The
Coins in Crusader Gold
David Gibbins
Two ancient coins feature in my novel Crusader Gold. The first is Roman; it appears in the novel in Rome itself, then resurfaces in an extraordinary discovery on the other side of the world. The same discovery produces another coin, a Viking silver penny a thousand years old. These coins are not fictional; they truly exist, and were constantly in my vision as I wrote the novel.
The first coin is a silver denarius of the Emperor Vespasian, who ruled Rome from AD 69 to 79. On the obverse is Vespasian himself, with a laurel crown, surrounded by the words IMP CAESAR VESPASIANVS AVG, Imperator Caesar Vespasianus Augustus. Unlike the coin of Cnut below, this is a true portrait of the man, one of the finest to survive from antiquity. In the prologue of Crusader Gold, Vespasian holds this very coin and admires his image, and you can see why:
He saw the image in the centre and grunted. It showed a heavy-set, balding man, advanced in years, with jutting chin and hooked nose, deep creases around his eyes and mouth and lines on his forehead. It was not a pretty sight, but his was a grunt of satisfaction. He had ordered his portrait deliberately made in the old fashion of the Roman Republic, warts and all, in contrast to his reviled precedessor Nero, whose effeminate Greek-style images were being torn down and erased all over the empire. Vespasian was tough, gritty, honourable, a man close to the earth. A Roman of the old ways.
In that scene, in front of the triumphal procession
in Rome, the coin is brought to Vespasian by a slave, ‘fresh from the
mint.’ It is the spring of AD 71, less than a year after Jerusalem has
fallen and the Jewish Temple has been looted of its treasures. On the
reverse of the coin is one of the most powerful images ever made of
conquest, one which draws us with frightening immediacy from ancient Rome
to the worst nightmare of the 20th century: it is an image of
the subjugation of the Jews, a woman sitting cowed under a Roman legionary
standard, and under her the single stark word IVDAEA.
When I first held this coin I felt an extraordinary frisson of excitement. Some of the looted artefacts from the Jewish Temple, the greatest treasures, were taken to Rome and kept intact, displayed in triumph and then locked away for all time, spoils of war. Others paid for Vespasian's greatest building project, the Colosseum. Yet more, silverware from the Temple perhaps, must have been melted down for bullion. How else could Vespasian have minted a whole new issue of coins, an issue specifically celebrating his victory over the Jews? Was I holding in my hand part of the lost treasure of the Temple in Jerusalem?
The second coin is a silver penny of King Cnut of England, who ruled from 1016 to 1035. Cnut had inherited the throne of Denmark from his father Sveyn Forkbeard in 1014, and two years later secured England; by marrying Emma of Normandy, widow of the previous king Aethlered, he strengthened his position in England and kept the Normans at bay, and by later defeating Norway and Sweden he created an ‘Empire of the North’ that put England on the world stage for the first time. Norse blood had run in the veins of the Anglo-Saxon rulers, but Cnut was the first true Viking King of England and his success would doubtless have been in the mind of King Harald Hardrada of Norway when he led his own invasion fleet west in the fateful autumn of 1066.
The obverse of the coin shows a crowned head within a quatrefoil pattern, surrounded by the words CNVT REX ANGLO – Cnut, King of England. The reverse shows a long voided cross within a quatrefoil, with the words ARNCETEL OEO, Arncetel of York, the moneyer licensed by the king to mint the coin. This particular type, the ‘quatrefoil penny’, was issued in the first period of Cnut’s reign, between 1017 and 1024. Two further main types were produced, the ‘helmet’ type and the ‘short cross’ type. With each new issue, previous coins were exchanged to raise revenue from new dies, and to maintain control of the currency. More than 70 mints are known in England at this period – York was the most northerly – but the king kept a tight control over the currency, unlike France and the Holy Roman Empire where feudal barons and bishops issued their own coins. As a result, coins of Cnut were highly esteemed outside England, and more than 90% of known coins of his reign come from hoards in Scandinavia.
This particular coin was in use during the lifetime of Harald Hardrada. When it was struck he was a youth in Norway, before fleeing to Novgorod and Kiev and joining the Varangian bodyguard in Constantinople. By the time Harald returned to Norway to claim the crown in 1046, Cnut had been dead for more than a decade, but his coins continued to circulate widely outside Britain as silver bullion. It is possible, just possible, that this very coin – found recently in England, like the Vespasian denarius - was part of the treasure brought by Harald across the North Sea on that fateful expedition in 1066, in readiness for a dream of conquest that disappeared with him on the battlefield of Stamford Bridge only a few miles from the city where the coin had been minted.