Denier Bracteate - Wichmann of Seeburg

Wichmann of Seeburg served as Archbishop of Magdeburg from 1152 until his death in 1192, a tenure that coincided with the aggressive eastward colonization drive under Henry the Lion and later Frederick Barbarossa. Magdeburg sat at the commercial and ecclesiastical center of that expansion, and its bracteate issues functioned as the dominant regional currency across the middle Elbe territories during this period.

Bracteates of this type were struck on a single die pressed into a thin silver flan — a minting technique that dominated German ecclesiastical coinage east of the Rhine from roughly the mid-twelfth century onward. The resulting impressions are inherently fragile, and undamaged survivors are far rarer than the reference numbers suggest.