Money And Currency In Medieval Greece 241
issuing coinage in about 1285 in the names of the newly appointed dukes of
Athens. The Theban tournois coinage was paralleled by new petty denomina-
tion issues Metcalf types 3–5. The early history of the Theban tournois remains
shrouded in some controversy: the mint output may not have been entirely
regular and there may have been an adversarial stance to the Achaean coinage
in terms of the standard of issue. We may, by contrast, assume that from about
1296 onwards these tournois were issued consistently, in large quantities, and
at an acceptable quality. The small Peloponnesian tournois issue of Karytaina,
possibly dating to the last months of 1291, must be viewed in the context of
the monetary controversy between the ruling houses of Athens and Achaea.
Equally small, but of quite different importance, was the Corfu issue in the
name of Philip of Taranto which can be dated with some confidence between
August 1294 and September 1296/August 1298. This issue is testimony to the
northward extent of the area of influence of this currency and the sustained
efforts by the Angevins towards the monetisation of their Greek holdings.
Within the duchy of Athens, a small baronial tournois coinage was emitted at
a mint in Salona in Phokis for a short while sometime between 1294 and 1301.
With the great augmentation in tournois minting particularly in the 1290s the
rate of counterfeiting of these same issues also increased. From the mid-1270s
onwards the hoards of Greece were almost completely dominated by Greek
deniers tournois.
The first victims of this new coinage were evidently the remaining sterling
pennies and the much larger quantity of French royal and feudal issues, all
of which were re-minted wholesale. Venetian grossi kept arriving in Greece
unabated, remaining in circulation and being the subject of some hoard-
ing, although we must assume that a good number of these grossi were also
re-minted into tournois at Glarenza and Thebes. The other western fine
silver coinages which would have come to Greece from the 1270s and 1280s
onwards—although there are very few numismatic data to support this—,
and which would also have been converted into tournois, were French royal
gros tournois and saluti of the Naples mint. The route for most of these coins
was via the Angevin kingdom of Sicily, sometimes through administrative
channels, and occasionally through the warfarring efforts in Albania. Another
Isabelle, although his scheme is not convincing. The high production rate in the name of
Isabelle can best be explained by shortening the time during which her immediate prede-
cessor and successor—Florent and Philip of Savoy—were effectively emitting tournois,
to 1294–97 and 1301–04 respectively, and by conceding that during these years an unprec-
edented quantity of western silver was reaching the mint of Glarenza, which followed a
general European trend.