The Late Roman Context

The previous chapters have described the Visigothic minting system in Gaul and Spain as well as it can now be known and have offered evidence of the manner in which minting was carried out at the many sites. Equipped with extensive data on the minting network and operations – the ‘what and how,’ so to speak, of monetary production in the Visigothic kingdom – the much broader question of why the coins were made can be addressed. This second field of inquiry is every bit as important as the first. Without contemporary documents to inform us about the matter, the question of why minting was undertaken is unfortunately impossible to answer with the relative precision which one can attain about the facts of coined money now above ground. The coins yield much information about what the workshops were doing, but tell nothing directly about the reason for their being struck. The answer is in the realm of conjecture, yet with more numismatic data now in hand we are in a position to judge which hypotheses concerning the purpose of minting are most tenable.

Some of the earliest authors to take up the matter concluded from the legends of Visigothic solidi and tremisses, and from occasional holes in the coins or attached loops, that the gold pieces served primarily as political monuments and as decorative pendants.