Money And Currency In Medieval Greece 253
parts of the 15th century and beyond. Some areas of Greece would have had to
revert to moneyless transactions even earlier.
The evidence of coinage is very relevant to administrative and constitu-
tional histories, in ways which have already been indicated, and also in other
respects: the circulating currency had a very strong administrative component,
particularly in the coins which are injected and culled from it. Consequently,
the 13th century, after the first decade, was marked by very tightly controlled
importations of largely English and French specie, and then by a total and
equally rigorous transition to an indigenous coinage. During approximately
the three decades either side of 1300, coinage was the most harmonious in
Greece, suggesting a strong administrative hand. Within the principality, coun-
terfeits were effectively targeted. However, and this is another administrative
aspect, there are numismatic signs that for about a decade in the 1280s and
1290s the Angevin settlement was not acceptable to all parties, and again just
after 1300 that the rule of Philip of Savoy at Achaea was unacceptable to the
Angevins. During these two periods a monetary war of sorts was waging, in
the shape of the undercutting of the minting standards of Glarenza at Thebes
and Naupactus respectively, which might have caused disruptions such as the
effects of Gresham’s Law, which implies that good coins were shunned for
lesser quality ones, had the former not been relatively short. The Catalans in
Athens from 1311 might potentially have caused the same problems, but this
was not the case principally because they did not mint good quality tournois,
confining themselves to a short and obviously sub-standard issue. Besides
operating a policy which tolerated, or even embraced more overtly, coinages
of the Italian carlino tradition, the tournois in general usage remained well
controlled even there, and the quick adaptation of the soldino, as in the west-
ern Peloponnesian, was a sign of political/administrative accommodation
with Venice. Even beyond the era of tournois production in Achaea, and even
during periods of the later Middle Ages which are usually viewed quite nega-
tively by administrative and political historians of the Morea, the principality
and the despotate managed to maintain a firm control of monetary specie,
effectively culling and injecting specie. This stands increasingly in contrast to
the mainland, under long spells of Serbian and Albanian control, threatened
periodically by the Ottomans, and exhibiting no effective monetary policy
under any of these nor under the disparate rulers of the Tocco family or the
Navarrese. Only the Ionian Islands under Venetian rule may have had a more
(Aldershot, 2004), xiv; Eleni Saradi, “Evidence of the Barter Economy in the Documents
of Private Transactions”, Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 88 (1995), 405–18.