An ancient gold coin found in Transylvania proves that the Roman emperor of the 3rd century, removed from history on the grounds that he was a fictional character, actually existed, BBC reports, citing News.ro. The story was reported at University College London and published in the journal PLOS ONE.

Professor Paul Pearson of University College London, who led the study, told BBC News he was amazed by the discovery. A copy of this coin is kept in the Bruckenthal Museum in Sibiu.

The study of the coin was published in the journal PLOS ONE under the title “Authentication of Coins of the ‘Roman Emperor’ Sponsianus.

A coin bearing the name of Sponsianus and an engraved portrait of him was found more than 300 years ago in Transylvania, once a distant outpost of the Roman Empire. Considering it a fake, it was locked in a museum cabinet. Now scientists say that visible scratch marks under a microscope prove that it was indeed in circulation 2,000 years ago, writes the BBC.

“I found the emperor. It was a number that was considered a fake and was rejected by experts. But we believe it was real and played a role in history,” said Professor Paul Pearson of University College London.

The coin at the center of this discovery was part of a small hoard discovered in 1713. It was originally believed to be a genuine Roman coin until the mid-19th century, when experts, due to its rather rudimentary design, suspected that it was made by forgers of the time.

The coup d’état came in 1863 when Henry Cohen, the foremost coin expert of the time at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, emphasized this aspect when he compiled his extensive catalog of Roman coins. He said the coins were not only “modern” fakes, but also poorly made and “ridiculous in design”. Other experts agreed, and until now Sponsian has been rejected in scientific catalogs, the BBC notes.

However, Professor Paul Pearson suspected this was not the case when he saw photographs of the coin during research for a book on the history of the Roman Empire. He could see scratches on its surface and thought they might have been caused by the coin being in circulation. The professor then contacted the Hunter Museum at the University of Glasgow, where the coin was kept locked in a cabinet with three other coins from the original hoard.

Together with Scottish researchers, he examined all four coins under a powerful microscope and confirmed that they were indeed scratched, and the patterns seemed to indicate that the coins had been stored with others in money “pouches” of the time. Chemical analysis also showed the coins had been buried in the ground for hundreds of years, according to Jesper Eriksson, a curator at the Hunterian Museum who worked on the project with Professor Pearson.

Sponisan – The Lost Emperor

Researchers must now answer the question of who the Sponsian was. They believe that it was a military leader forced to crown himself as the emperor of the most remote and difficult to defend province of the Roman Empire: Dacia, the BBC writes.

Archaeological research has established that Dacia was isolated from the rest of the Roman Empire around 260 AD. There was a pandemic, a civil war, the empire was crumbling. Surrounded by enemies and isolated from Rome, Sponsianus probably assumed supreme command during a period of chaos and civil war, protecting Dacia’s military and civilian population until order was restored and the province evacuated between AD 271 and 275, according to Jesper. Eriksson.

“Our interpretation is that he was tasked with maintaining control over the military and civilian population, who were surrounded and completely isolated. In order to create a functional economy in the province, they decided to mint their own coins,” the researcher believes.

This theory would explain why the coins are different from the Roman ones. “Maybe they didn’t know who the real emperor was because there was a civil war,” says Professor Pearson. “But they needed a supreme military leader in the absence of real power from Rome. He took command at the moment when command was really needed,” explains the professor.

After experts determined the coins were genuine and discovered what they believed to be a lost Roman emperor, they alerted researchers at the Bruckenthal Museum in Sibiu, which also houses the Sponsian coin. It was part of the inheritance of Baron Samuel von Bruckenthal, the Habsburg governor of Transylvania. The baron studied the coin at the time of his death, and legend has it that the last thing he would have done was to leave a note that said “genuine”.

Specialists of the Bruckenthal Museum classified the coin, like all others, as a historical forgery, but changed their opinion after seeing the British research, the BBC writes. The discovery is of particular interest for the history of Transylvania and Romania, according to the interim director of the Brukenthal National Museum, Alexandru Kostiantyn Kituce. “For the history of Transylvania and Romania in particular, but also for the history of Europe in general, if these results are accepted by the scientific community, they will mean adding another important historical figure to our history,” he said, quoted by the BBC.