230 Baker
relation to single finds, there is in our record a much larger emphasis on hoards
rather than on single finds, and this situation misrepresents contemporary
usage: although coin hoarding would have been a common phenomenon in
medieval Greece, the exchange of single coins of different denominations and
values, counted in tale, would have occurred on an everyday basis in town and
country.
There are a number of ways of classifying coin hoards, one being by date
of concealment. The c.200 coins concealed c.1204–1460 divide into a number
of units. An impressive number of hoards (about 40) was concealed in the
decade c.1200–10. For much of the remainder of the 13th century there was a
rather low level of hoarding, followed by an augmentation in the rates around
1300, and then by a heavy concentration around c.1311 (nearly 20 hoards).
The years down to mid-century saw generally higher, steady hoarding, with
a small cluster before 1350. Subsequently, hoarding rates remained constant
if slightly reduced to about 1420, when hoarding apparently ceased almost
completely. There are only three hoards which date positively to the period
1423–70. These hoards contain a large spectrum of coinages, whose relative
values for the different periods are not always known. Nevertheless, based on
the sporadic evidence which we do possess, and on the intrinsic properties of
the coins themselves, they can all be matched in an approximate fashion to a
single value system, a form of hyperpyron of account, of which there were a
number in medieval Greece. The theoretical hyperpyron used in this exercise
is closest to the continental hyperpyron of Thebes/Negroponte, valued at 100
tournois/torneselli, 25 sterling pennies/soldini, and 10 grossi. In this way the
c.200 hoards can be classified according to their values. There are nearly 40
hoards which contain in excess of 10 of these hyperpyra, which is a substan-
tial sum, if not within the highest reaches of some of the recorded yearly
payments (for instance salaries of top officials) which can be encountered in
the public and private sectors.36 By far the most valuable hoard was the early
13th-century Agrinio 1978/1979 of gold hyperpyra, with an estimated value of
469 hyperpyra, followed by Elis 1964 (tournois and soldini of c.1356, 259 hyper-
pyra); Cephalonia (mostly soldini and torneselli of c.1410, 202 hyperpyra);
Thebes 1967 (mostly gigliati to the 1320s, in excess of 100 hyperpyra); Euboea
(Venetian gold ducats to 1355–56, 93 hyperpyra). High values could be reached
in the different periods, and through a number of different denominations. In
fact, some of the most valuable hoards date relatively late and are composed
36 Cécile Morrisson and Jean-Claude Cheynet, “Prices and Wages in the Byzantine World,”
in Economic History of Byzantium (Washington dc, 2002), pp. 815–78. In this study, as in
many similar studies, different hyperpyra are freely combined.