Attached this coin photo below, can anyone help me identity this coin, thanks

[samcoins]

[shanxi]

From Italy

https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=528527

[samcoins]

Hello shanxi,

Thanks so much for your reply and for your information and your knowledge!!! 

[JeandAcre]

Good morning!  There's a little more in the way of fun context to this issue.  The listing that @shanxi archly contributed includes a citation of Metcalf's classic, near-magisterial reference on coins of the Crusades.  That's because, as one of the largest single issues in contemporary Europe, they circulated widely in the Crusader States, along with other French and Italian issues.  

http://medievalcoins.ancients.info/Italy.htm

  While I these or other 'foreign' coins aren't included in the reference I have (Malloy), it's easy to suspect that the Lucca denaros were immobilized as a civic issue beyond the reign of Heinrich IV.  This is true of a contemporary one of Genoa (lower on the webpage above).  It's almost an index to the commercial vibrancy of the region; easy recognizability over much of Europe took precedence over the accuracy of the legends. 

 

 

Edited March 6 by JeandAcre

[JeandAcre]

Incidentally, @samcoins, Welcome to the forum!

There's more to find on this once I'm back from work.  Including a reference to the specific European issues that circulated in one of the major medieval chronicles.  ...From memory, likely of the First Crusade.  This phenomenon started from the beginning.  ...To cut to the chase, your coin is a textbook example of the historical significance running circles around the relative commonness of the type!  By no means a bad example, btw.  They were all as crude as this --again, a symptom of the volume of mintage.

[samcoins]

Thanks, this is an amazing forum, I'm so glad I found this.

To JeandAcre, thank you for taking your time and supply me with so much information and knowledge, so much history about such a tiny coin👍

[JeandAcre]

Thanks back at you, @samcoins!  

Regarding the circulation of European coins among the early crusaders, I don't have the threatened chronicle in print.  ...And, Rats, the operant web pages of The Maskukat Collection ("medievalcoins," etc.) are down.  It's an old website.  Rats. 

But two secondary histories in print (and onhand) cite the chronicle for this (by Raymond d'Aguilars), along with Metcalf,  who devotes a separate section to the practice.  The better of those includes a brief quotation of the chronicle.  Starting with a further excerpt of that:

"'Our money in circulation included Pictavini (Poitou), [...] Chartres, [...] Le Mans, [...} Lucca, [and ...] Valence [...].'

"Of these seven different types of coin current in the Latin East the coins of Lucca and Valence predominate by far in the coin hoards that have been found.  Possibly they were the preferred currencies of the Latin states until such time as minte their own coins sometime before 1100."

Lock, The Routledge Companion to the Crusades (2006), p. 331.

The Maskukat website included a frankly bronze version of the billon deniers of Valence, which it characterized as an imitation minted in the Frankish Levant.  I managed to find one of those.  The French original is no less common than the issue from Lucca; in both cases, an obvious reason for their wide circulation among the crusaders.  The ones of Valence were, if anything. immobilized longer (well into the 13th century) than in the case of Lucca.  Even at that, the unusually extensive blundering of the legends bolsters the contention that this is likely to be an imitation.

 

  

 

[samcoins]

Thanks again for all the grate info you sent, I have some coins that I purchase long time ago that I don't know anything about them, they are not in good conditions, this is why I could not find any information about them, they look a bit like this coin in the photo you sent me, photos attached. 

[JeandAcre]

(Another edit:) @samcoins, condition aside, those are some fun ones!  Yes, in the case of the top two, even though the obverses don't give you much to go on, you're in luck.  The reverse, with the cross bouletee and the annulet, is unique to the series.  These are the same type as the likely imitation of mine.  Here's a quick rendition of the listing in Duplessy, Monnaies Francaises Feodales.  (Including his unblundered legends.)

Bishopric of Valence and Die.  Billon denier, c. 12th-13th centuries.

Obv.  Angel (sometimes interpreted as a bird). +VRBS VALENTIAI.

