Gold Coins and Crowds: The Byzantine Empire by the Numbers

Coins and Crowds in Constantinople

1In 476 the last emperor in the west lost his throne, and the western lands broke into separate kingdoms. The eastern half of the Roman Empire went on for nearly a thousand more years. Historians call it the Byzantine Empire, though its people called themselves Romans and most of them spoke Greek. Its capital, Constantinople, stood on the Bosporus, the strait where Europe meets Asia and where ships pass between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Silk, spices, grain, furs and enslaved people were sold in its markets, and officials taxed goods coming in and going out.

2Justinian, who ruled from 527 to 565, had Roman laws gathered into one code and rebuilt the great church of Hagia Sophia, finished in 537. His armies retook North Africa and Italy, but the wars were long and costly. Most of the empire's taxes came from farmers and their land. In 542 a deadly plague struck Constantinople and killed a large share of its people. The plague came back again and again over the next two centuries.

3Trade depended on trust in money. In the early 300s, the emperor Constantine had begun minting a gold coin called the solidus. For about 700 years, emperors kept its weight and its gold nearly the same. Merchants from Italy to India accepted it, and people far beyond the empire's borders saved it.

4In the 1000s the empire faced new enemies. In 1071 Seljuk Turks defeated a Byzantine army at Manzikert, and over the next years the empire lost much of Anatolia, where many of its farmers lived. To pay soldiers and officials, emperors mixed more silver and copper into the gold coin. In 1092 Emperor Alexios I issued a new gold coin, the hyperpyron, whose name means "highly refined."

5In 1204, crusaders from western Europe, carried by Venetian ships, captured and looted Constantinople. They ruled it until the Byzantines won it back in 1261, but the empire was now small, and merchants from Venice and Genoa controlled much of the trade through the straits. In 1453 the Ottoman Turks captured the city.