252 Baker
tetarteron counterfeiting just after 1204 was the result of political and admin-
istrative changes, and met a necessity for this kind of petty cash and perhaps
one-off payments, but had no macroeconomic implications. This precedence
was continued by the trachea of Michael ii and his son-in-law Manfred, and
the petty denomination issues of Athens and Achaea, in mid-century. The lat-
ter were even carried to the Levant. It is possible that there was also a technical,
not directly commercial, aspect to the spread of the tournois successor of this
coinage northwards and eastwards, in the sense that Glarenza was the first via-
ble mint which travellers or traders met coming from the West, and therefore
a convenient place at which to convert their currency before resuming their
journey. This bullion movement would have made little impact on indigenous
Greek monetary affairs, apart from the small percentage which remained there
as a consequence of payments to the mint. The large-scale transfer of Greek
specie to southern Italy also took place quite clearly within a technical and
administrative framework. The tournois coinage of John ii Orsini, especially
the later coppery issues, was conceived in a military context and its movement
towards Macedonia would initially have been conditioned by warfare. At a sec-
ondary stage, its further spread and usage would have been fostered by Serbian
(administrative) expansion and the dearth in petty issues within the Bulgarian
state, not however by any overt commercial relations between Greece and this
part of the Black Sea, as Bulgarian scholars had maintained between the 1960s
and 1980s.
There are other instances during the latter part of medieval Greek history
in which local states produced and proposed to use substandard coinage: see
the cited examples from Mistra/Monemvasia; Naxos; and counterfeit issues
from Catalan Athens and the western mainland. Also here it is unimaginable
that outright, high-value commercial transactions were the main cause and
motivation. Such coinages would have been intended to make one-off, quasi-
fraudulent payments, again perhaps in military contexts, or to keep the lower
end of the monetary system oiled: if all the basic purchases, direct and indirect
taxes, fines, wages, and the like, were paid in tale for much of the medieval
period in Greece, even more so than they had been in the middle Byzantine
period,49 we must nevertheless assume that this was no longer the case during
49 The question has never been systematically investigated; snapshots are nevertheless given
for instance in Nikos Oikonomides, “Σε ποιό βαθμό ήταν εκχρηματισμένη η μεσοβυζαντινή
οικονομία;” [“To What Degree was the Middle Byzantine Economy Monetised?”], in
Ροδωνιά. Τιμή στον Μ.Ι. Μανούσακα [Rodonia: In Honour of M.I. Manoussakas] (Rethymnon,
1994), pp. 363–70, repr. in Nikos Oikonomides, Social and Economic Life in Byzantium