Money And Currency In Medieval Greece 223
tetartera of southern Greece dating to the 13th century have been known for a
long time, but more clearly defined only in the last years.18
The billon trachy coinages of the Byzantine successor states in Nicaea and
Thessalonica during the first half of the 13th century are comprehensively, if
not always entirely correctly, treated in the work of Hendy. The same consid-
ered also the rare but interesting trachea of the Byzantine Arta mint, although
his extremely conservative approach to what might and might not be accepted
as a genuine issue of that mint will necessitate revisions in the light of counter-
suggestions and the archaeological data.19 Whatever the precise identity
and number of types, the overall shape of the trachy coinage of Michael ii
Komnenos Doukas of Epirus at Arta (who ruled c.1236 to 1266–68) is now fairly
well understood. The coinage of the Palaiologan empire (post-1259/1261) has
also been treated with much more attention in recent decades, and the grand
synthesis in doc V offers a comprehensive overview.20 With regard to the bil-
lon trachea of Emperor Michael viii, a string of three to four Epirote hoards,
which have been the attention of Touratsoglou,21 are particularly noteworthy.
The other main discovery in late Byzantine coinage which affects medieval
18 See in the last instance Julian Baker and Alan Stahl, “Coinage and Money in the Morea
after the Fourth Crusade,” in Viewing the Morea: Land and People in the Late Medieval
Peloponnese, ed. Sharon Gerstel (Washington dc, 2013), pp. 153–84, and various contribu-
tors to the Argos conference in May 2011 (in respect to which see especially the sum-
mary given in Julian Baker and Mina Galani-Krikou, “Δυτικός μεσαίων στην Πελοπόννησο”
[“The Western Middle Ages in the Peloponnese”], in Το νόμισμα στη Πελοπόννησο. Πρακτικά
της ΣΤ ́Επιστημονικής Συναντήσης, Άργος 26–29 Μαίου 2011, [Coinage in the Peloponnese:
Proceedings of the Sixth Scientific Meeting, Argos 26–29 May 2011] (Athens, forthcoming).
19 The principal protagonists in this debate have been Simon Bendall, Manto Oikonomidou,
and Petros Protonotarios.
20 Philip Grierson, Michael viii to Constantine xi 1258–1453 (Washington dc, 1999) [= Alfred
Raymond Bellinger and Philip Grierson, eds., Catalogue of the Byzantine Coins in the
Dumbarton Oaks Collection and in the Whittemore Collection, 5]. See also Cécile Morrisson
and Simon Bendall, “Monnaies de la fin de l’empire byzantin à Dumbarton Oaks: Un cata-
logue de référence,” Revue Numismatique 157 (2001), 471–93.
21 Touratsoglou published both the Arta 1983 and the Ioannina hoards: the second of these
studies offers a synthesis which relies however on dates of concealment which are too
late (1274, instead of about a decade earlier). See Ioannes Touratsoglou, “Θησαυρός άσπρων
τραχέων 1983 από την Άρτα” [“The 1983 Hoard of Trachea from Arta”], Αρχαιολογικόν Δελτίον
36 (1981), A ́, 209–26; and idem, “Ο θησαυρός ‘Ιωαννίνων’ άσπρων τραχέων” [“The Ioannina
Hoard of Trachea”], Αρχαιολογικά Ανάλεκτα εξ Αθηνών 32–34 (1999–2001), 237–50.