Download PDF | Studies in the Byzantine Monetary Economy c.300–1450 By Michael F. Hendy, University of Birmingham 1985.
830 Pages
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book has been an unconscionable time in preparation, and one can only hope that it is the better for it. Written over a number of years, in a number of places, various institutions (willingly or unwillingly) bear some responsibility for its existence: the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; the Barber Institute of Fine Arts and the Department of Mediaeval History, University of Birmingham; and the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies, Washington, D.C.; to name only the main ones.
In the course of the text, I have attempted to quote, verbatim and extensively, as many of the major primary sources as is possible and as seems relevant. I have done this because a number of them have not previously been rendered into a modern language, or, even if they have been so rendered, are still not readily accessible. I thus hope to have made them accessible to students and amateurs who lack the necessary languages, or the academic facilities, or both. This has meant that, in many cases, and with some trepidation, I have had to do the translating involved myself. In doing so, I have attempted to retain the original form and flavour in as far as it is possible, and particularly where the ponderous, allusive, and elliptical pomposity of imperial legislation is concerned. On the other hand, I have felt little hesitation in changing the moods or tenses of verbs where I have thought it necessary the better to indicate a particular modern sense, or to retain a reasonable linguistic facility.
The extensive quotation of sources has also been undertaken in the belief that, where a source is virtually or entirely self-explanatory, it is better to allow it to remain so, and that it isin any case frequently quite as succinct as a modern paraphrase and commentary. Technical terms, and crucial phrases, have nevertheless been simply transliterated and included in parenthesis where thought necessary, for the use of scholars.
I genuinely would be most grateful for the correction of egregious errors (particularly where couched in moderate terms), and —as I have doubtless not picked up all the major sources that are available, and that I ought to have done — for the provision of any additions to what I hope to be the emergent canon. ,
Ihave generally, at least where easily possible, given Greek personal and family names, and Greek toponymics, in an English or Latinised form (the latter quite often with the modern equivalent, where very different, as is frequently the case with Turkish). This 1 have done partly for the ease of the more general reader (if any such there be), and partly in reaction to the lunatic excesses of direct, and extremely complex, transliteration, to be seen in at least one still quite recently published book.
Where I have broken this general rule, it has tended to be either quoting or directly reporting a mediaeval author, or with a definite aim in mind: for example, whereas I have generally used the forms Macedonia and Cappadocia where the wider geographical sense is to be indicated, I have nevertheless used the forms Makedonia and Kappadokia where a particular administrative circumscription (i.e. a mediaeval theme) is involved.
Footnotes, with regard to the inevitable and omnipresent consideration of expense, have been kept to a minimum, not so much of number, but certainly of length. In general, [have referred either to the original textual! source, or to the most modern comprehensive treatment of the subject involved, or to both, only. I have attempted to do the equivalent for the bibliography, which as a body of material is extensive, but in which individual entries have been kept to a minimum. For other reasons entirely, I have been able to take major acount of works published before — sometimes, and always at a stretch, actually in — 1981, only.
I owe particular thanks to my friend and colleague, Chris Wickham, both for much stimulating discussion — whether in the course of conversation, or in that of joint teaching — and for performing the arduous task of reading over the text in typescript and making valuable suggestions with regard to it. If | have not invariably acted upon them, then I bear full responsibility, and for the remaining faults and eccentricities, whether analytical or otherwise, he of course cannot be blamed.
I also owe thanks to my friend Alan McQuillan for advice on various matters of an agricultural or a technological nature. 1 owe a number of cardinal references to the kindness of various friends, colleagues, and pupils, and I have attempted to indicate my indebtedness and thanks at the appropriate points in the text. If I have forgotten any, I can only tender my apologies and express my thanks here and now, with the assurance that any such omission was entirely unintentional.
For the final typing of the text and footnotes, I owe thanks to Joyce Kirkpatrick and Diana Glanville-Jones of the School of Hellenic and Roman Studies, University of Birmingham. For the photography involved in the plates, I owe principal thanks to Eric Taylor of the Barber Institute, University of Birmingham, from the collection of which the great majority of the non-Dumbarton Oaks coins illustrated derive.
I would also like to thank my friends Simon Bendall and John Casey for invaluable help, and particularly for that given at short notice with regard to the plates.
Fox the drawing of the splendid series of maps, I owe thanks to Jean Dowling of the Department of Geography, University of Birmingham.For being a kind and patient but efficient sub-editor, with an eagle eye for the superfluous comma, I owe thanks to Ann Johnston of the Cambridge University Press.
And lastly, I should particularly like to thank the British Academy, but also the Foundation for the Promotion of Numismatic and Archaeological Research, Basel; and the University of Birmingham; for generous grants in aid of publication, without which the book inevitably would have been far more expensive even than regrettably, and necessarily, it actually is.
Department of Mediaeval History The University of Birmingham 27 October 1982
INTRODUCTION
When, now a number of years ago, I commenced work on this book, it was intended as a very different kind of affair from that which it has eventually turned out to be. It was originally intended to be a single volume, of moderate length, on the Byzantine coinage in the wider sense: that is, both as regards chronology and as regards scope. It is now a series of eight studies, on the three main constituent elements in the Byzantine monetary economy: economy and society, finance, and coinage (circulation and production).
From the nature and extent of the three elements mentioned above, it should be obvious that I do not regard the study of an historical monetary economy as consisting of the mere record and analysis of coin hoards and archaeological site-finds (although I hope that eventually both of these will have their own not inconsiderable place), but as something much wider and more inclusive. It is, after all, pointless to analyse coin finds, and to derive ‘monetary’ or ‘economic’ conclusions from such analyses, either in total ignorance of the fundamental causative factors behind the production and circulation of a coinage, or on the basis of some superficial or faulty causative and behavioural framework.
