The Barbaric Tremissis in Spain and Southern France: Anastasius to Leovigild

Anyone who attempts to study early sixth century coinage in the West must come to grips with the difficulty of separating fact from fiction. The endeavor is obfuscated not only by the small number of facts but by the larger number of hypotheses which have become accepted as fact. The student cannot help but be skeptical of the use of this numismatic material as evidence because of the uncertainty of attributions, the seemingly endless variety of type styles, the lack of any systematically studied or recorded hoards and the lack of any complete catalogue. This skepticism is aggravated by aesthetic prejudices towards non-classical forms. To see these coins as barbarous, nonclassical, ergo crude and ugly, is not to see them at all. This aesthetic blindness or narrowness has hindered numismatic understanding and has limited the usefulness of the numismatic material.