Money, bracteate. [1] Antiquarians designate by the name of bracteates a kind of money of the Middle Ages, the manufacture of which presents several remarkable peculiarities in certain respects, in spite of the lightness of weight and the defects of workmanship.

These are coins, or rather simple leaves of metal, struck with a crude stamp. Most are of silver. Nearly all are struck in the concave, and consequently on a single side, some apparently only with stamps made of wood. Their origins do not predate the barbarian centuries. Common in Sweden, in Denmark, and in several provinces of Germany where their use continued for a long time, they are unknown in other parts of Europe.

Wherever these monies circulated, they should be considered the product of either a nascent or a degenerate craft. They are primitive things that by themselves could adequately demonstrate the bad taste and ignorance of the centuries that elapsed between the decline and the rebirth of learning. But no object is indifferent to human vanity. The invention of bracteate monies is claimed by all the nations who have used them, doubtless as the legacy of a respectable antiquity from which they hope to derive certain advantages over their rivals and neighbors. This diversity of opinions has made the dating of these monies a problem for which the solution requires a thorny inquiry.

In 1751, a chance event inspired Mr. Schoepflin with the idea to look more deeply into this subject, and to communicate to the Paris Academy his research and his views on the matter, which we shall make use of here.

In 1736 a hoard of bracteate monies was discovered in the monastery at Gengenbach, an abbey in the diocese of Strasbourg on the opposite side of the Rhine from us, and one of the oldest of the order of Saint Benedict. [2] There they found two small gray terracotta urns set next to each other in a wall that seems to have been part of a tomb. Of these vases, one contained only ashes while the other held several bracteate monies . Each vase had a piece of brick for a lid. [3]

These kinds of monies are rare. They are too thin to be durable. All those not enclosed in vases were destroyed because they were unable to avoid the rapid deterioration of their substance and the even more rapid alteration of their shape. Though they circulated more commonly in Germany than elsewhere, it is not in Germany that they first came into use.

By a strained interpretation of several obscure terms, some, including Tilemann Frise, have claimed that they originated prior to the Christian era. [4] Other writers have situated their origin in the seventh century after Jesus Christ; their opinion is more plausible but no better substantiated. The laws of the Salians, the Ripuairians, the Visigoths, the Bavarians, and the Lombards—laws that testify to their customs—provide by their silence the indisputable proof that these peoples did not know bracteates , the shape of which has nothing to do with the solidi and denarii mentioned in these laws, as well as in their capitularies. It also has nothing to do with the shape of those coins of which Justinian speaks in his Novel 105 under the name of caucii , to which the authors of late antiquity seem to attach the same idea as to the word scyphati . [5] This Greek money was not always thin, and even when it was, it was never as thin as the bracteates .

Common agreement attributes the origins of the latter to the Germans, and sets it during the time of the Ottonian emperors, which would indicate the tenth century as the period of the bracteates . Several consequences induced from indisputable facts would seem at first to favor this conclusion, which has been adopted by Olearius, by Ludwig, by Doederlin, and several other scholars. [6] It was under the empire of the Ottonians that silver mines were discovered in Germany. In the time of Tacitus inner Germany had no silver. If its use later penetrated that country, it must have been the Franks, conquerors of the Gauls, who introduced it. But the silver monies that the latter brought from their new residences to their former homes were not bracteates ; they were the sort that under the Carolingian monarchs were called palatine money, moneta palatina , because princes had it minted in their own palaces. Their minters followed them everywhere. They went with the court from one residence to another, sometimes on this side and sometimes beyond the Rhine, and everywhere they struck with the stamp of the monarch coins whose weight and solidity suffice to prevent us from confusing them with the bracteates , which by comparison were thinner. It is thus not until after the extinction of the Carolingian dynasty that Germany made use of this light money . It is therefore during the reigns of the Ottonians that we must set its origin. Thus reason Olearius and his supporters.

This argument would be convincing if the bracteates had indeed originated in Germany, but if they came from elsewhere then they might have predated the tenth century. That is what M. Schoepflin thinks, who gives his opinion only as a conjecture, but who bases this conjecture on evidence.

Collections in Sweden and Denmark revealed to him bracteates that were from earlier times than those of Germany; he therefore concluded that their use started in Denmark and Sweden. According to him, Sweden was the first to manufacture these sorts of monies . Elias Brenner, a famous Swedish antiquarian, has produced a bracteate of King Biorno I, a contemporary of Charlemagne, with the name of this prince as its legend. [7] Brenner reports that in his day some denarii of Charlemagne were discovered in Stockholm that had a certain resemblance to these monies of Biorno. M. Schoepflin concludes that the latter served as a model for the stamp of the Swedish bracteates , though not for their thickness, because the scarcity of silver in the whole of the north compelled the reduction of coins to a very thin leaf.