In any case, each of the eight resultant studies, or chapters, is more or less self-contained, and the fact that the findings of each, whether implicit or explicit, are not formally and comprehensively interrelated in a concluding synthesis, is quite deliberate. For although many of the particular relationships implied or specified will be outlined, and although the nature and directions of future explorations will be indicated, in a concluding section, thereby at least suggesting the overall shape of the final structure as it seems likely to emerge, this series is, and is intended to be, a preliminary one only, and to be followed by one, or perhaps even two, more. In other words, much remains to be done before the history, dynamics and mode of operation of the Byzantine monetary economy emerges in as full a detail, if in however imperfect a fashion, as it is possible for me to depict and analyse it.
The distinction between original intention and present reality is the result of a number of factors, some personal, others impersonal. But in retrospect, it was certainly premature, and perhaps even naive, given the existing state of the discipline, to suppose that the in its desired wider sense, could be encapsulated within a single A necessary pre-condition for such an attempt is the existence of a d body of material, and a reasonably limited range of opinions as to its This situation barely obtains in the Case of the Byzantine coinage in its narrowest sense, let alone in that of its wider, and, a fortiori, its widest, sense.
Byzantinists of all disciplines frequently complain of the lack of surviving evidence, and Byzantine numsmatists and historians are no exception to this general rule. To a certain extent, of course, the complaint has foundation. Numismatists, for example, quite justifiably point out the complete lack of the mint documentation that, in most western Mates, survives however sporadically at first, and increasingly with time. To a certain extent, equally, the complaint lacks justification. While certain types of documentation undoubtedly have failed to survive, others have not, and it therefore behoves the Byzantine numismatist to make the best possible use of what is available, rather than to lament what is not.
This may well mean that a number of the questions which wumismiatises in other fields have traditionally asked and still do ask of their material will, in the case of Byzantine numismatics, turn out to be unanswerable — at least by way of the traditional and currently conceivable methods of enquiry. While these questions should not be entirely neglected, and new methods of enquiry into them should certainly be explored, it is probably more useful, for the moment at least, to award them a lower order of priority than is customary, and to turn instead to different questions for which the surviving material is better suited to providing the answers.
For the numismatist, if for no other scholar, the implied or incipient choice involved is aN acute One, presenting imagined or even real difficulties. On the one hand, there exists a series of coins, the chronological and geographical spread of which is virtually if not entirely unparalleled, and the historical information from which — on even a very limited interpretation of the discipline — there is to be gained an amount at least commensurate with that spread. On the other hand, between this and what is in kind a totally different beady af evidence there is next to nothing: not only no state archives or mint documents, but no mercantile manuals except western ones which deal with eastern materials only incidentally; no epistolary collections or journals with a consistent numismatic, financial, or economic bias; no account-books (again except for the latest period and even then largely of western origin); and no municipal archives with collections of mercantile regulations and documents.
Because of this accentuated division between coins as such and the other materials which have potential or real bearing upon coins or coinage in a wider sense, the Byzantine numismatist has tended to internalise his discipline: to worry incessantly about problems — again imagined or real — such as the nature and development of imperial dress and regalia, and the propagandist intent behind the issue of coin; the sequence of issues and the identity of mints; even the number of coins going to make up an issue or a series of issues. All these subjects have their own place and significance. This author has himself indulged in several of them, and a concentration upon them is certainly not confined to Byzantine numismatics, being in some cases shared with the ancient branch of the discipline, in some with the western mediaeval, and in some with both and indeed others. Much more than this, however, is needed, and much more, as it happens, is possible.
There have been, it is true, faint signs, more recently, of the evolution of a rather wider consciousness. The existence of such a wider consciousness, or at least of its desirability, has indeed generally been acknowledged, but has all too frequently been the subject of lip-service, or of decorous consignment to the (apparently ever-receding) future, when the state of the discipline shall permit it: ‘the Time is not Ripe’.
Nevertheless quite recently, for instance, an attempt has been made to trace in some detail, and to account for, the first phase (c. 1040-71) of the increasingly severe and eventually catastrophic debasement of the precious-metal coinages in the eleventh century, in terms that are well outside the normally accepted ones. To be sure, the very attempt is in itself praiseworthy, but the distinction in the degree of success attained as between the measurement and the explanation of the phenomenon well reveals the limitations of the conceptual framework within which even leading numismatists tend to work.
Now, given the establishment of a basic sequence of issues, and of a reasonably accurate and (not unimportant) an appropriately used method of metallurgical analysis, the course of a debasement is capable of being plotted without too much difficulty, and in this particular case, in its main lines at least, it may now be considered to have been successfully effected. But, beyond that, the application of Fisher’s Equation (essentially a development, but not the most developed form, of the Quantity Theory of Money) to the phenomenon not only fails to provide a satisfactory explanation for it, but also quite unconsciously begs a number of really fundamental questions as regards the nature and operation of the Byzantinc—and for that matter of most ancient and mediaeval — monetary economies.
The assumption implicit in the application of this equation, that is that the Byzantine monetary economy functioned essentially as a modern free and commercially based and oriented one, and that the laws governing the former must immutably, and in detail, have been identical with those that govern the latter, may well appear attractive, the more particularly so as the precious-metal — or, more precisely, the gold — coinage appears in the light of a traditional commodity, and as credit played a relatively minor, and may even have played an absolutely minimal, réle at all major levels of commerce and finance. It is to be observed, however, that the recent application of strict monetarist policies, which evolve from and rely upon such equations and theories, to several modern economies, has not left many convinced of their entire validity even there.
