The Second Bulgarian Empire's revival began with the Asen brothers' rebellion against Byzantium in 1185, and these imitative copper pieces emerged directly from that rupture — struck when the new state lacked both the infrastructure and the trained die-cutters to produce original coinage. The Bulgarian workshops copied late Byzantine anonymous folles so closely that attribution remains contested; many examples circulating today were long catalogued as Byzantine issues before find-site evidence from Tarnovo and the Danube frontier forced a reassessment.
The imitation degrades progressively across the series, with later dies showing increasing distance from the Byzantine prototypes.
The Second Bulgarian Empire's revival began with the Asen brothers' rebellion against Byzantium in 1185, and these imitative copper pieces emerged directly from that rupture — struck when the new state lacked both the infrastructure and the trained die-cutters to produce original coinage. The Bulgarian workshops copied late Byzantine anonymous folles so closely that attribution remains contested; many examples circulating today were long catalogued as Byzantine issues before find-site evidence from Tarnovo and the Danube frontier forced a reassessment.
The imitation degrades progressively across the series, with later dies showing increasing distance from the Byzantine prototypes.