Ninth & Tenth Centuries: The Byzantines Never Got A Break
Ihad a customer who had built a pretty good Roman Imperial people collection. A coin for every emperor and family member. He sold it to me. It was pretty complete; he was missing about five people.
He also had a Byzantine collection. He called it his Romaion collection, which was technically a better name, seeing as that’s what they called themselves. They tended to speak Greek rather than Latin. He was missing about thirteen people. I went looking for them for him. I couldn’t find them at all.
We’re marching through the Byzantine Empire period of Turkish history, which is appropriate because that’s what Turkey was for a thousand years. We think of them as different from the Romans, but they didn’t. They thought they were the Roman Empire, continued. The Turks were not yet on the scene. They were still over in Central Asia.
It’s useful, I think, to remember that the Byzantine Emperors behaved substantially like the ancient monarchs all behaved. They liked their rule to be as absolute as they could manage, though it never really was, there being always other interests that had to be appeased. Wars, whether of necessity or choice, were the norm rather than the exception and were always more expensive than they were intended to be.
Now, back then, there was no paper money. Due bills went back and forth, but everything had to be eventually settled in gold, silver, or copper. You packed it up, put it on draft animals, and hauled it over mostly dirt paths to wherever it was supposed to go. The cost of the armed guards at the higher transaction ranges was a normal business expense.
I started writing this particular article about the ninth and tenth centuries of Turkiye, I mean, Byzantium, I mean, the later Roman Empire, as it was back then. There were emperors, one after another. They did stuff, some good, some bad, and engaged in wars with neighbors, some they won, some they lost. They engaged in various repressions at home or didn’t. There were plots, rebellions and coups. Just like back in the Pagan days of what we think of as the Roman Empire.
Pretty much all Byzantine history was like that. There was no century of peace and prosperity like the Antonine period of the old Roman Empire.
I was going to give thumbnail characterizations of these reigns, and then describe their coinage, as I’ve been doing, one emperor after another. But then I noticed something.
From the eighth through the middle of the tenth century the coinage in general displayed a certain set of characteristics.
Bronze, silver, and gold coins were made. Quantities were generally small, some smaller than others. There were large mintages for the earliest Byzantine Emperors: the Justins, Justinian, Maurice, etc. Those somewhat later emperors, all operating under less than optimum conditions, spending more money than they were taking in, made fewer coins.
They did keep their weight and fineness standards for the most part. Bronze size was somewhat variable, being made for the local market. The Sicilian bronzes were always smaller than the Constantinopolitan bronzes.
The silver coins were only struck in small quantities, almost entirely in Constantinople, and often for some commemorative reason, the investiture of someone, or the birth of someone, maybe.
The gold coins, well, we just don’t find that many of them. If you want common Byzantine gold coins, you’ll be looking at previous centuries, Constans II and earlier. The gold coins of the ninth and tenth centuries were mainly made for display, I think, or presentation. Here I am, says the emperor, here is my heir and co-emperor.
A lot of the coins of this period, in all metals, are found in high grade. That means they didn’t circulate. Someone got them, put
them in the ground, and never came back to get them. That’s where all ancient coins we see today come from.
What were they using for gold transactions, then? Probably coins of the previous century. Maybe Arab gold coins. The Arab gold coins were mostly the same weight as the Byzantines, and sometimes, and in some places, there were more of them around.
Bulgaria, another big player of the time, didn’t make any gold coins. The Byzantines sometimes made “tribute” payments in gold. The government kept all of it. Bulgarian merchants who needed gold had to get it from the Byzantines.
There is a famous bronze coin. Emperor Michael III (“the Drunkard”) received an insult from the Pope in Rome. The Pope said, “The Emperor is a barbarian. He doesn’t even know Latin.” Michael’s reply was to make a (cheap) bronze follis with legends all in Latin. Take that, Pope! It is a very rare coin. He probably had it made just to show the Pope. A few extra to give to some friends. A few have made it to our time.
Whenever a new emperor was installed, there’d be gold coins made by way of announcement. The equivalent, back then, of a press release. The thing is, during the ongoing military emergencies of the ninth and tenth centuries there got to be less and less in the treasury, so there were fewer coins made as the economy declined.
Generally speaking, then, the emperors of the ninth and tenth centuries made gold, silver, and bronze coins, from Constantinople and Sicily and the Italian mainland, when they had those places, and all of them are scarce and rare. I’ve had only a few in my decades of numismatic activity.
We had left off last time with Michael II, who had been brought in chains from prison to be enthroned as emperor in 820 A.D. There was an immediate rebellion by a guy, Thomas the Slav, who took most of Anatolia and besieged Constantinople before his defeat in 823 A.D.
Seeing that Michael was distracted, the Arabs (two different governments) took Crete and began activities in Sicily that eventually led to its conquest entire in 902 A.D.
Despite the generally bad situation, Michael II began a reform of the military which brought some stability to the Empire in subsequent decades. He died in 829 A.D. of kidney failure.