The reality, paradoxically enough, is in any case likely to have been at once both more simple and more complex. It goes without saying, of course, that the Byzantines knew nothing of Fisher’s Equation itself, and in all probability that they were almost equally ignorant of each of its conceptual components. Admittedly, its strict operation amongst the Byzantines is in no way thercby disproved, although such ignorance may well not be entirely insignificant. But, in addition, on all the available evidence, the Byzantine coinage was intended to perform certain very limited functions only, and amongst these functions that of public utility (the provision of a convenient medium of exchange for the private sector of the economy) ranked as very secondary. It was produced according to the current pattern and emphasis of the imperial fiscal administration, in which the structural needs and requirements of that administration were modified by one further identifiable consideration, those of the imperial military forces. It was distributed, at least as far as its precious-~metal components were concerned, entirely as the product of state expenditure, in which the principal item was provided by those same military forces.
It was therefore distributed according to a very accentuated and fundamentally ‘uneconomic’ pattern, in which a particular region might well be agriculturally highly exploited, fiscally productive, with a relatively large number of urban concentrations, and a correspondingly numerous and complex population, and yet both lack a mint, because there were present no appreciable military concentrations, and apparently any alternative methods of coin-supply. It was distributed, as far as its base-metal components were concerned, either as state expenditure, or through the medium of technical fiscal practices which, while they may have ensured a considerable volume of production and a greater degree of uniformity of distribution, also involved discrimination against those base-metal components, both on the part of the state (certain), and on that of private citizens (probable, at least where anything else was available for the purposes of storing wealth). In other words, precious- and base-metal coinages were produced and distributed to serve very different functions, not simply that of serving as convenient vehicles for high- and low-value private exchanges.
It is true that the precious-metal components of the coinage were the preferred, even demanded, medium, in the payment of state taxes, but the state itself was apparently normally unconcerned as to their availability, and as to the provision of the means of rendering them readily available. It therefore shows every sign of having been endemically scarce, even in those regions where it would have been much more convenient to the population at large for it to be common.
It is equally true that the normal processes of exchange and trade would have guaranteed that this extraordinarily accentuated pattern of production and distribution was to some extent alleviated as regards circulation and supply. But at the same time it should not be forgotten that this monetary economy, which at the outset was both specialised and superficial, also functioned in a society in which — inevitably — the means of communication were painfully crude and slow; in which the costs of transport, at least in areas that were more than a few miles removed from a navigable river, or from the sea, were extremely high; in which therefore trade in basic products was acutely limited as regards distance, and that in luxury products was equally limited as regards volume; in which the producer was almost invariably the distributor and/or the seller, operating almost equally invariably on a small scale; in which there in any case seems to have been a fundamental distinction in the degree to which coin was available and/or used, both as between rural and urban areas, and as between regions and metropolis; and in which (besides the emperor) a very few secular families and the church as a corporate body owned a very high proportion of the total of available moveable (as well as other) wealth, a very high proportion of this in turn being immobilised in the form of plate in its widest sense, or hoarded in the form of coin.
It is of course true that many or most of these features were not peculiar to Byzantine civilisation, but obtained in most or all large ancient or mediaeval societies. Indeed, in this respect, it might well turn out to be extremely useful to be aware of the nature and operation of a monetary economy in a historically recent, or even present-day, but still primitive or underdeveloped, society. In the case of Byzantium in particular, and indeed that of the gold-based eastern and southern Mediterranean in general, the mechanics and velocity of circulation of the standard, and overwhelmingly the most important, denomination will have been determined not least by the extremely high purchasing power of the nomisma/dinar, whether metallically pure or subjected to a moderate degree of debasement, and — with regard to Byzantium, at least, and over long stretches of time — by the lack of a reasonably flexible system of subordinate denominations. Even when gold was used in private transactions, it seems clear that the sum involved was normally weighed out, the actual weight of the coins necessarily being almost invariably made up or restored to the theoretical one, in itselfa most cumbersome physical process.
In the light of all these circumstances separately or in combination, and despite wide-ranging claims to the contrary, it is at least questionable whether the application of Fisher’s Equation has much, if any, relevance to the situation, and whether the pre-conditions necessary for its operation in any chronologically and geographically uniform, and in any detailed, fashion existed.
Part of the trouble, of course, is that the Byzantine coinage-system was in its primary characteristics alone an economic phenomenon, and that between it and the economy as a whole there intervened the state, its finances, and its political will and its ability to exploit society and the economy as a whole, as a major — probably the major — secondary determinant factor.
In a civilisation in which the sources of revenue effectively available to the state were only minimally flexible; in which the dominant classes of society had the greatest capacity to evade such financial obligations as the state chose to impose upon them; and in which the significant use of credit in any flexible and systematic sense on the part of the state was simply not possible, it is all too easy to envisage a set of circumstances in which, at a time of general economic expansion and demographic increase, because of the political power that increasingly, and mainly, accrued to the dominant classes as a result of their social and economic position, the state would paradoxically have found it increasingly difficult, and eventually impossible, to extract from those classes and eventually from society as a whole, the revenue that it needed to perform its traditional rdles, At this stage, even in the absence of such complicating factors as imperial extravagance and increased military and civil expenditure (for all of which there is ample evidence), it would have been threatened, perhaps even afflicted, by a classic budgetary deficit. No matter that it might have had reserves to rely on for some while: it provided a classic response to the problem — the debasement of the precious-metal coinages.
What the state could not extract from the dominant classes, it might attempt, of course, to extract from the dependent ones — in other words to ‘screw the peasants’ — and there is explicit, if slightly later (that is, twelfth-century) evidence, in the shape of the treatise known as the Palaia kai Nea Logariké, which demonstrates that it had attempted to do just that. This was obviously an entirely unsatisfactory solution, or attempted solution, both as regards equity and as regards practicalities: it mary well be that the financial short-fall made on the dominant-classes was, in the long run, simply not capable of being made up on the dependent ones, and even if it were, the social and economic consequences of the resultant crippling over-taxation of the latter classes, in anything but the short run, might have proved obviously disastrous and self-defeating. It is noticeable that when the state found itself once more in a position to reassert the financial control that it had lost, it speedily did so. The apparent contradiction in the fact that the emperor involved in this reassertion of state control, Alexius I, was a member of one of the leading families of those classes that had earlier escaped control, and was by then systematically allied by blood and marriage to a nexus of other such families, merely emphasises the simple truth that ifthe individual at the head of the state wished it to perform its traditional réles — and in many ways Alexius was a very traditional figure — then some appreciable degree of financial control over the dominant classes was a crude necessity.