From Sweden the use of bracteates was transmitted to Denmark, and from there to the provinces of the German Empire. [8]

We have already remarked that bracteates are more common in Germany than elsewhere. The reason is simple. It follows from the very constitution of the Germanic state, composed of an infinite number of sovereigns and several free cities that, under various statutes, have enjoyed the right to strike money , which was liberally accorded by the successors of Charlemagne along with other royal prerogatives.

In the tenth century the use of bracteates became common in Germany, or at least the dates of those we have discovered are not earlier. Neither the collection of the Duke of Saxe-Gotha nor that of Gottian Abbey in Lower Austria, the two most extensive of this type that M. Schoepflin is aware of, includes any bracteates that are older. [9]

The discovery of silver mines in Lower Saxony did not prevent the use of this weak money from being introduced and perpetuated in that region. Other provinces of Germany also have silver mines found shortly after those of Lower Saxony, and Alsace has its own, but these provinces and Alsace long continued to manufacture bracteates . Strasbourg continued until the sixteenth century, and the city of Basel persists in this practice to the present day, which testifies less to the poverty of the barbarian centuries than to the cautiousness of the ancient Germans, who as in the time of Tacitus wanted to protect themselves against counterfeit monies . [10]

Tilemann Frise and Doëderlin claim that the earliest bracteates were the thinnest, and that little by little the standard gradually changed. That is possible, but the bracteates found by M. Schoepflin are almost all of different standards, though they appear to be of the same age. [11] The Italians introduced the art of metal alloys into Germany. Afterward copper was so frequently used in the coins of this money that antiquaries thought they had found bracteates of bronze. M. Schoepflin saw several made of gold, but they were not very old. He also found a few that were two-sided, but they are so rare that this exception should not prevent us, generally speaking, from defining bracteates as monies made of a silver leaf struck in the concave on just one side.

Their shape is usually round, but often the metal leaf has been cut with such negligence that one might think it a very irregular square. The size varies greatly. At least twelve sizes have been identified, of which the largest exceeds the circumference of the contorniates of the [Roman] emperors, and the smallest is the same size as the small bronze [coins] of the late [Roman] Empire. These various sizes and alloys are not especially characteristic of particular states of the [German] Empire as opposed to others. The emperors, the ecclesiastical and secular princes, and the imperial states struck large ones and small ones indifferently. As the former did not have a thickness proportioned to their diameter, they were even less fit than the latter for trade. One might thus conclude that they were medals rather than monies . In truth, neither could long endure, nor thus be of much use. But we know that at that time large sums were paid in uncoined silver, by marks and pounds.

Because of the fact that the sovereigns of Germany—emperors, kings, dukes, bishops, abbots, margraves, landgraves, counts, free cities—willingly struck bracteates , it follows, without need to insist on this conclusion, that their forms are extremely varied. One finds the images of men, of animals, of symbols, of coats of arms, of buildings, and of marks of dignity of all sorts, but the most common, according to M. Schoepflin, are the ecclesiastical bracteates . [12] See the Histoire de l’académie des Inscriptions, volume XXIII, in-4º .

1. As Jaucourt indicates in the final line, this article is an abridgement of the anonymous article “Recherches sur les monnoies bractéates,” Histoire de l'Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres, avec les Mémoires de littérature tirés des registres de cette académie 23 (1756): 212–219. It summarizes unpublished research that the Alsatian historian Jean-Daniel Schoepflin (Johann Daniel Schöpflin) had presented to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris on June 8 and 22, 1751. Jürgen Voss, Jean-Daniel Schoepflin (1694–1771): Un Alsacien de l’Europe des Lumières , trans. Valérie Boos (Strasbourg: Société savante d’Alsace, 1999), 180.

2. Gengenbach, Germany, lies almost forty kilometers southeast of Strasbourg in the state of Baden-Württemberg. Founded in the eighth century, Gengenbach Abbey was closed in 1803.

3. In “Recherches sur les monnoies bractéates,” 213, this paragraph continues: “The shape of the urns is exactly represented in the plate that we provide here, based on the drawing by Mr. Schoepflin, who estimates their volume at roughly a pint.” The article includes a plate picturing an urn closed with a brick, and three of the silver bracteates that it contained. One bracteate is labeled “Saint Henri and Saint Cunigonde”—that is, Holy Roman Emperor Henry II and his spouse Empress Cunigunde of Luxembourg—and another is labeled “Emperor Conrad II.” The third, pictured recto and verso and labeled “Money of Werner,” is unusual in that different images are stamped on the opposite sides, with the profile of Bishop Werner I of Strasbourg on the obverse and the façade of a church on the reverse.

