All Things Medieval

Constantinople’s greatest industry in jewelry was the making of elaborate head-pieces for royalty and other aristocracy. We tend to take “crowns” for granted now, as part of the whole history/fantasy landscape. Crowns, gowns, horses, lances, etc. But crowns, like anything else, had their own evolutionary path.

The aristocracy of Eastern Rome was inbred and inward-looking, mainly confined to its one huge city. Through this city, so much trade shipping passed that its wealth from fees and tolls never ran dry. Additionally, once it became Constantine’s new capital, it collected taxes from all surrounding regions.

The men and women of Byzantine nobility had to find ways to show off their wealth to each other. After heavily embroidering their simple T-cut robes, they began to decorate their hair and heads. Pearls were great favorites, and of course gold was the chief metal. We don’t have as many early Byzantine images as later ones. Here is an early (ca. 500) mosaic of a court lady, whose hair is decorated with a very simple crown. We can see pearls and some colored gems set in gold, and she has pearl earrings.

The most famous images from the Byzantine court are the twin mosaics of Justinian and Theodora. Their century, the 7th, was a high water mark of Byzantine wealth and influence. Here is Justinian, in his crown, and Theodora in her crown and earrings. At this point, the head-decoration has fully become what we think of as a crown.

Images of saints were important elements in Byzantine crowns and other jewelry. This later crown, from the 11th century, is pretty much nothing but images of saints—on solid gold. Saints’ relics (hair, bone, scraps of cloth) were placed into little jeweled cases embedded in later crowns and other decoration, especially collars worn around the neck, and rings.

The King of Hungary became Christian around 1000 and although Hungary was part of the Roman church, the Hungarian crown was modeled after Byzantine ones. It included both icons and jewels. Notice that the jewels are round, not cut with flat faces the way we style modern jewels.

The trend toward making the crown into a full hat continued; we have one image of the last Emperor of New Rome, at the time that the Ottoman Turks were besieging Constantinople. His crown has become a jeweled hat with long dangles of more jewels. By this time, in the 15th century, there had been so much trading with the Far East that this crown appears to be influenced by Central Asia’s love of hanging strings of bangles from headgear, as illustrated by this crown from Samarkand.

One other far eastern influence is worth mentioning, although its influence came only late in the Middle Ages. Mongolian queens, who sometimes rode into battle, wore a distinctive tall hat. Its fashion changed over time, sometimes a simple cone and other times a high column. Late medieval ladies in Europe copied the tall cone shape, perhaps modeled after Queen Monduhai who re-established the Mongolian kingdom in the 15th century.

The word “jewel” first came into use without any reference to personal adornment. The jouel, or joyau, was the golden centerpiece on a king’s feast table. The word didn’t apply to gold and gems fastened onto clothing and hair until the late 14th century, where its use apparently began in the court of the Duke of Burgundy.

In early medieval times, European jewelry was a brooch or a ring. That is, either it fastened your cloak or it slipped onto your arm or finger. Clothing was heavy, since the distinction between outerwear and daily wear was not very big in a time of unheated rooms. Most fasteners we know today had not yet been developed; clothing was laced or fastened with brooches. Men used brooches as much as or more than women, so in this time, wearing a brooch carried no gender marking at all. Brooches for men and women were identical.

Arm rings had no practical purpose, but they were the chief means of “portable property” (to borrow a phrase from Dickens). When a Germanic king honored a warrior, he gave him an arm ring. The inner chamber of the king’s hall held a locked chest filled with arm rings. They were taken as spoils in raids, or they were made fresh by melting down gold or silver seized in other forms, like coins. Early Europe did not value gold, or even silver, chiefly for its purchasing power. Precious metals were for arm rings, visible signs of honor.

The story of jewelry in medieval Europe is essentially the same story as everything else: the late Roman Empire had a certain level of industry, learning, wealth and civilization that was disrupted by multiple barbarian invasions. Roman arts lived on in Byzantium, or Constantinople as the city was now called. To the west and north, however, those arts could only be glimpsed now and then. Travelers brought back reports or small tokens of New Rome’s beauties. Barbarian smiths, tailors, and carpenters tried to imitate Byzantine things. At first, their attempts ranged from silly to charming to pathetic. Gradually, the north and west caught up. Eventually, they surpassed Constantinople. The moment of catching up and passing is, effectively, the close of the Middle Ages and the beginning of what we know as the Renaissance.

By starting to talk about coins in Western Europe—with Charlemagne’s penny—I passed over what was actually the dominant coin in the early medieval years. Constantinople controlled eastern Mediterranean trade all through the Middle Ages, and even when its military power was not enough to keep its eastern lands safe from Muslim conquest, its currency was still the stablest.

Constantinople was able to strike gold coins when Western Europe was dealing only in silver and copper. Its gold coin was called the solidus (which eventually corrupted to the English “shilling”) or nomismus. The port city managed a high volume of wholesale trade, so it needed coins to represent large values.

Roman coins had shown pictures of their emperors in profile, but the Byzantine style showed emperors looking straight out in full view. Although some old Roman coins circulated in Europe, Charlemagne and his descendants copied Byzantine coins, showing their faces too. Byzantine coins usually had a cross or saint on the reverse side, another detail copied by Western Europe.

By the 1200s, the coins circulating in the eastern Mediterranean would have been split between Byzantine solidii—the gold no longer pure—-and the Islamic dinar. Muslim power was still nominally centered in Baghdad, although its regions were operating independently and certainly minting their own coins. The earliest Umayyad dynasty coins featured an image of the Caliph, but later Muslim coins were covered entirely with script. Here is an article on some medieval Islamic coins, with a few pictures.