Other similar models of this kind, none of which need necessarily be represented as, or based upon, a precise mathematical interrelationship, can be constructed without difficulty: this is perhaps merely the most plausible.
These observations are not intended on the one hand to advocate a retreat to the laager of internalised numismatics, nor on the other to deprecate the use of modern methods of monetary analysis. Still less are they designed to suggest that the Byzantine coinage and monetary system operated in some mystical way, entirely removed from the observation and empirical knowledge of contemporaries, and equally absolved from behaviour conforming to recently formulated economic laws: the anonymous author of the De Rebus Bellicis, describing the effects. of Constantine’s confiscation of the temple-treasures, seems to have some basic perception of the interrelation of metallic supply and its consequence for the level of appropriate exchanges; both Procopius and John Lydus, describing the effects of Justinian’s abandonment of the public post, seem to have an equivalent perception of that and its consequence for the supply of coin; both Theophanes and the patriarch Nicephorus place Constantine V’s attempt at gold thesaurisation in correct juxtaposition to the consequent fall in the prices of other commodities; the composition of twelfth-century hoards of billon coins acutely reflects the monetary manipulations of contemporary emperors with regard to their silver-content, and therefore the effective operation — if not necessarily the conscious knowledge — of Gresham’s Law.
What they are intended to suggest is that it is on the one hand unacceptable for the numismatist, in accounting for some monetary phenomenon, to connect it with a contemporary ‘economic crisis’ (for the basic distinction between a financial and an economic crisis is one that is scarcely ever made), the existence of which is asserted through reference to another such assertion, which turns out to be based on a statement in George Ostrogorsky’s History of the Byzantine State — however distinguished that author, and however valuable that work. But they are also intended to suggest that it is on the other hand equally dangerous, that is dangerous enough to be unacceptable, for the numismatist, in accounting for some other monetary phenomenon, to insert it into a precise mathematical interrelationship evolved in the light of modern monetary theories and conditions. In general, if in no other sense, the result is thereby lent an entirely spurious air of precision and authority, and the nature and mode of operation of the ancient or mediaeval monetary economy involved is effectively never questioned.
Much the same kind of approach and much the same kind of objections to be raised to it are evident in the case of recent attempts to estimate the original size of issues in gold, silver and copper, covering a chronological range extending from the eighth to the fourteenth centuries. The methods in this case are based on a mixture of practical experiment (with modern dies and blanks approximating to those used in ancient Greek silver coinage) and mediaeval mint documentation (mainly regarding English silver pennies), and involve what is essentially a relatively simple exercise in statistical probability. On the assumption that there exists an average number of coins liable to be struck from a single die, and on examination of the number of dies represented, and the degree to which they are repeated, in a sample of surviving coinage, it is theoretically possible to calculate the number of dies originally used for an issue, and therefore the number of coins originally forming that issue. This may sound rather grand and impressive. Unfortunately, even given the assumption that there is indeed such a thing as a meaningful average number of coins liable to be struck from a single ancient or mediaeval die {in itself a controversial issue), and even ignoring the certain physical differences between the size and thickness of Greek, English and many Byzantine coins, and the possible technological differences between modern, mediaeval English and Byzantine dies, there still remains such a large number of probable practical flaws in the logical and methodological sequence as to render it effectively useless in a Byzantine context.
The whole sequence depends upon the calculation of the number of dies involved in a sample of surviving coins being accurate, and on that sample being a random one. It is, however, notorious that examination ofa single sample by different scholars commonly yields different results, this being particularly the case where a base-metal coinage is in question, as it is peculiarly liable to disfiguration by corrosion and is in any case likely to have been struck in much greater quantity and with much less care than a precious-metal one. Much more important, however, is the fact that no sample of surviving coins is likely to be entirely random, and it is virtually — probably absolutely — impossible to judge just how select any sample is likely to be, or actually is. This is particularly the case where a precious-metal coinage is in question, as its extremely high purchasing power is likely to have rendered its velocity of circulation extremely low, and a high proportion of it is likely to have circulated over long but varied periods of time sealed up in purses, separately, issue by issue, each only very gradually being broken down, and only very gradually being mixed with others.
It is also notorious that precious-metal coins, at least, tend very strongly to be found in the form of hoards — being very rarely, for example, found singly, in the course of archaeological excavations — and that the contents of a single large hoard, or of several smaller ones, found and broken up in subsequent times, are capable of changing, not to say entirely distorting, the current commonness or rarity of individual issues.
Finally, on this immediate subject, it should be noted: that whether it is a base- or a precious-metal coinage that is in question, the smaller the current sample, the greater the margins of eventual error, and that samples are always relatively, and are in most cases absolutely, minute. The result is likely to be — to a greater or lesser, but entirely unknown, degree — a severe underestimate.
Even if, despite all this, it proved possible to evolve an accurate estimate of the number of coins that had originally gone to form an issue or several issues, the knowledge gained — paradoxically enough — would still, at least currently, be of internal and numismatic interest only, for as the size of the Byzantine population amongst which it circulated remains entirely unknown, and beyond the limits even of reasoned guesswork, and as the coinage-using habits of that population have in any case been so little studied, the knowledge would be incapable of being put to effective wider use.
