Money And Currency In Medieval Greece 219
silver grossi, and Venetian and Florentine gold coinages. The impact of Ottoman
coins remains, on the other hand, difficult to measure and may have been mar-
ginal until quite late in the period under consideration, even in the northern and
eastern parts of the Aegean. Apart from these general trends, the lands border-
ing on the Aegean Sea can be divided into three distinctive monetary spheres.
The east (Anatolia), which includes the islands of the Dodecanese, Chios, and
Lesbos, was eventually marked by the usage of Rhodian-Neapolitan, Genoese
colonial, and beylik coins. In the north (Macedonia and Thrace) the monetary
system continued to revolve around Byzantine issues, now of the Palaiologan
emperors, supplemented by those of the Serbian and Bulgarian states. The
monetary system in the west (central Greece, the Peloponnese, the Cycladic
islands, Crete), the area which may be termed Greece proper (“Hellas”), was
initially marked by imported European coins, then by indigenous coins of the
same western tradition, and finally Venetian colonial coins. Between central
Greece and Macedonia lie intermittent areas, namely Epirus and Thessaly.
Thessaly is altogether badly documented and would be marginal to any mone-
tary history as far as the evidence currently stands, but has been included here
since it was closest in character to central Greece. The monetary developments
in the Ionian region between the Gulf of Corinth and the city of Durazzo, and
further north, have been relatively well studied. This area belonged essentially
to both of the monetary spheres which have been described, the Greek and
the Macedonian, while partaking also in a third monetary region which may
be termed “Dalmatian”, centred on the cities of Ragusa and Cattaro, but also
very heavily dominated by the Serbian and Venetian empires. A part of Epirus
should be included in the present discussion because it was a primary area
of Greek denier tournois circulation, contributing after a certain point (later
1320s/early 1330s) to this coinage with the important issue from the Arta mint
in the name of John ii Orsini. It would, however, make sense to include Epirus
only up to a certain geographical limit, roughly speaking to the line between
the cities of Valona and Berat, thereby limiting ourselves to the confines of
what contemporaries would have termed Romania, beyond which lay Albania
and Sclavonia.5 The period and area which have been delineated for this article
will in its further course be referred to as “medieval Greece”.
5 Alain Ducellier, La façade maritime de l’Albanie au moyen âge: Durazzo et Valona du xie au xve
siècle (Thessalonica, 1981), xiii; Oliver Jens Schmitt, Das venezianische Albanien (1392–1479)
(Munich, 2001), p. 49, n. 6.