Money And Currency In Medieval Greece 221
metallurgical analyses.9 Later Byzantine numismatics specific to the Greek
area was slow to develop and began in a sense with the publication of a hoard
from Arta.10 Other monetary traditions which became relevant to medieval
Greece—Venetian, French royal and feudal, English, Chiot, and Serbian—
were by contrast well served with reasoned catalogues.11 By the time of World
War ii and its immediate aftermath some important bodies of excavation coins
had become available.12 The 1960s and 1970s saw a remarkable surge of activi-
ties by David Michael Metcalf, who worked on the typology, chronology, and
circulation of the main denier tournois series, looked at the production and
circulation of the petty denomination issues of Athens and Achaea, and wrote
also on the earlier phase of imported French tournois and English sterling pen-
nies. This attention to Latin-style coinages, combined with his parallel work on
coins of the Byzantine tradition (see below), laid the foundations for the Greek
chapters in his seminal book Coinage in the Balkans, later revised as Coinage
in South-Eastern Europe. Other names worth mentioning for these years are
those of Demetrios Artemis, Arthur Seltmann, and Drosos Kravartogiannos,
who published widely on finds and types of medieval Greek coins.
Michael Metcalf also investigated in great detail the Byzantine-style copper/
billon and gold coinages of the 12th/13th centuries, particularly from Greek
finds. This paved the way for the identification of very significant imitative and
counterfeit coinages, that is to say coinages which had in the past been consid-
ered to be of the Komnenian emperors, but which are now attributed to vari-
ous 13th-century authorities. The most significant contribution has been in this
respect Michael Hendy’s, who first postulated in 1969 the existence of large-
scale billon trachy emissions at Latin Constantinople and Thessalonica, and in
the second Bulgarian empire.13 Subsequent publications, particularly of Greek
9 By Anastasios Konstantinos Chrestomanos, “Ανάλυση αρχαίων νομισμάτων” [“Analysis of
Ancient Coins”], Journal international d’archéologie numismatique 8 (1905), 115–20.
10 Harold Mattingly, “A Find of Thirteenth-Century Coins at Arta in Epiros,” Numismatic
Chronicle ser. 5, 3 (1923), 31–46.
11 See the works of Nicolò Papadopoli Aldobrandini for Venice, Louis Ciani and Faustin
Poey d’Avant for France, L.A. Lawrence for England, Domenico Promis for Chios, and
Sime Ljubić for Serbia.
12 For Ancient Corinth, see the bibliography of Alfred Raymond Bellinger, Katherine M.
Edwards, and J.M. Harris. For the Athenian Agora, that of Josephine P. Shear and Margaret
Thompson. Sparta: Arthur Maurice Woodward. Eutresis: Hetty Goldman. Orchomenos in
Arcadia: Gustave Blum and André Plassart. Delphi: Ioannes Svoronos.
13 His original findings were largely repeated 30 years later in Michael F. Hendy, Alexios i
to Michael viii 1081–1261 (Washington dc, 1999) [= Alfred Raymond Bellinger and Philip