The employment of modern scientific methods without significant recourse to thought about the wider historical background has also tended to characterise the use of various techniques of metallurgical analysis to discover the metallic composition of coins or coin issues. -Here, the dichotomy between the two elements is admittedly less accentuated, or at any rate less important. After all, it is very useful indeed to know how the gold-content of the nomisma and the silver-content of the miliaresion declined in the eleventh century, the gold-content of the electrum trachy and the silver-content of the billon one declined in the twelfth, and the gold-content of the hyperpyron declined in the thirteenth and fourteenth, quite independently of any enquiry into contemporary metallurgical knowledge. In these cases, too, the study of contemporary documentary sources, and the analysis of the composition of hoards, indicates the existence and operation, at a fairly short remove, of a popular awareness of many of the major details of what was going on.
Nevertheless, for example, when minutely analysing the metallic composition of late third- and early fourth-century billon nummus, there is a marked tendency to assume that everything that is now present in a coin, and in however small proportions, then formed a deliberate admixture, with a sound metallurgical reason behind it. Examination of the few surviving sources having some bearing on the matter, however, suggests that two metals only were recognised as being of formal significance: copper to provide the bulk of the alloy, and silver to provide the required enhanced value for the coin. Examination of ancient, mediaeval western, Persian and Arabic treatises on minerals and metals and their utilisation might well also reveal a generally and distinctly less ordered and logical situation than that now customarily assumed.
The burden of all this, of course, is quite simply that modern scientific methods are liable to be of more than very limited use to the numismatist only where the ancient or mediaeval conceptual, technological and behavioural background is known, or at least its limitations and potentialities appreciated. In other words, the application of modern scientific methods does not absolve the numismatist from the greatest possible effort to discover, in as far as is now possible, how an ancient and/or mediaeval monetary economy actually appeared and worked: ignoring this is likely to result in the evolution of a vast numismatic superstructure with minimal historical foundations, and this unsound edifice currently shows every sign of coming into being, a prernature sophistication disguising what is essentially a reversal of the logical order of research.
If these remarks are directed against certain salient trends in the study of Byzantine numismatics, then it has to be admitted that those in that of Byzantine history, which are of a somewhat similar nature, have at least not helped the situation. With certain notable exceptions, Byzantine historians, other than purely political ones (and they are always with us), have tended of recent years to be obsessed either with the concept of ‘decline’ — how far back in time it, or its roots, can be traced —or with that of ‘feudalism’ — whether, and if so how, the term can be applied to Byzantine society — or indeed with both, the former frequently being seen as caused by the latter. Allied to these there has tended to be an overwhelming concern with ‘foreign [i.e. Latin] domination’, particularly with regard to trading concessions, the disadvantages for and decline of the Byzantine mercantile classes, and the losses to imperial revenue. The second and third of these -- feudalism and foreign domination — have both tended to be seen as internal and external causative cquivalents in the first: decline.
To a great extent, of course, these obsessions derive ultimately from the two major political and intellectual strands or inheritances amongst the scholars involved: marxist historians have tended to dominate the field where questions of social structure, feudalism, the pronoia grant, and so on, are concerned; what are pleasantly termed ‘bourgeois’ ones have tended ta dominate that where those of trade amd allied subjects such as east—west relations are concerned, Admittedly, this distinction has never been absolute, and in recent years — even during the (somewhat lengthy) gestation petiod of this book — with some relaxation in the intellectual rigidities of ‘official’ marxism in most eastern countries, and more particularly with the widespread acceptance and adoption, as respectable and even fashionable, of marxist modes of thought (even if ‘deviant’ ones) in virtually all western countries, it has tended to become increasingly blurred. This may well be no bad thing, and the resultant synthesis valuable, but the essential distinction survives.
In addition to all this, there has remained constantly in the background the division between the numismatist and the historian that is commonly found elsewhere in the general historical discipline, and that may well be inherent. This division seems to be based on a fear, on the part of the numismatist, of venturing beyond what can be deduced from coinage in its narrowest sense, or even (given the disproportionate position of the amateur collector in the discipline) on a straightforward lack of interest in the possible results of so venturing. The fear is perhaps understandable, but the lack of interest is certainly inexcusable. The study of coins, while justified and necessary, is (or should be) merely a means to an end, and that end is the contribution they can make, or can thereby be made to make, towards the study of the civilisation that produced and used them. Now coins by themselves tend to impart information ofa very particular and restricted nature only, although ~— given the fragmentary nature of the surviving evidence — even that is not to be despised. Nevertheless, it is in attempting to answer a more general type of question — such as why, when and where coins were, or were likely to be, struck; the functions that they were intended to, and did, perform; how, and by whom, they were used; and their relationship to contemporary concepts of wealth, and to the financial system and the economic structure of the state — that information of wider interest, and of more general use, tends to come to light. To fail to explore the full potential of coins is therefore simply to indulge in bad numismatics.
That being said, however, there remains one most important caveat. Which is that the numismatist should be aware not only of the potential, but also of the limitations, of his subject, and it is precisely here that the division between numismatist and historian is likely to occur and evolve. For information derived from coins, and of a perfectly legitimate historical status, has on occasion been neglected, or even consciously ignored, by the historian, because, in pressing the claims of his material too far at other times, the numismatist has discredited his discipline.
From the other side, the tendency has been for the historian to assume the numismatist to be interested only in numismatic details of an internal nature, and of a minor import, and (as pointed out above, with some justification) to be distinctly unimpressed whenever the latter has ventured outside those details — while at the same time remaining somewhat nervous of techniques that he considers arcane, yet of potential bearing upon his subject. It may be objected that, in taking a particular numismatist, or numismatists, as representative of the discipline, or as reflecting the antiquarian basis of the discipline itself, the historian merely betrays his own professional inadequacy. But even historians are human in respect of simple prejudice and, however justified the theory of the objection, numismatists would be well advised to take account of the practical effect of their conclusions in this respect.
