Money And Currency In Medieval Greece 239
data and contradictory pieces of documentary evidence. The relationship of
the grosso to the other two currencies is also not entirely clear. The deniers
tournois experienced an impressive rise in stature in Greece during the first
decades of the 13th century, thanks to a succession of abbatial (St. Martin of
Tours), royal and finally feudal issues (Provence, Poitou, Toulouse) in France.
In parallel with this development, there was also an increase in the appear-
ance of grossi, and a relative decrease in the availability of sterlings. With the
advent of new generations of French tournois a natural relationship between
the grosso and the tournois of 1:8 may have stabilised. By mid-century, to judge
by hoards and stray finds alike, western coins established themselves firmly
beside coins of the Byzantine tradition in Greece, although they were handled
and used differently and to a large extent separately, and neither grossi nor
deniers tournois managed to cover the entire analysed territory in an even
manner.
In the 1240s and 1250s Athens and Achaea minted the petty denomination
issues which have already been described. They mark a curious interlude in the
monetary history of Greece because, although produced in large quantities and
intensively used for about a decade, they were seldom hoarded, and even more
rarely together with any of the other coinages which were in contemporary
circulation. Another anomalous coinage was minted in or conceived for the
territories under discussion in exactly these years: these were billon trachea
produced in a western style in the name of King Manfred of Hohenstaufen,
which have again been discussed above.
For the second half of the 13th century the evidence for the persistence of
coins of the Byzantine tradition in Greece is sporadic. Especially in urban con-
texts such as Athens, Corinth, Argos, and Thebes, the 12th-century tetarteron
coinage was still widely used. Tetartera might still have been counterfeited
in places such as Elis or Athens. It is also possible that certain much earlier
billon trachea—such as small module Latin Imitatives—were still available
in Greece, especially if a connection with the minting of petty denomination
issues, in terms of concept or bullion used, can be proven. Before the advent
of the Palaiologan dynasty and the re-conquest of Constantinople (1259/61),
Thessalonican trachea in the names of John iii and Thedore ii arrived in lim-
ited, invariably military, contexts. This movement of specie from Thessalonica
to our area of concern continued under Michael viii and Andronikos ii
Palaiologoi, but no later than c.1300 and affecting almost exclusively Epirus,
where it lead to a highly distinctive episode of hoarding in the 1260s. Even sil-
ver (electrum) trachea might still have been in usage in Greece in the second
half of the century. As far as the gold hyperpyron is concerned, issues of Latin
Constantinople and Byzantine Nicaea of a slightly earlier period (see above)