Medieval Europe
Byzantium
For centuries the Byzantine Empire lay between the worlds of medieval Europe
and Islam, a crucial zone of influence and exchange as well as a great
civilization in its own right. Its coinage provided the model for the first independent
currencies of its neighbours and successors, while for over half a millennium the
gold solidus or nomisma, the bedrock of its monetary system, ruled supreme as
the principal trade coin of the Mediterranean world, the 'dollar of the Middle
Ages' as it has been called. It was also familiar as the bezant over a much wider
area across Europe and Asia. When Western kings wished to make religious offerings in gold coin, they used bezants.
This coinage, like that of Rome before it, probably owed its form to the
needs of the state rather than the interests of commerce. The constant
availability of a stable gold coinage enabled the state to function, accumulating cash
through taxation to pay for its standing army, civil servants, buildings,
ceremonials and foreign subsidies -the armies alone may have regularly absorbed over
half the state's income. The Byzantine state taxed and spent on an enormous
scale in comparison to contemporary western Europe. A land tax was the basis
of the system, and to pay it landowners sold their surplus produce -often to the
state itself to supply the army, the administration and the imperial post.
Taxation in gold coin, rather than in kind, simplified collection and
distribution, and also facilitated the building up of reserves of treasure. Treasure was
important because the Byzantine state was not able to have much recourse to
credit and loans -in a crisis the emperor had to look to his regalia, the Church or great magnates to tide him over.
While the gold coinage existed to fulfill the purposes of the state, it inevitably
played a role beyond that in daily life. Furthermore, supporting it were lesser
denominations, mostly in copper, which permitted smaller-scale monetary
transactions to occur. In any case, provision of such a coinage helped maximize
the state's holdings of treasure: taxes had to be paid in gold, but the state could
make payments (including change out of gold offered for tax) in copper.
Initially there was a range of smaller gold and copper coins, though from the
mid-eighth century the only lesser coin normally available was the copper follis.
Intermediate silver coinages were only periodically provided, though the
milaresion (1/12 nomisma) was in reasonable supply in the ninth and tenth centuries. In
general the empire remained predominantly agricultural and rural, and, outside
Constantinople and a few other centres, trade would have been confined to
agricultural produce or low-level dealings and was probably highly seasonal.
Merchants were of low status and subject to state regulation. The relative lack
of low-level coinage between the seventh and twelfth centuries suggests a restricted urban economy.
|