DIE RECUTTING IN THE ELEVENTH-CENTURY POLISH COINAGE MATEUSZ BOGUCKI Despite many years of research on the earliest Polish coins, the picture of the coinage of the first two historical Polish rulers, Boleslav the Brave (992-1025) and his son Mieszko II (1025-1031), is still puzzling in many aspects. Thanks to new finds and studies our knowledge is systematically expanding, but there are still many pieces from this puzzle missing. Since the basic monograph, published by Stanislaw Suchodolski (1967), a lot of new coins, several new dies, and new types of coins have been discovered (Ilisch / Suchodolski 2003, pp. 97-104; Jonsson / Suchodolski 2009; Bogucki 2006, pp. 181-94; 2008, pp. 77-89). New discoveries on the well-known material happen infrequently. In such cases accident plays an important role. One of the best known eleventh-century Polish coins is a penny of Boleslav the Brave with a bird (peacock – see Suchodolski 2005, p. 1253) on one, and the cross on the other side, with the inscription PRINCES POLONIE. Its image is even placed on the banknote (20 zloty), issued by the National Bank of Poland since 1994. The coin was first published by a Norwegian orientalist and numismatist, C.A. Holmboe, who examined the hoard found in Årstad (Egersund), some 70 km south of Stavanger (Holmboe 1837, p. 344; 1843, pp. 208-10; Skaare 1976, pp. 152-53, no. 95). In this hoard there were three PRINCES POLONIE coins, but Holmboe recognized only one of them. He was not able to read the badly struck coins, but he guessed that the legend should be primus rex poloniae, primas poloniae or princeps poloniae. He attributed the coin to Boleslav the Brave. The pioneer of Polish early medieval numismatics, Kazimierz Stronczyński, in his first book (1847, pp. 177, 248) repeated Holmboe’s attribution and did not discuss the coin in more detail, because the Årstad (Egersund) specimen was still the only known then. In the second book (Stronczyński 1883-1884) he noted more than 20 specimens of those deniers. Then he could read the inscription properly – PRINCES POLONIE. Interestingly, he noticed that there are at least two variants of it. He wrote that ’there are 3 known specimens with an accurate inscription, while more than 20 are barbarian’ (Stronczyński 1884, p. 17). An expression of regression in the research was the work of Marian Gumowski, entitled Corpus nummorum Poloniae (1939). He wrote about four variants of PRINCES POLONIE deniers: two were with accurate inscription, differentiated by the last letter in Poland’s name (POLONIE / POLONIK), the third was a mule with accurate obverse and barbarian reverse, and the fourth was fully barbarian (Gumowski 1939, pp. 21-25, nos. 10- 13). The reason for such a multiplicity of variants was the method of coin documentation used by Gumowski (specific imprints of coins on paper) on the one hand, and the willingness to multiply the ’Polish monuments’ on the other. Zygmunt Zakrzewski (1956, pp. 211-37) argued that there were two official variants – accurate and barbarian (CNP 10, 11) and two ’merchant’ imitations (CNP 12, 13). Ryszard Kiersnowski (1960, pp. 273-81) was not sure about how many dies were used for their striking, but he returned to Stronczyński’s opinion, that there were two main variants: accurate (Pl. I, top) and barbarized (Pl. I, middle). The first one is characterized by the accurate inscription, a two-legged peacock, and a three-line cross on the reverse. The barbarized coins are characterized by a blundered legend, a three-legged bird, and a thick cross on the reverse. According to Kiersnowski, the engraver of the barbarized dies was looking at the original die, not at the coin. Otherwise, the barbarized coins