4. Tilemann Friese, Müntz Spiegel, das ist, Ein new und wol aussgeführter Bericht von der Müntz (Frankfurt: Feyrabendt, 1592), bk. 3.

5. Justinian, Novellae constitutiones 105.2.1. Latin caucii translates Greek kaukioi , the name of certain coins mentioned in the supplement to Justinian’s law code. Both words appear to derive from caucus , a Late Latin word for cup, and thus to mean cup-shaped. In the seventeenth century the historian Charles du Fresne, sieur Du Cange, identified these caucii with the nummi scyphati mentioned in sources from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, since scyphatus appears to derive from Latin scyphus , also meaning cup. Philip Grierson has disputed this etymology, however, pointing instead to an Arabic root for scyphatus . Charles Du Fresne Du Cange, Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis , 10 vols., ed. G. A. Louis Henschel (Niort: Favre, 1883–1887), 7:383, 10:163; Philip Grierson, “ Nummi Scyphati : The Story of a Misunderstanding,” Numismatic Chronicle , 7th ser., 11 (1971): 253–260; David Miller and Peter Sarris, The Novels of Justinian : A Complete Annotated English Translation , 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 2:692n20.

6. Johann Peter von Ludewig, Einleitung zu dem teutschen Müntzwesen Mittler Zeiten (Wendisch Halle: Leipziger Oster-Messe, 1709); Johann Alexander Döderlein, Commentatio historica de numis Germaniae mediae, quos vulgo bracteatos et cavos (Nuremberg: Engelbrecht & Endteri, 1729). Johann Christoph Olearius published a series of short works on bracteates: Spicilegium antiquitatis nummos XXV suggerens bracteatos (Jena: Bielkii, 1702); Spicilegium antiquitatis secundum brunsvico-luneburgenses nummos exhibens bracteatos (Jena: Bielkii, 1703); Spicilegium antiquitatis tertium halberstadienses nummos tradens bracteatos (Jena: Bielkii, 1703).

7. Elias Brenner, Thesaurus nummorum sueo-gothicorum (Stockholm: Horrn, 1731), 1–3. The bracteate in question is dated 818. Biorno is a variant spelling for Björn and refers to King Björn IV (not Björn I).

8. Jaucourt omits the remainder of this paragraph and the whole of the next as they appear in “Recherches sur les monnoies bractéates,” 215–216:

References in this passage are to Otto Sperling, Dissertatio de nummis non cusis tam veterum quam recentiorum (Amsterdam: Halmam, 1700), 130; Andrew Fountaine, “Numismata anglo-saxonica & anglo-danica breviter illustrat,” in George Hickes, Linguarum vett. septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico-criticus et archæologicus, 2 vols. (Oxford: E Theatro Sheldoniano, 1705), 1:160–182; John Speed, The History of Great Britaine under the Conquests of ye Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans: Their Originals, Manners, Warres, Coines & Seales (London: Hall & Beale, 1611); Henry Spelman, Glossarium archaiologicum continens latino-barbara, peregrina, obsoleta, & novatæ significationis vocabula (London: Braddyll, 1687). From September 1727 to January 1728, on a diplomatic mission for France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Schoepflin traveled to London where he became a member of the Royal Society. Voss, Jean-Daniel Schoepflin , 54, 288–292.

9. “Gottian Abbey” presumably refers to Göttweig Abbey near Krems in Lower Austria, known for its rich collections of coins and other antiquities. In 1738, in the course of a trip to Vienna, Schoepflin spent time in both Gotha and Göttweig. Between 1747 and 1752 he exchanged a series of letters with Julius Karl Schlaeger, curator of Gotha’s collection of coins and medals. Voss, Jean-Daniel Schoepflin , 57, 201.

10. The term used here for counterfeit money, fourrée , means literally “stuffed money.” That is, silver coins could be counterfeited by silver-plating a false coin of base metal, but bracteates were too thin to permit such a ruse.

11. Jaucourt has softened the text’s criticism of Friese and Döderlin. Instead of “That is possible, but...,” “Recherches sur les monnoies bractéates,” 216, reads: “That is an error; the bracteates found in the deposit that gave rise to this research, of which several have entered the collection of Mr. Schoepflin, are almost all of different standards, though they appear to be of the same age.”

12. Jaucourt omits the final six paragraphs of “Recherches sur les monnoies bractéates,” 217–219. The omitted passage is a discussion of the three bracteates from Gengenbach Abbey pictured in the article’s illustration, and would therefore have been out of place in Jaucourt’s unillustrated version of the text.