c. AD 425-455 AV Solidus (4.43g, copying Ravenna mint)

The Visigoths originated as a Germanic people on the western banks of the Dnieper in modern Ukraine. From the 230s AD onward, under pressure from population movements further east, they began the long migration westward into the Roman world that would define late antiquity. They raided imperial territory throughout the Third Century Crisis; by the reign of Theodosius the Great, large Gothic groups had been settled in Illyricum as foederati and gave nominal allegiance to the emperor - though only after the catastrophic Roman defeat and death of the emperor Valens at Adrianople in 378.

Under Alaric I, after 395, the Visigoths became one of the great political actors of the western Mediterranean. Alaric was granted a Roman generalship by the Eastern emperor but failed to obtain the same recognition from the West, where Stilicho - the half-Roman, half-Vandal magister militum - was sent against him. The Visigoths invaded Italy, and in August 410 Alaric captured and sacked Rome itself: the first time the city had fallen to a foreign army in nearly eight centuries. Settlement followed: the Western emperors conceded large parts of southern Gaul and northern Spain to the Visigoths as the Kingdom of Toulouse, with the Visigothic kings continuing, at least on the coinage, to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Western emperor in Ravenna.

The reign of Valentinian III (425-455) is the period of this solidus. The real power behind Valentinian's throne was the Roman patrician and magister militum Flavius Aetius - "the last of the Romans" in the famous phrase. As a young man Aetius had been a hostage at the Visigothic court of Alaric, and he later spent years as a hostage among the Huns; he therefore enjoyed unusually personal relationships with both peoples. In 451 Aetius assembled a coalition of Roman regulars, Visigoths under King Theodoric I, and other federate Germanic contingents and met Attila the Hun at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, halting the Hunnic invasion of the Western Empire (Theodoric himself fell in the battle).

This solidus belongs to that exact moment. It was struck inside the Visigothic kingdom in southern Gaul or northern Spain, in the name of Valentinian III, copying the official solidi of the Ravenna mint - the obverse a pearl-diademed, draped, and cuirassed bust of Valentinian III right with the legend D N PLA VALENTINIANVS P F AVG, the reverse the standing emperor in military dress holding a long cross and a Victory on globe, with a kneeling captive at his feet, the legend VICTORIA AVGGG, the mintmark COMOB and the Ravenna officina mark RV in the field - all faithfully imitated, but in the slightly stylised "barbarian" engraving that betrays the Visigothic die-cutter rather than an official Roman one.

NGC Ancients has graded it Ch AU, Strike 5/5, Surface 4/5 - a heavy 4.43-gram gold flan with the portrait fully struck, the reverse fully readable, and the original soft yellow gold tone intact. It is, in the most literal sense, a coin of the long fall of the West: struck for a Roman emperor, by a Germanic kingdom, in the years between the sack of Rome and the murder of Aetius by Valentinian III in 454 - after which the Visigoths stopped acknowledging Ravenna at all, and the following year (455) the Vandals sacked Rome for the second time.