Obol - Louis I Melle

Minted at Melle in the Deux-Sèvres, one of the most productive silver-producing centers in the early medieval West, drawing directly on local argentiferous deposits that had supplied Frankish coinage since the Merovingian period. Louis the Pious reorganized imperial minting in the years following his father's death, and the Melle workshop operated under strict capitulary controls intended to enforce weight and fineness across a theoretically unified monetary system. The obol, at half the denier, circulated as the smallest silver denomination in that system.