Pfennig - Bernard II Heiligenkreuz

Bernard II of Carinthia, who ruled from 1202 to 1256, presided over one of the longer ducal tenures of the region, during which the Spanheim dynasty's grip on Carinthia was already beginning to loosen under pressure from Habsburg and Babenberg interests. The Heiligenkreuz designation — referring to Holy Cross — points to a specific mint attribution rather than a monastery of that name acting as issuer, a distinction that still generates disagreement among specialists working the CNA typology.

Thin-flan bracteate-adjacent pfennigs of this region and period are notoriously difficult to attribute without die study; CNA Cq102 remains one of the more firmly anchored Carinthian types precisely because the die corpus is unusually consistent.