Once upon a time, there were a bunch of city states whose populations had some shared ancestry, close enough dialects that they could understand each other, and some shared religious ideas and mythology. They didn't consider themselves the same people as each other, but they still considered themselves something closer to each other than other societies around, so they were the Greeks, and the others barbarians.

But then one of them conquered the rest, and his son Alexander conquered a lot of other people, and a more unified identity started to form. They started thinking of themselves as a common people with a common culture, and maybe they'd have a shared destiny.

But then a different group took them. Armies from Italy calling themselves Romans, a group that might have once been considered a multi-ethnic people, but the other Latins and even the Oscan and Etruscan were already fading into this identity. And the Greeks tended to get along well in this empire. Caracalla made them all citizens in the early third century AD (along with all other freeborn men in the empire). A century after that, authors tell us that if you asked most Greek speaking people in the empire what they were, they'd say they were Roman.

Things got a little weird when the Western half of the empire fell. Greek was already dominant in the eastern part of the empire, but it started making more sense to shift laws from Latin to Greek, since far more Romans could speak that language when the Westerners weren't Roman anymore. And for a while, the West called those Greek speakers Romans as well. But Western their stories about the history of the Romans became more legendary and idealized, and as the remaining Roman empire shifted in culture as all people do, they started to doubt their "Romanness." The pope ended up crowning some guy named Charlemagne as the new Roman Emperor, much to the confusion of the people who had been the Romans for centuries. And since it didn't make sense for Westerners to be the successors to the Romans when there were still Romans, they reverted to an old name for those guys over out East: the Greeks.

The Romans who spoke Greek didn't consider themselves the same as the Romans who spoke Latin's descendants (and later German), and they started talking about those Latins as uncouth barbarous people who weren't like the Romans at all. Still, they called on those primitive Latins to help them reconquer some territory from the Turks, and those Latins took it much farther than intended and kept much of the former Roman lands they took. Things fell apart between the Romans who spoke Greek and the Westerners who considered themselves the real successors of Rome, culminating in the Latins conquering the Roman capital Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade. Those conquerors declared themselves the Roman Empire. The surviving Greek speakers who set up government elsewhere insisted they were still the Roman Empire. And the Germans called themselves the Holy Roman Empire. None of them contained the city of Rome.

Those Greek speaking Romans whose distant, distant ancestors considered themselves Greek did retake their city, but the empire slowly declined until it was taken over by the Ottomans. But those conquered people still considered themselves the Romans. And there were those who wanted independence for the surviving Roman people. But that needed Western support, which was difficult as the Westerners didn't like those "Byzantines" and thought that culture was decadent and the people slimy and treacherous. But do you know what Westerners liked? Those extinct ancient people called Greeks.

And so those working for independence started insisting they were the people of Pericles, Leonidas, and the glory of an ancient, idealized past. And plenty of those now being labelled Greeks hated it. They were Romans. Proud orthodox Christian people following the glory of Constantine, Justinian, Heraclius, and Basil II Porphyrogenitus. They had nothing to do with those ancient pagans. They didn't even speak the same language! You could get trilingual dictionaries that translated between Greek, Latin, and "Romanish," the language that descended from Greek that modern Romans spoke.

But being Greek brought support. And propaganda started changing minds. The people whose parents called themselves Romans started liking those old Greeks. They stopped talking about them the way we talk about the Ancient Egyptians. Now they were their ancestors and the originators of their culture. Romanish was just modern Greek. And that big empire that lasted after the West fell? Totally Greek. Not Roman at all. After all, if those people were Roman, they wouldn't be the ancestors of the people who were now obviously Greek.

Things like nations and ethnicity aren't just constructs, they're weird and far from static.

So the bronze denominations of Roman coinage heavily declined in quality in the late 4th century CE and for most of the 5th. They got smaller, lighter, and cruder, to the point where it's often hard to identify them with how badly they're made. The top left coin here is an example that I think is from the reign of Theodosius II (408-450 CE), though I'm not 100% certain of that. They were so worthless that they usually just distributed sealed sacks of them rather than bother with separating out the coins. The term for such a sack is a "follis" (plural "folles"), a term also used to mean scrotum among other things.

But then we get the beginning of "Byzantine coinage" with the reforms of Anastatius I (491-518).¹ Anastasius was a bit conservative and put restrictions on the erotic pantomime performances that were popular in Constantinople, but he also made significant improvements in the functionality of the government and its finances. And one thing he did was turn the follis into a big coin. These early folles continued the standard side view portraiture of earlier coins along with standard Latin inscriptions, but on the reverse, they usually used a Greek numeral to tell you how many of those small, shitty old coins they were worth. Most commonly, you see M meaning 40 and K meaning 20. In the above examples, A half follis of Anastasius is second on that first row, followed by folles of Justin I (518-527) and an early example of Justinian I (527-565). I've rarely seen early folles like these with much surviving detail, so it seems they circulated for a long time.

During the reign of Justinian portraiture shifted to be frontal, and that's how it would stay on Byzantine coins from here on out. These next three coins depict Justin II (565-578) and his wife Sophia, Maurice (582-602), and Phocas (602-610). That Phocas coin is a flat, uneven strike, but it's supposed to have "XXXX" on the reverse. For whatever reason, values written in Roman numerals are common during his reign.

