Nummus - Justinian I Carthage, ☧

Carthage's Byzantine mint operated under conditions quite unlike Constantinople — a reconquered province, taken from the Vandals in 533 under Belisarius, where imperial coinage had to reassert Roman authority over a population that had spent a century outside the empire. These tiny copper nummi, the lowest denomination in the Byzantine monetary hierarchy, were the coins most ordinary North Africans would have handled daily. The Carthage mint's output for Justinian's reign is catalogued across multiple die studies, and the chi-rho marked pieces represent a distinct local variant not replicated at other mints.