Seventh Crusade coinage from Alphonse de France

[seth77]

The denier tournois starts being minted in Poitou at the end of the 1240s for Alphonse, very likely on the occasion of the Seventh Crusade, for which Alphonse took great expenditures in order to join and support with his retinue the campaign of his brother, Louis IX of France to Egypt -- on October 24th 1249 he was with his brother at Damietta. Originally the coinage was minted at the standard of the royal tournois of France, with the intention to have it circulating at a parity with the royal coinage during the preparations for the Crusade, but after the mid 1250s the poitevin coinage started to drop in weight and title (a similar situation as with the tournois provencal of Charles I d'Anjou). By 1263, Louis no longer accepted the tournois poitevin or provencal and the types are eventually discontinued in the French realms and pushed east, towards Outremer (especially after around 1267 and the Treaty of Viterbo).

 

AR19mm 1.06g billon denier tournois ca. 350/1000, Montreuil-Bonnin(?) mint, ca. 1247-1250.
+ ALFVNSVS ' COMES; cross
+ PICTAVIENTSIS; chateau tournois fleurdelise.
Poey d'Avant 2582, cf. Boudeau 431 p. 54.

The present specimen at a high weight and billon quality is likely one of the first issues, minted before or during the first phases of the Seventh Crusade to pay for common expenses. The legend ALFVNSVS seems to be the earliest variation (not recorded by Boudeau, possibly by mistake), as by the 1250s it changed to the shorter ALFVNS, the same orthography that would be employed on the poitevin neuf of 1264.
 

[JeandAcre]

@seth77, your level of erudition, only especially on the numismatic details, never ceases to amaze.  --And you're owed another apology for my scanner going on the fritz when I was about to send you some pages from Adam's book on the Champagne series.  ('Technologically Challenged' are both my middle names.)  For what it's worth, the Duplessy reference for this is 931.  (Les Monnaies  françaises féodales, Tome 1, Platt, 2004.)

This is of Alphonse as Count of Toulouse and Marquis (right, vs. Count) of Provence, from the death of his father-in-law in 1249.  ...I couldn't add a word about how these fared relative to the royal denier tournois!

Another châtel tournois, without the fleur de lis.  (As a guess, because Alphonse had acquired this by marriage, rather than as a royal appanage.) +.A. COMES TOLOSE.  /Cross; +MARCh' PVINCIE.

Duplessy 1698A; the variety with the initial cross in the form of his father-in-law's comital arms.

  (From this Very cool website on Languedoc: https://www.midi-france.info/1901_cross.htm .)