PIC of my crusader (?) imitation of Venetian Soldo

coachleonard · June 10, 2010 4:05AM

Here is the copper imitation of 1300s-1400s Venetian soldo I was talking about in a recent thread. It's about the diameter size of a US dime.
Hope to get any thoughts!

spoon · June 10, 2010 4:14AM

Wow. Now that is neat! I have nothing especially useful to say, but you can definitely see on obverse how it looks like a Venetian piece.

A lot of Venetian stuff is notoriously crude, but that seems crude in a different way. Venice was pretty strict with its money, so I wouldn't imagine it to be a native token, counter or play money type thing.

Odd!

coachleonard · June 11, 2010 2:55AM

Certainly there must have been others like this struck......but I have never seen or heard of one!

Hussulo · June 11, 2010 4:32AM

Thats neat.

Heres a link to a Crusader copy of a gold benzant I was watching on ebay:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=170493234769&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT

Unfortunately I didn't have the funds to bid on it.

coachleonard · June 11, 2010 5:31AM

how do they id that as a crusader copy instead of an islamic coin? I assumme there are some stylized differences.

Hussulo · June 11, 2010 6:15AM

Here's a link to not the exact same coin as ebay but a very similar one:

http://www.calgarycoin.com/medieval2.htm

I'm no expert on these but I've no doubt the crusaders did strike coins to replicate the local currency/s to use when buying and selling goods.

Edited to add: I didn't study the ebay coin in depth as I decided not to bid on it. I just had it on my watch list and would have studied it to try and compare it with an original to validate the sellers claim if I was going to bid on it. I'd assume there will be different characteristics.

The point I really wanted to make was that the crusaders did imitate other coins.

PIC of my crusader (?) imitation of Venetian Soldo

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