There was a major coinage reform in 491 A.D., and we, numismatists and historians in general, kind of take Emperor Anastasius's reign as the start of the Byzantine era. He thought of himself as the Roman Emperor, and so did all his successors in that line of rulers.
There are descendants of the last Byzantine Emperor. They represent themselves as the heirs of the Roman Empire, never mind that they have no territory. As far as they’re concerned, Istanbul belongs to them, or, I suppose, the entire Roman Empire at its greatest extent. If they could somehow get it back, they would have “deserved” it, by ancient right.
So Zeno, the last “Roman” Roman Emperor, died. He was the one who had responded to the deposition by Odoacer of the last Western Roman Emperor, Romulus, by appointing that same Odoacer as Magister Militum in Italy. There was nothing else to do.
Zeno had a reign of problems. The Roman government at that time was a mostly functional bureaucracy, with criminals of various kinds killing each other at the top. They would persecute and kill their enemies and jockey for power. Meanwhile, the bureaucracy would keep things going as best it could.
There was a rebellion hatched by his Imperial mother-in-law, Verina, which drove him out of Constantinople in 475 A.D. (the year before the deposition of Romulus in the West).
While Zeno was gone, the rebels fell on each other. One of them, Basiliscus, got properly positioned long enough to quash the others. Zeno played politics and war and outflanked them all. It took about a year. In another year, Zeno had cornered and eliminated all his visible remaining potential opponents.
The Western Empire fell while Zeno was dealing with that rebellion, so he was not able to do anything about the West. By the time he could have done something, it had already happened.
There was more trouble throughout Zeno’s reign until his death in 491 AD. His wife, Ariadne, selected Anastasius to succeed him. She later married him to improve his claim to the opinions of the Empire's “important” people.
Anastasius was a civil servant. He worked in finance and was good at it. He came to the throne in his 60s. In his twenty-seven-year reign, he reformed the tax system, abolishing payment in kind and requiring they be paid in cash. Embezzlement became harder. A surplus was generated, the first in a long time. There was gold in the vaults. Successors would do things with that gold.
When he died in 518 A.D., there were no children. The captain of his guards, Justin, became emperor. There are different stories regarding how that succession came about. Justin was made emperor at the age of 68, even older than Anastatius had been. He ruled for about nine years.
In 526 A.D., a big earthquake destroyed Antioch. Justin sent funds for rebuilding. The rebuilt city was renamed Theopolis (God City) for a while. Justin died the following year.
About the Coins
The first few years of the Anastasius coinage were the last years of the old system. There were gold solidi and tremissi, of average availability today, and semissi, which are pretty rare. There were silver miliarenses, siliquae, and half siliquae, rare. And there were tiny bronze nummi, also rare.
Gold Anastasius coins are not impossible to find, but they are not as common as those of some of the later emperors. His silver and pre-reform bronze are rare.
In 498 A.D., a reform of the minor coins was implemented. Silver disappeared. There was plenty of silver in Persia but pretty much none in Byzantium. Bronze was issued in four denominations: 40 nummi (we call them follis, and they were relatively large coins), 20 nummi, 10 nummi, and 5 nummi. The denominations were indicated by letters in the standard Greek number system: M was 40, K was 20, I was 10, and E was 5.
Bronze coins were popular and circulated widely. They have been found deep into Central Asia and tend to be worn.
Mints for Anastasius were Constantinople, Thessaloniki, Nicomedia in Anatolia, and Antioch.
Emperor Justin I's coinage continued the module of the Anastasian reforms. The bronze coin types were essentially the same. The gold coins were almost the same, except that a few years into the reign, the reverse type of the gold, which had been a Pagan Victory, became a Christian angel. Both were winged beings. Victory had a high-waisted gown. The angel had a tunic. Little details, but the government was telling the world that it was more Christian than ever.
In addition to the Anastasian mints, Justin’s coins were made in Cyzicus, Alexandria, and Cherson on the Black Sea.
Justin elevated his nephew, Justinian, to be co-emperor for a few months in 527 A.D., just before he died. The two of them show up on some of the coinage of those months, though some of the joint-reign coins have a single portrait with the two names in the obverse legend. Quite a few of those right-facing portrait early Byzantine coins are so worn that there’s no obverse legend at all.
I’d say that the Justin and Justinian coins, at least the bronzes, are scarce rather than rare. If that is so, they must have made a lot of them in those few months. As if they were trying to tell the people in the streets what the plan was.
Justinian, when he became sole emperor, ruled for thirty-nine eventful years. He started with plenty of money. Those funds he used to attempt to take back the former Roman territories in Spain, North Africa, and Mesopotamia. In these massive military ventures, he was partially successful. He retook Rome and most of Italy, southern Iberia, and most of coastal North Africa, bringing the Byzantine Empire to its greatest territorial extent.
Justinian’s attempts against the Sasanids of Persia were generally inconclusive, ending with a peace treaty that included annual payments of a token amount of gold. Wikipedia mentions 400 or 500 pounds or 30,000 solidi. In international relations, that wasn’t much. Wikipedia also mentions an estimate of 300,000 pounds of gold for Justinian’s reconquest of Italy, which is probably a tenfold inflation of the actual cost, but still, 30,000 is a lot different from the 500 he was supposed to pay the Sasanids to keep them quiet.