In any case, the effect of these several tendencies and divisions — current tendencies in the study of numismatics, inherited divisions in the study of history, and a general division between numismatists and historians — has been little short of disastrous for the study of the Byzantine monetary economy as a whole. Numismatists have duly tended to internalise their discipline; marxist historians, while rejecting (probably justifiably) the concept of a ‘trade-based’ economy, have also tended to ignore (probably unjustifiably) the study of coins and coinage, as forming an extension and antiquarian adjunct of that concept; and ‘bourgeois’ historians, while in most cases accepting (probably unjustifiably) the concept ofa ‘trade-based’ economy, have therefore also — and paradoxically — tended to neglect (probably unjustifiably) the study of coins and coinage, considering it merely to confirm, in an antiquarian way, what is already known and capable of being independently verified. Both types of historians therefore tend to avoid numismatics, and numismatists and historians alike all tend to avoid the monetary economy.
And yet it is precisely on the question of the general nature and functioning of the monetary economy that the Byzantinist possesses an immense advantage over other mediaevalists. For the Byzantine empire comprised territorially, over much of its history, holdings in two peninsulas, the Balkan and Anatolian, each with a very accentuated physical structure and with all the concomitant characteristics deriving from that, and it survived, with an unique degree of historical continuity, and in however varying a territorial form, for over a millennium. The Byzantinist is thus assured of a certain degree of territorial uniformity, but equally of a basic geographical diversity, and of a high degree of historical continuity, over an extended period of time. Upon this foundation, he is in a position to superimpose the information to be gleaned from a body of straightforward numismatic materials —the coins—the unique nature of which has already been mentioned. In addition to an almost continuous sequence of hoard evidence, there is, increasingly, a body of evidence deriving from the investigation of archaeological sites — some of which is on a relatively massive scale. The Byzantinist also has increasingly at his disposal an extremely important body of sphragistic materials — and also a number of administrative treatises and texts to flesh these out. For the early period, he has a superb collection of epigraphic materials, and for the early and middle periods, an extensive and wide-ranging sequence of legal codifications, thus permitting the evolution — amongst other things — of an extremely important prosopographical tool. Again for the early period, he has a huge corpus of papyrological materials, which cannot be discarded entirely on the grounds of its overwhelmingly Egyptian provenance, and therefore of its supposedly atypical nature. For the middle and later period, there also exists an increasing number of — with time — increasingly detailed monastic chartularies.
In addition to all this, the Byzantinist possesses a superb sequence of chronicles and narrative histories extending, virtually continuously, from one end of Byzantine history to the other. It is true that many of these histories have one major and obvious defect in common: that they were written in Constantinople, by Constantinopolitan-educated and/or based authors, for a limited Constantinopolitan audience. This inevitably tends to result in quite severe problems of conceptual interpretation: what has been well described as the ‘distorting mirror’ effect. Yet even here, many of them also have one major advantage: that they were written by emperors, by members of the imperial house, or by senior figures in the imperial court or administration — in other words, not only by ecclesiastics, whether metropolitan or regional (although the former, at least, also figure notably), but also by an educated laity with at least a theoretical, and often a widely exercised, access to secular sources other than their own personal experience or hearsay. It is also true that many of these histories have not received modern editing, and still have to be consulted in nineteenth-century or even earlier editions. This is frequently the subject of complaint, the strong implication being that nothing can really be done until the situation has been rectified: once again, the Principle of Unripe Time. But Byzantium has in no way a monopoly of this situation, and yet progress is made elsewhere, for example in the western early mediaeval field. The doctrine of the establishment of a pure text as a pre-condition for serious work (a pre-condition that is never fulfilled, as each generation finds reason for dissatisfaction with a text), strongly resembles, and is probably derived from, the dead hand of classical studies of a now (fortunately) almost extinct type. It may be suggested that the sooner the doctrine expires in Byzantine studies the better: with some few exceptions, it is most unlikely that many fundamental historical discoveries will derive from such re-editing, the price of the results in any case being now frequently so high as to render them available in specialist libraries only, thus at least in part nullifying their undoubtedly greater convenience, and ironically representing to some extent a reversion to the mediaeval situation.
It may thus again be suggested that what the Byzantinist interested in the study of coinage and money lacks in some aspects of his material is compensated, or is more than compensated, for in what is available in others.
This series of preliminary studies, then, represents an attempt to take as full an advantage as is possible of these many and varied sources of information, or at least of as many of them as seem currently necessary, in laying down what are intended to be the foundations for the further and more detailed study of the Byzantine monetary economy. It thus proceeds from the very general, the basic geography of settlement and society, to the very particular, the coinage itself, with the three elements involved forming a pyramid: settlement and society being the base, and coinage the apex.
It may be thought that I have wandered far from the customary or even proper preserve of the numismatist, in discussing such questions as erosion, predominant forms of land-use, and twelfth~ and thirteenth-century frontiers — and so, perhaps, I have. But the nature of the basic resources of the economy, the areas in which these resources were concentrated, the methods by which ~ and the degree to which — they were exploited, and the effect that the possession, gain or loss of these areas might or did have upon the finances of the state, and upon its ability to carry out its traditional functions, are all questions of perfectly legitimate concern even to the numismatist in a narrow sense, let alone to the numismatic scholar interested in a rather wider context. And if questions like this have not so far been treated in any detail, or treated in a satisfactory fashion, by the historian, then there is nothing for it but for the numismatist vo attempt to do it for him.
There is indeed an impeccable case in logic, and of a more directly numismatic nature, for extending the scope of the enquiry so as to encompass such topics as mentioned above. As also implied or mentioned above, it is quite clear that the late Roman and Byzantine coinage was, in a very direct sense, a fiscal instrument, that is, pertaining to the revenue and expenditure of the state. It is equally clear that the state obtained the vast bulk of its revenue from land and its exploitation, the precise balance between land and other sources of revenue obviously being likely to have varied over the course of its history.
