Denier - Pepin the Short Arles mint

Pépin III seized the Frankish throne in 751 with papal blessing — the first Carolingian king, having deposed the last Merovingian, Childeric III, who was tonsured and packed off to a monastery. The Arles mint was an inheritance from that older dynasty, one of several southern workshops Pépin absorbed and kept operational as he consolidated control over a fractious kingdom. These early Carolingian deniers from Arles are poorly documented precisely because the administrative machinery of the new dynasty was still being assembled; the absence of a Prou Carolingien reference number reflects how irregularly this mint's output fits the broader typological framework.