The coinage of Justinian I was extensive and varied. Large quantities of some types have survived.
The mints were Constantinople, Thessaloniki, Cherson, Nicomedia, Cyzicus, Antioch/Theopolis, Alexandria, Carthage, Constantine in Numidia (now Algeria), Rome, Ravenna, several other mints in Italy and Sicily, and probably Spain.
The early Byzantine gold coins had portraits either facing or turned to the right, typically with a Victory becoming an angel on the reverse. Justinian’s gold continued those two portrait types with angel reverses.
There were a few silver coins made, apparently all at the Constantinople mint. All are rare.
There were stylistic changes in bronze. Facing portraits on the bronzes began in the joint reign period when facing busts or full-enthroned figures of the two Emperors were used. In Justinian’s sole coinage, facing a long bust in complex regalia became an ordinary feature of the bronze as they already were on the gold used at most of the mints. A follis of Theopolis shows the emperor’s full figure enthroned, facing, a motif that became common in subsequent reigns.
New denominations were added by various mints. In Thessaloniki, they made 3, 2, and 1 nummi coins. In Alexandria, they made odd denominations: 33, 12, 6, and 3 nummi. The odd denominations tend to be rare.
There was a time when slightly heavier folles were issued with large flans as wide as 40mm. Handsome coins, not too hard to find.
Some of the bronze coins have regnal years on them. This feature would become a fixture of the coinage through several subsequent reigns.
There also began to be a tendency toward sloppiness in manufacture, particularly of bronze. One starts to find weak spots, planchet flaws, and similar problems, especially in the smaller denominations.
They also tended to circulate for a long time, especially the smaller ones. It is not uncommon to find small bronzes so worn that there is no legible obverse legend, and we can’t tell if it is Anastasius, Justin I, or Justinian.
Justinian I died in 565 A.D. and was peacefully succeeded by his nephew, Justin II, who had previously been announced as the heir.
The expanded Empire of Justinian was very expensive to try to maintain. The treasury was rather depleted. At least there was peace on the eastern border.
Justin shut off the tribute his uncle had been paying to the Sasanids to keep them quiet. There was no money anyway, so they went to war again. Tied down in the East, Justin had no resources to deal with renewed hostile activity in the West.
What always happened was the Romans, as they lost power over their local commanders, accepted a formal if toothless suzerainty that meant, most days, that the local boss would do as he pleased and say he was doing it at the will of the emperor. If anyone asked the emperor, he’d mutter, “Yeah, what he said.”
Here’s a story. Justin stopped buying off the Avars in Pannonia, now Hungary. The Avars started preying on the Lombards, who left for sunny Italy, recently reconquered by the Byzantines. Well, Justin was involved with the Persians in the East and couldn’t do anything about the Lombards, and thus lost northern Italy to the Byzantines. Everything connected to everything else.
Turns out, this is where Turks start to come into the picture. Silk from China started to be a serious trade item, causing the Romans to spend gold. There were Turkic kingdoms in various places in Central Asia through which the caravans traveled. People on both sides thought that the Byzantines and Turks had a shared opponent and, therefore, reasons to discuss things together. That opponent was Sasanid Persia.
The Turks, of course, will show up more and more over time.
Justin and the Sogdian Kingdom discussed matters and arranged a trade route that went north around the Sasanids.
Justin seems not to have prospered in his doings. He adopted a general, Tiberius, and named him his successor. Then he abdicated, dying nine days later.
His wife, Sophia, was a powerful player in his reign. She shows up on the coinage.
Mints striking Justin II coins were Constantinople, Thessaloniki, Nicomedia, Cyzicus, Theopolis (Antioch), Alexandria, Carthage, Constantine, Ravenna, Rome, Sicily, and a couple of rare ones.
During the reign of Justin II, the gold coins pretty much kept to the norms of the previous reigns back to Anastasius a half-century before. There were some rare silver coins of Constantinople. Most of the bronzes have full figures of Justin and Sophia enthroned facing; there are a few showing busts only, and a few small, rare ones, from small mints, with the traditional right-facing portrait.
I used to get these batches of bronzes from the Middle East. I never knew exactly where they came from. They’d mostly have Byzantines and early Islamics. The late Roman batches were always separate, similar to when the Byzantine bronzes appeared, and they drove the tiny little “minimi” of the late Roman period out of circulation. All those “barbarous” coins were gone, replaced by the good-sized Byzantine stuff.
Byzantine batches used to be either early or middle period, or I’ll call them “later,” though not from the end of Byzantium. Those coins of the end are pretty rare.
“Early period” Byzantine coins could be characterized by full-weight (more or less) copper coins. I mean, an Anastasius follis is kind of the same size as a Phocas follis (we’ll get to him next time). But a follis of Heraclius is basically the same as the half follis of Justin II. So, the second period, which lasted for a while. Then, there was a restoration of the full-sized follis in the anonymous Christ coins, and the follis disappeared and was replaced by the quarter-sized tetarteron. Later for them.
Just to say now that the early Byzantine bronzes are, on the whole, fairly common, and that the most prolific mints were on what is now Turkish territory.
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