Theophilus, son of Michael, who had been co-emperor with his father, Michael II, became sole emperor. He ruled for twelve years and a few months. There was war all the time. He had to fight the Abbasid Caliph Al-Ma’mun in Anatolia, at the same time as the Aghlabids of North Africa in Sicily. There was back and forth with the Bulgarians, Serbs, etc. They had been, as we think of it, generically “Slavs” a century earlier. In the ninth century, various Slav groups were starting to develop separate kingdoms.
Theophilus, though his wars were back and forth, won some and lost some until he died aged 30 in 842 A.D. Last of the iconoclast emperors. He got sick, which was a “good” end for an emperor, so many were assassinated or violently overthrown.
Theophilus’ son, Michael, had been named co-emperor at the age of one year. The kid was two when he was made emperor. There had to be a regent, and that was his mother, Theodora.
Fifteen years into his reign, Michael arranged a conspiracy that overthrew the regency. and he began ruling on his own. Wars between Byzantium and the Arabs, not to ignore the Bulgarians, continued, with the usual mixed results.
Michael III got in about 11 years as sole emperor. Circumstances brought a guy, Basil, into the picture. Basil was a courtier who became the second most important person in the Empire. Then Basil murdered Michael and had himself crowned Emperor.
Out there in the rest of the world, people in Scandinavia were experiencing some excess population and were developing a trend of younger sons banding together to go “Viking” around in boats. They’d go attack someplace convenient, like France or England, do some looting and enslaving, and retreat. Or they’d go trading maybe, including on the rivers of what is now Russia, Ukraine and Poland.
Some would get to Constantinople, where they could get mercenary work. The Byzantines called them “Varangians” and esteemed them as soldiers.
Some of the Scandinavian settlements on the rivers of Eastern Europe developed into hybrid cultural and political entities. One of them developed into the polity that became known as Kievan Rus, which became a power on the level of Bulgaria and Byzantium.
East of Kievan Rus, and north of Bulgaria, was Khazaria. The Khazars were Turks, who became Jewish, or at least the rulers did. Khazaria was a major force in the region for several centuries. We used
to think they hadn’t made any coins, but now we tend to think they probably did. Rare, though, and the attribution of those non-Islamic coins with Arabic legends is not at this time fully settled.
Even farther afield, over in what is now Xinjiang in China, Turkish tribes had provoked a reaction from the Tang Dynasty. Chinese troops whomped the Turks good. There was some flight of Turks westward. There may have been an extended drought as well.
A chain reaction of westward movement began. If the Turks were a river, the river started rising. In subsequent centuries the movement would become a flood that overcame locals from Afghanistan to Anatolia.
But in the ninth-century Byzantine territories, they weren’t worrying about the Turks yet. They were worrying about Arabs and Slavs.
Basil I, after murdering his predecessor, ruled for nineteen
years. Among other things, he systematized and augmented the Code of Justinian, creating a legal framework that endured essentially until the end of the Byzantine Empire.
We could ask why the people of Byzantium accepted the murderer of their old emperor as their new emperor. We have to assume that the Byzantines didn’t like Michael III much. A decent administrator, it seems, but not great, and he had problematic aspects to his private life that he did not hide in public.
Basil, in contrast, ruled as a sincere Christian and came to be appreciated for being fair and keeping promises. Still, he did arrange the murder of his predecessor. He died of complications from injuries sustained in a hunting accident.
His successor, Leo VI, had been his least favorite child, jailed for a while by his father. There were rumors that Leo was a son of
Michael, not of Basil, who had arranged Michael’s murder. Michael had been having a long-term affair with the woman he had convinced Basil to marry. So there was a plausible story to go with the rumors.
Leo VI, 886-912 A.D. That’s twenty-six years. He became emperor at the age of twenty, which was fully adult back then. Afterward, they called him “the Wise.” He had enough time to get something done, you’d think. But there were the usual domestic intrigues and foreign military ventures, some born of necessity, others of willfulness.
At the time there was a prohibition on third marriages, even if the second wife had died. Leo went ahead and married a third wife anyway, then a fourth. The Church Elders made him put a law into the Code that fourth marriages would be henceforth illegal. Then he went and died and his brother Alexander, who had been co-emperor for more than a decade, became sole ruler.
We think of this time as the Dark Ages, which might have been the case to some degree in Europe, but they of course didn’t think so. They thought they were getting by, dealing with stuff day by day as things developed.
Alexander died after thirteen months. He was followed by
Constantine VII, 913-59 A.D. Son of Leo VI, Constantine was made co-emperor at the age of two and was briefly the sole emperor at the age of eight. The government was run by a Regency Council until 920 A.D. when one of the Regents was made Senior co-emperor as Romanus I. Romanus dominated until Constantine arranged a coup in 945. Constantine named his son, also named Romanus, co-emperor.
We’ve grown up with stories of powerful families fighting with each other in fictional TV shows. The Byzantine Empire was the ground from which all our dynastic melodramas proceeded. Any good deed that managed to get done was accomplished in a milieu of generalized warfare and family strife.
The last gold solidi were made in the time of Constantine
VII and Romanus I. The change to the gold coinage was kind of momentous. The state finances had finally reached a point where the government had to start squeezing the rich people. Messing with the gold was the way they did that back then.
We’ll talk about chickens coming home to roost next time. Oh, and the Crusades.