Obol - Charles II Bar-sur-Aube mint

The Edict of Pîtres, issued by Charles II in June 864, represents one of the most deliberate attempts at monetary centralization in the Carolingian period — restricting minting rights to a defined list of royal and episcopal workshops and forbidding coin production anywhere else. Bar-sur-Aube was among the authorized locations. That the edict had to be issued at all suggests how badly fragmented production had become in the preceding decades.

Obols of this type are considerably scarcer than their denier counterparts from the same mint, a predictable consequence of lower striking volumes for fractional denominations throughout the Carolingian system.