The common imitations are certainly coins. And everyone who has collected ancient,
medieval, Indian or
Islamic coins seriously for a while has "unique" specimens (usually variants within a known
type). But it seems to me
unlikely that a coin struck for a valuable trade would have survived only in one single example - it's in the nature of trading coins to be issued in number, think of the myriad Athenian owls,
Maria Theresia talers, and so on - but
very conceivable that a handsome individual specimen should have been struck as one of a small issue intended as ceremonial pieces or gifts. (It can
still be a "real coin", in the sense that it could be spent.)
This is not "my" theory, by the way. Here for instance is an extract from the discussion of the eighth (!) known Anglo-Saxon gold penny by Dr. Gareth
Williams of the British Museum:
"The coinage of
medieval western Europe, with the exception of those parts of Christendom recovered from the Muslims, was one of silver. About AD 670 a coinage of silver deniers was inaugurated in the Frankish kingdom of Neustria, and by AD 700 silver
had taken over completely in the
West, a monometallism which was set to endure for five hundred years. Gold remained known, gold in bullion form was often available and sums of gold were often referred to in documents and in wills, but these amounts were paid by
weight, in the equivalent value of silver, or in Muslim
gold coins (financial records show
Henry III (1216-72) regularly purchased
supplies of oboli and
denarii de musc’, i.e.
gold coins of Muslim
Spain, in anticipation of each great festival of the
Church). Only very occasionally, possibly for reasons of prestige, were
gold coins actually struck. In
England the term mancus, possibly derived from manqush (‘
engraved’) an adjective used to characterize dinars in Arab records, came into use meaning an Arab gold dinar, and subsequently as a unit equivalent to the
weight of gold of a dinar (4.25g) or the value of a dinar in silver currency, 30 pennies, at a gold:silver value ratio of 10:1. The seven other surviving Anglo-Saxon gold pennies also represent a mancus. They take a variety of forms:
The first and most famous is the gold dinar of Offa of Mercia (757-96), 4.28g., a close copy of an Abbasid dinar of Caliph al-Mansur (754- 77), AH 157, with ‘OFFA
REX’ inserted into the inverted
obverse. In 786 Offa promised the pope to send an annual gift of 365 mancuses, and Papal letters of thanks in 797 and 802 show that the subvention was paid. This coin, the only survivor, was found in
Rome prior to 1841 and was acquired by the British Museum, ex the P W P Carlyon-Britton sale, 17 November 1913, lot 269, for £215. (
Stewart 1978, A.120).
[...]
The extremely low survival rate suggests that Anglo-Saxon
gold coins were never struck in large quantities, aided by the fact that they often ended up in the
hands of ecclesiastical authorities, who turned them to other purposes."
Of course, £215 was a lot of
money back in 1913!
Francis