The nature of the land involved, and both the degree to which and the way in which it was exploited, all become of even more direct relevance to the issue in hand than is implied by this connected sequence of general statements when it is also realised that the accentuated physical structure of the land together with its concomitant characteristics are likely to have entailed equally accentuated patterns of coin-use amongst the public: it is scarcely likely that a pattern of coin-use characterising the coastal plain of Anatolia will have been repeated on the central plateau of that peninsula; and it is scarcely more likely that a pattern of coin-use obtaining in a town or city ofsome relative size — wherever it may have been — will have also penetrated very far into its dependent territory.
For all these reasons, the broad scope that has been adopted in this enquiry into the Byzantine monetary economy becomes desirable or even necessary.
It may also be thought that the whole project is over-ambitious. But at least for the strictly numismatic element, the time is in fact particularly propitious. The recent past has seen the publication of catalogues of the greater parts of two major collections of Byzantine coins: those in Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, and in the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris.
In addition to these, the publication of a ‘systematic’ classification and arrangement of the series in the German language has also commenced. The attribution, classification and arrangement of Byzantine coins has not reached its ultimate with these publications: they will doubtless be superseded in due course, just as they have themselves superseded publications (such as that of the collection of the British Museum in London, and the Ratto sale catalogue) that have long been published.
They do nevertheless provide, for the first time, what has every appearance of being a broadly representative assemblage of the series, arranged with a logical consistency, suggesting that the basic structure of the original whole has now been established. This should in itself bring closer, perhaps even inaugurate, the stage at which the study of Byzantine coins can be usefully supplemented and extended by the study of Byzantine coinage, and even by that of the Byzantine monetary economy.
The project therefore may well be ambitious, but it should not — in theory at least — be over-ambitious. This, of course, in no way guarantees the actual success of the particular enterprise, which will in any case be the subject of criticism and correction by others and of constant revision by myself.
Two particular criticisms that I do anticipate are that, on the one hand, I have paid insufficient attention to the many hagiographical writings and vitae that are available, and that, on the other, I have paid overmuch attention to the monetary figures that are found from time to time in casual contexts and sources. Both features are quite deliberate, although in point of fact I have neither rigorously excluded hagiographical sources, nor have I placed particular reliance on any single monetary figure.
It is frequently supposed that the occasional mention of coins, coinage, or monetary transactions in hagiographical sources denotes the existence and operation of a monetary economy. This, in any modern sense (that in which it is normally quite carelessly used), is inevitably suspect. But in any case, individually, such mentions mean very little: many or most are of such a general nature as to have no particular context or application.
For example, they normally indicate nothing of the commonness or rarity of the coins involved; or of the ease or difficulty with which they were obtained; or of the methods by which they were obtained. Even collectively, they are of little or no greater value or application: all the other forms of evidence suggest that the availability and use of coin was subject to such wide extremes of variation according to time, place and particular circumstances as to render any generalisation derived from what one might term crudely the totting up of particular hagiographical cases to be virtually meaningless.
This is not to suppose that such mentions cannot, or will never, be of usc, but much more work needs to be carried out on the question of when, where, by whom, and for whom, such sources were written, and on the problems inherent in their utilisation, before they can at all usefully be employed in this way. Whatever the solutions, they are unlikely to be simple, or capable of general application.
They cannot, in any case, be compared in reliability or significance with the relatively extensive and detailed accounts of monetary behaviour that are occasionally to be found in imperial laws or narrative histories, where such accounts have a particular context, and where they are capable of insertion into a structure capable of independent verification. For all these reasons, I have tended to utilise hagiographical sources only where their evidence can be shown to conform with that of other kinds of sources: in other words, in a basically passive and supportive réle, rather than in an active and assertive one.
The unreliability of mediaeval figures, whether military or monetary, is notorious, and indeed almost universally acknowledged amongst historians, with perhaps the partial exception of Byzantinists, amongst whom at least one scholar has argued for the reliability of a particular figure on the grounds that it is so precise and odd as to be unlikely simply to have been made up.
I would in fact argue for the absolute reliability of very few indeed of the individual figures that I have quoted. Those given by Justinian for the salaries of the various officials dealt with in his legislation are, except where obviously textually corrupt, exceptions to this general rule. Those given by Constantine Porphyrogenitus for the costs of the Cretan expeditions of 911/12 and 949 are also to be counted as exceptions, for Constantine was in an excellent position to obtain the official accounts from which they do indeed appear to have been derived.
Occasionally, figures can be cross-checked, and where found coincident are likely to be correct (except, of course, where both are clearly derived from a common secondary source). The figure given by Nicetas Choniates for the compensation awarded the Venetians as a result of the confiscations of 1171 is actually also given in official Byzantine—Venetian sources, and again Nicetas was in an exccllent position to have or to obtain the information. The figures given by Ramon Muntaner for the pay-scales of the members of the Catalan expedition of 1303-5 are, when multiplied out, virtually identical with the global ones given by George Pachymeres. And so on.
On several occasions the authors who give the figures claim to be relying on official sources, but it is difficult to be sure whether invariably they indeed were, or whether mainly at least one is here in the presence of a literary topos. Even so, the accumulation of'a sequence of individually unverifiable figures for a particular class of function, whether it be the reserves amassed by individual emperors, the costs of military expeditions, the building and decoration of churches, or the revenue and expenditure of monasteries, can be collectively of interest and significance when compared with, say, a similar sequence composed of figures for provincial revenues or private fortunes.