Rev.  Cross bouletee (rats; that variety eludes capture from Google); annulet in lower right angle (so, Duh, reverse your pics! sorry for that less-than-obvious advice).  +S APO['O' cruciform]LLINARS['S' couchant].  ...St. Apollinaris, an early bishop and eventual patron saint of the bishopric.

From kWiki, there's this.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollinaris_of_Valence

Your next two (right, same issue, if not the same variant) are even more fun.  These are both of Hugh III, Duke of Burgundy (from an early cadet dynasty of the Capetian kings of France) 1162-1192.  Yes, Yay, issued in his own name!  Granted, which Hugh is involved can be reliably dated from hoard evidence and, more anecdotally, the engraving style.  Your top example was apparently continued early into the reign of his son Eudes /Odo, 1192-1218.  From your pics:

Rev.  Cross, pellets in upper right and lower left angles.  +DIVIONENSIS.  (City of Dijon.)

Obv.  (Tilt this 90 degrees to the right:) Double "annile" (anchor ...?), pellet and star to either side.  +VGO DVX BVRG:DIE.

In this case, the documentation is a little fraught.  For general overviews (such as Duplessy), no one's done a volume of the French feudal series that covers Burgundy for a century.  What you see here is is lifted from the Alde auction catalogue, 16 and 17 June 2011.  For their whole run of this subseries, they cite a book I don't have:

Francoise Dumas-Dubourg, Le monnayage des ducs de Bourgogne (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1988).  This listing is No. 306 of the auction catalogue, citing "no 7-1" of Dumas-Dubourg.  Thank you, presumably that's the listing, followed by the plate.  ...The catalogue also cites a source that's relatively easy to find online, the century-and-a-half old, but surprisingly comprehensive Poey d'Avant, no. 19 (for Burgundy) and Plate CXXX.

Here's the nearest example for which pics are readily findable from here.  From Eudes II, 1143-1162.  But the same mint, and much the same type.  (Granted, I waded Deep Into the Weeds collecting variants of Eudes III.)

 

...And, well, since this already went deeply into overtime, why not.  This is from an overview I began, about genealogy and related coins.  It's languished as a draft for what feels like a couple of decades, but this is a relatively coherent fragment, about your guy, Hugh III.

