Grierson P. - Byzantine Coinage.pdf - Artykuły - pavelkow

B YZANTINE C OINAGE

Philip Grierson

Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection

Washington, D.C.

Trustees for Harvard University

Washington, D.C.

Printed in the United States of America

Second Edition

Cover illustrations : Solidus of Justinian II (enlarged 5:1)

ISBN 0-88402-274-9

PREFACE

edition of Byzantine Coinage , originally published in 1982 as number 4 in

the series Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Collection Publications. Although the

format has been slightly changed, the content is fundamentally the same. The

numbering of the illustrations,* however, is sometimes different, and the text

has been revised and expanded, largely on the advice and with the help of

Cécile Morrisson, who has succeeded me at Dumbarton Oaks as advisor for

Byzantine numismatics. Additions complementing this section are tables of val-

ues at different periods in the empire’s history, a list of Byzantine emperors,

and a glossary.

The second part of the publication reproduces, in an updated and slightly

shorter form, a note contributed in 1993 to the International Numismatic

Commission as one of a series of articles in the commission’s Compte-rendus

sketching the histories of the great coin cabinets of the world. Its appearance in

such a series explains why it is written in the third person and not in the first. It

is a condensation of a much longer unpublished typescript, produced for the

Coin Room at Dumbarton Oaks, describing the formation of the collection and

its publication.

* The coins illustrated are in the Dumbarton Oaks and Whittemore collections and are re-

produced actual size unless otherwise indicated. Weights are given in grams.

III

T his publication essentially consists of two parts. The first part is a second

H ISTORY AND D ENOMINATIONS

Phases of the Coinage

differing from it only in being Christian in religion and Greek in lan-

guage. No elements in its coinage, however, apart from the use of Latin in its

inscriptions, go back before the fourth century A . D . The coinage of the early

Roman Empire disappeared in the great currency inflation of the second half of

the third century, and a new system took shape gradually under Diocletian

(284–305) and his Christian successor, Constantine I the Great (306–337).

This system involved a gold coin known as a solidus (or nomisma in Greek) and

a varying number of denominations of silver, billon (debased silver), and

bronze, whose weights were altered several times in the course of the fourth

century and whose names and value relationships have long been the subject of

debate.

The Constantinian subsidiary coinage in turn collapsed in the early fifth

century, at the time of the barbarian invasions. All that survived at the accession

of the emperor Anastasius I in 491 was the gold solidus and its two fractions,

the half (semissis) and the third (tremissis), and a tiny copper coin known as a

nummus, worth, in the mid-fifth century, 1/7200 of the solidus and weighing

less than 1 gram. In order to provide a stable subsidiary coinage, in 498

Anastasius introduced a series of multiples of the nummus, the chief of them

T he Byzantine Empire regarded itself as a continuation of the Roman Empire,

being a copper coin worth 40 nummi and known as a follis (Fig. 29). This de-

nomination was to be one of the most conspicuous features of Byzantine coin-

age for the next six centuries, and since only the solidus and its fractions are

earlier in date, it is with the creation of the follis that a history of Byzantine

coinage can most conveniently be begun.

This history can be roughly divided into five periods. The first, extending

from Anastasius I (491–518) to the mid-eighth century, is characterized by the

use of three denominations of gold coins (Figs. 4, 6, 7) and four (sometimes

five) of copper (Figs. 29–31, 33, 34), with, from 615 onward, one denomination

of silver as well (Fig. 19). This wide range of coins was made possible by the use

of three metals, and in this respect it is comparable to modern coinage. The

second period, from the eighth to the late eleventh century, saw the simplifica-

tion of this pattern to only three denominations, one in each metal: the

nomisma (Fig. 11), a silver coin known as a miliaresion (Fig. 20), and the follis

(Fig. 38).

The third period, dating from the monetary reform carried out by the em-

peror Alexius I Comnenus (1081–1118) in 1092 and lasting to roughly the end

of the thirteenth century, is characterized by the use of several denominations

of debased metal (called trachea by contemporaries) that were strikingly differ-

ent from normal coins in being concave instead of flat (Fig. 15). The highest

denomination was a coin of slightly base gold known as a hyperpyron (Fig. 16),

which replaced the old nomisma of pure gold. A coin of much baser gold (Fig. 17)

revived the functions of the long-defunct tremissis, while small change was pro-

vided by trachea of very base silver (Fig. 25), which eventually became copper,

and by two denominations of small flat coins that were copper (Fig. 40), one

briefly becoming lead. The fourth period, lasting from soon after 1300 to the

mid-fourteenth century, saw the introduction of a silver coin, the basilicon

(Fig. 26), modeled on the silver ducat of Venice, and a small copper coin

known as an assarion (Fig. 41). Finally, the fifth period, lasting from the middle

of the fourteenth century until the fall of the empire in 1453, saw the complete

disappearance of gold coins and a return to ones of pure silver (Figs. 27, 28),

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