Denier - Henry II Mainz mint, arabic inscription

Henry II, crowned emperor in 1014, authorized a remarkable series of deniers at Mainz that carried Arabic Kufic inscriptions — a direct consequence of the intensive silver trade flowing through the empire from Islamic dirhams. Merchants and moneyers working along established trade routes had grown so accustomed to Arabic coinage that imitative legends carried genuine commercial credibility in certain markets.

Kluge Kar#76 is among the better-documented of these Ottonian-era imitative types, though the specific Arabic text is garbled rather than semantically coherent — copied by craftsmen who could not read it.