 Hugues was the son and heir of Eudes II, and father of Eudes III.  Bouchard notes that Hugues went to the Levant on crusade twice, first "between major Crusades" in 1171 [much as, for another instance, the Anglo-Norman knight William Marshall did], then on the Third Crusade, dying at Acre in 1193.  On his death, Eudes III "confirmed all the rights and possessions of [the monastery of] St.-Benigne of Dijon for his father's soul.  A friendship between a nobleman and the monks of a particular house might be built up slowly (and, from the monks' point of view, painfully), but, once established, those monks were to the noble his monks, men he could count on to pray for his soul, monks he would turn to though half a world away."  (Bouchard, pp. 198, 199).  
This juxtaposition of various strands of piety, local, foreign and ultimately filial, is poignant enough, especially on the level of the immediate participants.  However, it simultaneously belies the fact that the very expense of crusading, ostensibly among the greatest acts of Christian devotion available to the lay aristocracy, easily could lead to less than exemplary behavior nearer home.  As Luchaire observes, the convergence of aristocratic social convention with expanding mercantile forces was only brought into highest relief by the crusades, for which “money was [only most immediately] necessary” (p. 326).  Cazel expands on the point: “few crusaders had sufficient cash income both to pay their obligations at home and to support themselves decently on a crusade.  [….]  From the First Crusade to the last the alienation of property by crusaders reveals the failure of booty, current income, and savings to support their expeditions” (pp. 117, 119).  
What was true of crusading also held for the wider aristocratic ethos.  Baldwin observes that, as of of the later 12th and earlier 13th centuries, the milieu was dominated by a powerful tradition of “largesse, or generosity,” reaching back to a smokily remote, idealized Carolingian past.  “Wealth was distributed ostentatiously, without restraint” (p. 98).  Luchaire characterizes this in terms of a “theory of obligatory prodigality, especially toward poor knights” (p. 336).  In reference to Baudouin V of Hainaut, he further notes that this inhabited a continuum with the more mundane pirsuit of domestic war: “[t]he military resources of [the nobility’s] own fiefs were not sufficient for them to lead armies into campaigns so often as they did.  They had recourse to mercenaries[…].”  Baudouin paid his exhorbitantly, supplemented by “presents of horses, clothing, and cash” (pp. 335, 336).  In effect, a ‘perfect storm’ had occurred, between the gradual but ever more insistent monetization of the French economy, and a feudal culture which, while far from static (in fact, ever more elaborate, both in practice and commensurate expense), continued, unsustainably, to rely on an agrarian economic basis.  This had already placed much of the feudal nobility on a losing trajectory: “[u]nless one were a Philip Augustus or a Henry […II], able to operate on a large scale and to make vast conquests, one got nothing out of it.  A [seignieurial] budget of this time is ordinarily a budget with a deficit” (p. 325; cf.pp. 335-6).  
Hugues’ own, repeated adventures overseas contributed profoundly to his “always [being] at the end of his resources.”  His response, especially in light of his father’s remarkably farsighted policy toward the Champagne fairs, betrays the depth of his desperation.  Luchaire goes on to observe that Hugues “was really a robber on the the great highways; he plundered the French and Flemish merchants who crossed his lands.”  (P. 251.  See the entry for Renaud de Dammartin for a specific instance of the practice.)  It would remain for his grandson, Hugues IV, to fully adapt to the changed economic landscape. 
    (Baldwin, John W.  Aristocratic Life in Medieval France: The Romances of Jean Renart and Gerbert de Montreuil, 1190-1230.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000.      
 (Bouchard, Constance Brittain, Sword, Miter, and Cloister: Nobility and the Church in Burgundy, 980-1198.  Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987. 
(Cazel, Fred A., Jr.  “Financing the Crusades.”  A History of the Crusades.  Volume Six: The Impact of the Crusades on Europe.  Ed. Harry W. Hazard and Norman P. Zacour.  Madison, Wisconsin: U of Wisconsin P, 1989.
(Luchaire, Achille.  Social France at the Time of Philippe Augustus.  Trans. Edward Benjamin Krehbiel.  1909 (/trans.1912).  New York: Harper, 1967.)  

[Below: start of the following entry.  "CT" stands for "the Coin Thing (edit:) Lineal (descent).  (...Nope, the documentation for that isn't coming from MyFace or SpaceBook.)
CT:  L:  Eudes III, Duc de Bourgogne 1192-1218.

...And, why not, take two.  Here are some renditions of ducal seals of Eudes III.  Followed by the contemporary ducal coat of arms.

 

...Now it has to be time to shut up.

 

Edited March 10 by JeandAcre

[samcoins]

YOU ARE MY GURU!

Wow!!, Amazing!!, overwhelming information by the incredible amount of data and knowledge presented, I’m going to need some time to processing all.

I’m so thankfull, I probably would never find or get this details or directions to place these coins in my propositional knowledge.

I appreciate the time you took to put all of that together and supply me with such an incredible data.

THANK YOU SO MUCH!

[JeandAcre]

Well, @samcoins, thanks Right Back At You!  Promising you, the process itself was fun, by way of reminding me of resources that are already here, and even bookmarked.  Never mind your very welcome vote of confidence about the result.

[JeandAcre]

1 hour ago, samcoins said:

YOU ARE MY GURU!

Wow!!, Amazing!!, overwhelming information by the incredible amount of data and knowledge presented, I’m going to need some time to processing all.

I’m so thankfull, I probably would never find or get this details or directions to place these coins in my propositional knowledge.

I appreciate the time you took to put all of that together and supply me with such an incredible data.

THANK YOU SO MUCH!

Since we're talking about gurus all of a sudden, there has to be this.  It's becoming a favorite visual meme.  (Instant edit:) --His teeth are a lot better than mine are.  Sorry if that was TMF.  :<}

Edited March 10 by JeandAcre

[samcoins]

This is funny😄I'll keep this photo in my daily calendar, Thanks a million!