dr Witold Władysław Garbaczewski

Section 22.: Auxiliary Sciences of History in Research on the History of Poland from the 10th to the 13th Century: Past – Present – Future

Numismatic sources play an important role in research on the ideology of power in early medieval Poland. The specific function of coins, which were primarily a means of exchange, but also a medium for transmitting specific content (in the first period of Polish coinage, this second function even came to the fore), makes them a very important iconographic and epigraphic source. Other types of sources from this early era have survived only fragmentarily. The subject of the paper will be an analysis of the dies of some Polish coins, starting from Bolesław the Brave and ending with Bolesław the Curly (the so-called denarius period), along with an attempt to sum up the state of research.