Denier - Stephen III

Stephen III came to power as a teenager in 1162, immediately contested by Byzantine-backed rivals — his uncles Ladislaus II and Stephen IV were each installed by Manuel I Komnenos in turn, forcing Stephen III to fight for his own throne across the first years of his reign. Hungarian royal coinage of this period is consequently difficult to sequence precisely, as multiple claimants struck silver simultaneously from competing mints with overlapping types.

The extreme thinness of this issue — a bracteate-adjacent fabric that barely qualifies as a full flan — reflects the progressive debasement and weight reduction that had overtaken Árpád-era coinage since the mid-eleventh century.