Denier - Stephen III

Stephen III came to the Hungarian throne as a teenager in 1162 and spent much of his reign fighting off rival claimants backed by the Byzantine emperor Manuel I Komnenos, who twice installed pretenders — first Stephen IV, then Ladislaus II — forcing Stephen III into repeated exile and military recovery. The political instability compressed his effective minting periods into irregular bursts rather than sustained production runs, which accounts for the pronounced scarcity of well-attributed examples across the ÉH series for this reign.