Denier - Pepin the Short Herstal

Pépin III struck these deniers after deposing the last Merovingian king Childeric III in 751 — the coup legitimized by Pope Zacharias, who famously ruled that it was better to call king the man who held power than the man who merely bore the title. The Herstal mint, ancestral seat of the Carolingian family, carried obvious dynastic weight as a chosen production site.

At roughly 0.85g these sit well below the later Carolingian weight standard that Charlemagne would enforce after 793. Pépin's monetary reforms were real but incomplete — the groundwork for a unified silver coinage, not yet the finished structure.