A Companion to Latin Greece

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chapter 7

Money and Currency in Medieval Greece

Julian Baker

To the memory of Anastasios Tzamalis

Introduction: Definition and Method of a Monetary History

The subject matter of this study is money, which may be defined as a measure
of value with which wealth is stored and exchanged. Much of the money avail-
able in medieval Greece, as with most pre-modern societies, was represented
by minted coinage (“currency”). Medieval Greece was a highly monetised soci-
ety, in the sense that a large percentage of the population handled and used
coins in a variety of ways on a regular basis. Arguably more money, that is to
say more higher value coins, and perhaps even more coins in general, were
available in medieval Greece than in earlier Byzantine times or during the
early modern period, and coins may have changed hands more frequently. On
the other hand, credit, which was very significant in parts of the contemporary
medieval West, though known in medieval Greece,1 would have played virtu-
ally no role there in increasing the money supply, and most importantly would
not have been able to alleviate the later medieval bullion crisis. Also the roles
played by metals other than coins as currency (ingots, tokens, jettons) would
have been negligible, while plate, jewellery, and the like, could function as stor-
age of wealth but less so as currency, and these are known especially from wills
rather than from the material record.2 This essay is therefore to a large extent
concerned with coinage.
The numismatic data offer the modern observer a sample of this coin-
age. This evidence has a number of aspects: issues and their denominations
and designs (“types”) are known from the extant specimens, which are kept
in public and private collections, sold at auction, or freshly found in the soil.
These coins can be subjected to different analyses, epigraphic, iconographic,
stylistic, or metallurgical, or through the original dies which produced them

1 See the contribution of David Jacoby to the present volume.
2 For some Byzantine sources in this regard, see Maria Parani, “Byzantine Jewellery: The
Evidence from Byzantine Legal Documents,” in Intelligible Beauty: Recent Research on
Byzantine Jewellery, ed. Chris Entwistle and Noël Adams (London, 2010), pp. 186–92.