At the very least, each individual figure ought, when evolved, to have been subject to what one might call ‘a threshold of expectation or plausibility’, however elastic that threshold might be at any particular time, and however much it might change over a period of time. What one is obtaining here, therefore, is a range of figures which may demonstrate some tendency to change over a period of time, but in which any component figure that jars egregiously, either over the range as a whole, or within a particular chronological section of the range, and which cannot be confirmed or explained independently, is automatically suspect. In other words, what is important is not the individual figures, but the general pattern.
As it happens, to take two examples only, the figures for imperial reserves, and those for the costs of military expeditions, are almost all acceptable within their own range. That given by Nicetas for the Italian expedition of 1155/6 does seem high, but may include the considerable political expenditure that is known to have been involved. What emerges unambiguously from a comparison between the two ranges is that in the case of any large or even relatively large expedition on the scale of the Vandal expedition of 468, the Italian expedition of 1155/6, or the Catalan (i.e. anti-Ottoman) expedition of 1303-5, the funds spent must have equalled or even surpassed a whole year’s imperial revenue.
Lesser expeditions, not involving the full resources of the empire, cost correspondingly less, but even here comparison shows that they must have been extremely burdensome. From the outsider’s point of view it may be supposed that a disproportionate amount of scholarly effort has to be put into proving what should, in any case, be basic and considered obvious, and this may indeed be so — except that in practice it does not seem to have been either much commented upon, or by many considered obvious.
Two further criticisms that I also anticipate are that I have failed to use the available physical evidence — particularly the coins, whether casual single finds or hoards, or site~finds — when dealing with such matters as monetary circulation, and that I have not drawn a sufficiently sharp distinction between the various periods into which Byzantine history is customarily divided, when following through the various basic topics treated in the course of the work. Again, both features are deliberate, although again I have neither ignored the physical evidence where it has appeared. necessary to an individual case, nor have I by any means automatically assumed that evidence for one period is necessarily valid for another.
What I have attempted to do in this series of preliminary studies is, in as far as it is possible, to set up a basic and independent structure, within which the physical evidence (much of which possesses very severe evidential limitations) is capable of being assessed and analysed, and against which the various bands or phases of continuity or discontinuity are capable of being defined and synthesised. These latter aims remain to be realised in a further series of studies.
Finally, it seems to have become accepted that numismatic works dealing with the Byzantine empire should commence with the reign of Anastasius I (491-518) and, more particularly, with the reform of the copper coinage initiated by his comes sacrarum largitionum John the Paphlagonian in 498.
The choice of this point of departure is generally accompanied by an acknowledgement of its arbitrary nature, for while Anastasius or his comes undoubtedly did carry through reforms both in the coinage system in particular and in the fiscal system in general, the overall structure of neither thereby underwent fundamental change. The dilemma therefore remains: where to start?
It has increasingly come to seem to the author that, while it is entirely proper for a catalogue of Byzantine coins to commence with the Anastasian reform ~ if only on the grounds that a start has to be made somewhere, or that an earlier date would involve the inclusion of a vast extra mass of material, or that it did at least mark a visually obvious change — there is much less excuse for a treatment of the coinage or monetary economy doing likewise. It will be stressed in the seventh chapter of this book that the production of coinage was influenced above all by the needs and organisational structure of contemporary fiscal administration.
If the question arises as to when the fiscal administration typifying the early Byzantine empire took shape, or at least becomes evident to modern scholarship, then there really can be no other answer than during the reign of Diocletian (284-305). It should be noted, incidentally, that on this kind of consideration, the foundation and dedication of Constantinople by Constantine I (306~37) assumes a position of secondary importance only: it was for long not the sole eastern capital, and was for even longer administratively anomalous — more anomalous, indeed, than Rome itself.
The alternative to the implications of this last major point seems the drastic one of considering the empire to have evolved into a form that is recognisably ‘Byzantine’ only as a result of the upheavals marking the seventh century. The case for such a division is, on the face of it, a strong one, for the empire that emerged into the relative light of the eighth and ninth centuries was undeniably a very different one from that which had disappeared into the certain darkness of the seventh.
Why, then, take the reign of Diocletian as the point of departure rather than that, say, of Leo III (717-41)? There is no completely satisfactory answer. The reigns of these two emperors do indeed appear less arbitrary choices than most or all the others, for it is arguable that both marked a change, or perhaps rather the culmination ofa series of changes, in the east, in a way that the division of the empire between Arcadius (395-408) and Honorius (395~—423) in 395/6, or the gradual disintegration of the western half of the empire in the fifth century, did not.
The situation is, naturally, not quite so simple: just as features of the reigns of Gallienus or Aurelian are now as a matter of chic seen as pre-figuring those of the reign of Diocletian, so there are good reasons for believing features of the reign of Heraclius (610-41) to have pre-figured those of the reign of Leo III. Having abandoned the choice of the reign of Anastasius on the grounds of its arbitrary nature, one is then apparently confronted with a similar choice between those of Diocletian and Leo III.
There is, however, an important difference: which is that they do in fact provide almost equally viable points of departure, and in such circumstances the personal preference of the author may perhaps be permitted decisive weight. To commence with the reign of Leo III would be to forgo the use of earlier primary sources that, despite the changes mentioned above, still appear to have validity for, and relevance to, the later period.
It would also be to omit the greater part of one of the most fascinating of all Byzantine numismatic phenomena: the process by which the coinage system and pattern of coin production reflecting the economic conditions and fiscal structure typical of the late Roman and early Byzantine period evolved into those typical of the developed Byzantine empire. The responsibility for which process is to be divided, as it happens, between Heraclius and Leo III.
The reign of Diocletian will therefore form the point of departure for this book. Coverage of the earlier period will perhaps be spasmodic, and will certainly be weighted towards the east, but the attempt will at least have been made. The attempt will itself have been made immeasurably easier by the still relatively or even very recent publication of several of the appropriate volumes of Roman Imperial Coinage. Whether it will be considered to have proved a worthwhile experiment, and to have resulted in a novel perspective, remains to be seen.
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