Dinar Grosso - Stefan Uroš II Milutin

Stefan Uroš II Milutin ruled Serbia for nearly four decades — an unusually long reign for the medieval Balkans — and his silver coinage reflects both his political ambitions and his close entanglement with Byzantine affairs. He seized the Macedonian towns of Štip, Veles, and Skopje from Byzantium around 1282, and the wealth extracted from newly acquired territories, including productive silver mines, funded a prolific minting program. His 1299 marriage to the five-year-old Byzantine princess Simonida, daughter of Andronikos II, came packaged with territorial concessions that further consolidated his holdings.

The dinar grosso type itself follows the Venetian grosso model that spread through Balkan minting in the late thirteenth century.