Money And Currency In Medieval Greece 237
considered Constantinopolitan, minted in all likelihood in the years just before
and/or after the conquest of the city by the army of the Fourth Crusade in April
- We must assume that Faithful Copies first came to Greece in the direct
wake of this event, carried there by the crusaders who had previously been in
receipt of this coinage from the last Byzantine and/or the first Latin authori-
ties in the city. It is nevertheless true that the large-scale hoarding of billon
trachea only occurred as the so-called Latin imitative issues, the next genera-
tion of imitative issues, came to be added to the mix, in the period after c.1205.
This Latin imitative coinage, and to a lesser extent the coinage of Theodore i
Laskaris at the Nicaea mint, embody a dramatic increase in coin production
and connectivity in and across the Balkans and Anatolia. It also augmented the
availability of monetary specie in our area. Nevertheless, this was a transient
development since after about 1210 the importance of Constantinople and of
Anatolia as a source of coinage decreased, and even the products of the new
Byzantine mint at Thessalonica (from 1224), which were available in somewhat
larger quantities than those of Nicaea, soon began to display rather mixed pat-
terns of importation and usage into Greece.
Within our area there were two instances of trachy production, as has
been described above. The first was a very discreet wave of counterfeits in the
Peloponnese just after 1204, perhaps in part related to the “Saronic Gulf Group”
of tetartera; the second was the Artan coinage of Michael ii. The next denomi-
nation in the Komnenian spectrum, the electrum trachy, was very prominent
in the documentary sources relating to parts of our area in the early years of
the 13th century, and in Epirus in particular, even though actual finds of such
coins, and of their silver trachy successors of the 13th century, are much less
abundant and largely confined to the conquest period itself. By contrast, there
is a large number of finds of 12th-century hyperpyra, which might suggest that
Greece was saturated with gold coinage by the time that the crusading armies
arrived, even if there is only one hoard (Mapsos 1991, near Corinth) to back
this up directly. Hyperpyron production increased once more at Nicaea dur-
ing the 1220s, with an immediate effect on the availability of that currency in
our area, as witnessed in the most valuable hoard of medieval Greece (Agrinio
1978/79: see also above). With the advent in the 1240s of gold issues in the
name of Emperor John iii Vatatzes produced at Latin Constantinople, hyper-
pyra became very common in Greece, and there was an increased instance of
hoarding, if in smaller quantities at any one time. The hyperpyron was very
seldom counterfeited in our area.
During the 11th and 12th century certain coins of western mintage had
already been available in Greece. These were on the one hand the typical thin
and light billon penny issues. The coins present in Greece came from a select