Denier - Charles II Toulouse mint, CARLVS REX FR

Charles II — "the Bald" — inherited West Francia from the partition of Verdun in 843, and the Toulouse mint operated under complex political pressures throughout his reign: the county sat at the edge of territory contested by both Gascon lords and the persistent instability of the Carolingian southern marches. These deniers were struck under the reformed monetary system his grandfather Charlemagne had established, but enforcement of weight standards across distant provincial mints was inconsistent, which accounts for the relatively wide mass variation documented across the Morrison and Gariel corpus for this type.