One thing I find interesting about these coins is that you can see the fortunes of the empire reflected in the size and quality of these coins. They peaked at 40mm wide during the reign of Justinian, but then shrank back down as he started having financial difficulties due to the plague and constant wars. And you can see things getting particularly bad in the last two coins of the second row. The first is from the reign of Heraclius (610-641), a man who reconquered the Levant and Egypt from the Persians only to lose it all permanently to the Arab conquests. It was also during the reign of Heraclius that they finally shifted the inscriptions to be all Greek. I've seen claim that this is a sign that Greek was now the "official language" of the empire, but the empire was always multilingual, and he probably just decided to switch coins to what happened to be the most popular language in the empire rather than one that was mostly only spoken outside its borders at this point. That last coin is from his grandson Constans II (641-668), a man who was not named Constans,² and who famously looted the Italian territories he visited due to the empire being that short on money.

But the Byzantine Empire had plenty of ups along with their downs, and you can see that reflected on the bottom row coins, which aren't as big and heavy as the early ones, but definitely better in both weight and construction to what was made under Constans II. The fractions of the follis had long since ceased to be made by the time of this bottom row, leaving only one bronze denomination. The M still stuck around for a while, but even that vestigial thing was abandoned by this point. The first coin here is of Leo VI (886-912), and both the obverse and reverse just state that he's Leo, Emperor of the Romans, with the reverse using the extra space to say it's "by the grace of God." The next coin is from the reign of Constantine VII (913-959), and while it basically has the same message with a different name, you'll notice that it's a very messy looking coin. This is what's called an overstrike. What they would sometimes do in the Byzantine period when they received an old coin in payment was to then restrike the coin with the image and message of the current emperor. This usually left bits of the old design, in this case, I'm pretty sure it's Leo VI again.

Our final coin is what's called an "anonymous follis." During this period, they started using entirely religious imagery on the coins sometimes rather than depicting the emperor. This one is from the reign of Romanus IV (1068-1071). The obverse is a little double struck, so Jesus' head looks bent, and the reverse depicts Mary. It wasn't long after this coin that the empire's fortunes really took a bad turn with the Battle of Manzikert, and the resulting financial troubles resulted in a major coinage overhaul, but I already talked about that in another post.

1. The entire distinction between the Roman Empire and Byzantine Empire is completely arbitrary. There was a continuous form of government and national identity from Augustus through Constantine XI that only ended with the fall of Constantinople in 1453. These people always called themselves Romans, as did any contemporary source from the Middle East. It was only when Western Europe started seeing themselves as the successors to Rome, particularly starting with Charlemagne, that they started referring to the empire as a bunch of Greeks, a term they not only hadn't used for themselves in centuries but used to describe an extinct people they descended from. You can't be the true successor of the glory of Rome if Rome is still around, so Western Europe decided it wasn't, and for some reason, significant pushback on that idea in the West is only fairly recent. There's also no clear consensus on when exactly the split between "Rome" and "Byzantium" happened, since the distinction isn't really based on a historical event, anyway, but coin collectors at least picked a point when there was a significant, sudden change in the coinage.

2. The Byzantine Empire had twelve emperors named Constantine, and we number them from 1 to 11. This guy was the fourth guy with the name Constantine who reigned, but he was unpopular enough that people tended to instead refer to him by the more diminutive "Constans," and for some reason, that's stuck in most retrospective sources, and his son is called Constantine IV. It would probably be a pain to rectify that, since you'd then have to constantly be clarifying whether you were using the old or new Constantine numbering system.

One of the most distinctive types of coins of the middle ages, at least to me, are these bent ass Byzantine trachea. Alexios I reformed the coinage in the late 11th century CE, and for some reason, the empire started making most of them in what you usually see referred to as cup shaped or scyphate. We have no fucking idea why they did this. The best guess anyone has is that this was done to make them stack better, as pre-modern coinage usually lumped up quite a bit in the image and didn't stack well, but I've heard of collectors with a bunch trying that out and finding that their stacking ability isn't much better than other contemporary coins, and these three certain don't stay still there's much movement after I stack them.

Whatever the reason, they found it important enough to change their minting method to make sure they got this shape, and they kept doing it for a long time, with even the Latin occupiers continuing it after the 4th crusade. As you can see in the last picture, they had to awkwardly rock that top die around to get the whole image on the coin and to get the shape right, and it tended to not work very well. It's hard to line things up right when it's all wobbly like that. Like that middle coin above is badly double struck on the concave side (there's supposed to be one double circle around the figures, and you can clearly see two at the top of the image), and errors like that, incomplete images, and results just looking like muddled messes are common in bronze, though less common in gold (possible due to more care, possibly due to the softness of gold making things easier). And the way coins wear meant that whatever image you managed to get on the convex side could get obliterated due to wear fast.

It's utterly baffling to me that they went to this much effort when there are so many downsides and no clear meaningful benefit. That makes them fascinating little mysteries, even if the result of them isn't pretty by normal standards.