A Scholar's Collection of the Carthage Mint Folles of Justinian II

Sale: Triton XII, Lot: 819. Estimate $500.  Closing Date: Monday, 5 January 2009.  Sold For $900. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

Justinian II. First reign, 685-695. Æ Half Follis (2.71 g). Class 1. Carthage mint. Dated RY 2 (686/7). IV[...], crowned and draped facing bust, holding globus cruciger, crown topped with cross; A/N/N/O down left field; II in right / +/X • X/P in three lines across field. DOC 84; MIB 59; SB 1274. Near VF, dark green patina with earthen overtones. Extremely rare.

The following coins (lots 819-828) form a collection of rare Carthage mint folles of Justinian II that have come onto the market during the past four decades, including an example of the extremely rare half follis. As many of these coins were normally overstruck on earlier issues, a close examination of the relationship between these overstrikes and their undertypes suggests that the previous ordering of this series, found in DOC and MIB, must be modified. In particular, two examples in this collection (lots 820 and 821) show MIB 54 overstruck on MIB 58, confirming that MIB 58 must now be viewed as an earlier issue.

Although Carthage had been destroyed following the Third Punic War (149-146 BC), by the first century BC, a new city had been built on top of the earlier city’s ruins. The surrounding fertile countryside provided an agricultural base for the new city’s prosperity, and during the Empire, Carthage became a major exporter of grain to Rome. At the same time, the city became a major Christian center and the site of numerous church councils, including the famous Council of Carthage in AD 397. For a brief period (AD 308-311) the usurper Domitius Alexander made the city his capital.

During the fifth century AD, Carthage fell to the Vandals, who made the city the capital of their African kingdom. Under the Byzantine reconquest of the sixth century, Carthage once again became “Roman” when the Byzantine general, Belisarius formally entered the city in 533. In 584 Maurice Tiberius (539-602) appointed an exarch, or viceroy, to administer Carthage and the surrounding territory and until AD 698, when it finally fell to the Muslims, Carthage, along with Ravenna, remained a major Byzantine outpost in the western Mediterranean. Because of its tenuous links to Constantinople, the Exarch of Carthage became semi-independent, and allowed him either the foundation from which to seize the imperial throne, as the future emperor Heraclius did in 608, or break out in open revolt, as was the case with Gregory the Patrician (647-648). At the same time, it was periodically attacked by its neighbors, first from the west by the Visgoths in Spain, and from Egypt by the Umayyad Caliphate. Following the return of Carthage to imperial control in 648, these attacks, particularly from the Muslims, grew more frequent until in 698, the Umayyad commander, Hasān ibn an-Nu'mān al-Ghassānī, conquered Carthage and reduced it to rubble, like the Romans had done over eight centuries earlier.