GERMANY. Rottweil. Circa 1270-1280. Bracteate (Billon, 18 mm, 0.31 g, 12 h), a contemporary counterfeit. Eagle with spread wings. Rev. Incuse of obverse. Cf. Klein (Rottweil) 84 (for prototype). Apparently unpublished and of great interest. Small edge cracks and some deposits, otherwise, very fine.


For many years, the prevailing view among scholars was that contemporary counterfeits of Bracteates simply did not exist. This assumption was largely the result of the limited surviving evidence. Even today, only a single contemporary counterfeit has been conclusively identified from the central German heartland of Bracteate coinage (cf. W. Kühn: Die zeitgenössische Fälschung eines Halberstädter Brakteaten um 1170, in: Numismatisches Nachrichtenblatt 8 [1994], pp. 202–204).

The reason such forgeries are so rare in central Germany lies in the manufacturing process itself. Bracteates of this region were struck on unusually large, wafer-thin flans, and producing them from debased silver alloys posed significant technical challenges. Alloys with a lower silver content were less malleable and lacked the flexibility required for striking such delicate flans successfully, making the production of counterfeit pieces extremely difficult (cf. P. Hammer: Metall und Münze, Leipzig and Stuttgart 1993, p. 83).

Conditions were quite different in regions where bracteates were struck on smaller, thicker flans. There, the obstacles associated with striking coins from reduced-silver alloys were far less severe. In fact, Bahrfeldt was already able to document contemporary counterfeits in the eastern and northeastern bracteate-producing regions in 1926 (cf. E. Bahrfeldt: Zur Münzkunde in der Niederlausitz im XIII. Jahrhundert. Part II, Guben, 1926, p. 43).

The present coin provides further evidence for this rare but well-documented phenomenon. While contemporary counterfeit bracteates remain scarce, they are demonstrably known from regions that employed comparatively small flans. For the coinage of Rottweil, however, no comparable specimen has previously been recorded. Its occurrence significantly expands the known corpus of Rottweil Bracteates and adds a previously unattested category to the region’s numismatic record.