Roman influence in later coins

[drifter182]

I was reading up on Louis the Pious (reign 814-840) on Wikipedia and was rather surprised when a very Roman looking coin popped out. I found several similar examples for Carolingian rulers. As far as I can tell, they started aping the Roman style after Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor.

It got me thinking - how did they know what Roman coins looked like? Were they accidentally rediscovered by farmers tilling their fields, or did some of them manage to avoid being melted down and instead were passed along for centuries? Or maybe it's a combination of both?

I couldn't find much on the subject on Google, so I was hoping somebody here might know where I could do some further reading.

[PeterD]

The Franks, as they were called, derived from the Germanic tribes that ultimately took over the Western Roman Empire. They considered themselves to be Roman - hence the title Holy Roman Emperor. The period might be called the 'Dark Ages', but it was far from dark. Culture, knowledge and coinage continued within the new nations after the eclipse of the Roman Empire. And of course, Rome itself was the religious capital of Europe.  It is hardly suprising that the denarius was revived. The name has continued to this day as Denier, Denar, Dinar.

Anglo-Saxon England also copied Roman coinage. The one below is a 'denarius' from the mid-7th century. The reverse is a degraded representation of the VOTIS X MVLTIS XX on a standard type of Roman coin (not itself a denarius). The denarius eventually became a penny.

[Jonathan O]

I actually just finished a paper in my masters on this topic in the Middle East. Many of the new coins minted by the Rashidun and Ummayyad Caliphate were just Roman or Sassanian coins, but with some Arabic script on them.
What you have to remember as well is that the Romans didn't simply just disappear. Many of the people in the newer Frankish kingdoms and the various other kingdoms were for lack of better words "Roman." Many of them would have been still versed in Latin, and you still had the Roman Catholic Church around, so they were well aware of the Roman past.