Gold came from Africa and the Far East, so the Muslim Sultanates always had much better access to it than Western Europe’s silver-based kingdoms. Their coins were pure and well made, since they also had better access to ancient metal-working skill, a trade still relatively new in the Germanic forests. Of course, they also issued silver coins of lesser value.

During the 1200s, some of the Italian merchant cities were able to trade profitably enough with Constantinople, Damascus and Cairo that they, too, had sufficient gold to mint their own coins. Venice was in some ways a miniature Constantinople; it profited very much by both trade and robbery from Byzantium, including importing its craftsmen. Late medieval Venice minted high quality silver and gold coins that soon became the standard for Western Europe.

Venice’s silver coin was called the grosso, produced during the Fourth Crusade and at that time the highest value coin in Europe. The grosso’s design included a circle of beads around its edge, so that shaved and clipped coins were easy to spot. Venice then created the gold ducat, but by then other merchant cities were striking gold coins too. Florence copied the design of the grosso, with an added lily, and called it the florin. The florin became the basis for all late medieval coins in Western Europe.

About a century after Florence minted its first gold coins, England’s Henry III created an English florin as part of his currency reform. The attempt was a failure, since the English florins used much less gold and were not popular at international fairs, compared to other coins. Withdrawn, melted, and restruck, the same gold became a new coin, the noble, which stayed in English circulation into Shakespeare’s time. The noble had only one problem: it was a stronger currency than France’s at that time, and merchants tended to trade it into French circulation, leaving England short of high-value coins. By the close of the Middle Ages, Western Europe’s coins were high quality, a far cry from their earliest clumsy silver pennies. Here is a late medieval English noble.

By the 1300s and 1400s, basic modern accounting had been developed. Banking started as a service for merchants within their own networks, in which a supply of coins was kept under guard at each city, allowing a merchant to travel light. Instead of carrying a locked casket, making himself a target for mountain robbers, he could deposit the sum in one city and travel with only a paper stating the sum so he could withdraw it in another. Coins were still highly important, but the basis of an accounting economy that wouldn’t require coins had been established.

Charlemagne’s silver penny, the denarius or denier, set the norm for European money. When his empire split into pieces, which eventually became Germany and France, both continued to mint coins similar to the denier for several centuries. Silver deposits discovered in Germany, in the 15th century, led to minting a new coin, the taler, to compete with late medieval Italian coins. (which will be discussed in the following entry)

England’s coins were much the same; under Norman rule, coins were more standardized than in Anglo-Saxon times. Large regional towns minted coins by collecting old ones and recasting them. In 1247, King Henry III commissioned a new coin design that had central cross with arms extending right out to the edge of the coin. This way, people could tell that a coin had been shaved or clipped. His successor Edward I tried to solve another problem: so many people cut coins in halves or quarters, that he tried issuing coins to half-penny and farthing-penny values.

The late medieval English kings had relatively strong control of their territories, so their coins were standardized. By the end of the Middle Ages, the English currency started (at the top) with the noble, a new gold coin introduced by Edward III. The coins discussed in this article are mostly silver; I’ll cover gold in the next. Most of Europe never saw gold; it was in use at the merchant level for large purchases, not in average households. The largest English coin in ordinary use was the shilling (24 pennies), the groat (four pennies), the penny itself, and then half-pennies and farthings (quarter-pennies), now issued as cheap coins to discourage cutting.

The Crusader kingdoms of Antioch and Edessa minted their own coins, but not ones of great value. Their standard coin was copper, and since they were in the Holy Land, their coins often bore images of saints and crosses. One coin had St. George, who was at once the patron saint of England and a regional hero. The historical George had been born to Christians in 3rd century Palestine; the dragon-slaying was supposed to have taken place in Libya. When the Crusader kingdoms came to an end, Crusaders still ruled and minted coins in places like Cyprus, Malta and Sicily. By the later medieval years, their coins pragmatically contained some Arabic script.

In Muslim Spain, where the Norman Sicilian coins traded freely, coins never carried portraits of the king. Muslim art was not supposed to portray a person’s face. Their pottery art sometimes broke that rule, but coins did not. The Almohad dynasty, who were later Berber immigrants from Morocco, struck square coins. When the Muslims were entirely conquered at the close of the medieval period, Ferdinand and Isabella issued a coin with both of their portraits, signifying the united rule of the north’s two largest kingdoms.

Before moving on to the significant gold coins of the period, there’s one last odd silver coin to mention. The territory of Russia had been colonized by Vikings, who had some difficulty adapting to the idea of gold and silver freely traded, not hoarded. After Kiev became part of Byzantine Christianity, the prince minted coins, but in the remote places, these still did not have much popularity. Most silver was traded in the form of a standardized bar, the grivna. It was often hexagonal!

next: Byzantine and Italian gold coins

For most of the medieval era, the silver penny was the basic currency in all places. Silver was the most common precious metal; gold was too uncommon until the late medieval, and copper was not precious enough. Silver was precious, but not too much so. Copper and bronze coins were also used, but their value was fixed to the silver penny.

During the early medieval period, Anglo-Saxon and Merovingian kingdoms had poor control over their currency. As described in past entries, weak central government permitted anyone with local power to collect silver coins (including Roman ones) and melt them down to strike new local coins. Charlemagne was the first Germanic ruler with enough power to reform and stabilize currency across a wide area. At his peak, he ruled (directly or through vassals) most of modern France, Benelux, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy.

Charlemagne stipulated that his penny would be called a denarius, obviously following Roman tradition. 240 of them would make a pound (which was probably a little different from the modern pound). Over time, the medieval French silver penny was called a denier (probably rhymed with veneer); it remained the mainstay of the marketplace for many centuries. Interestingly, there was a theoretical coin that was not, apparently, actually minted in his time: the solidus, worth 12 denarii, therefore 20 of them in that same pound. Charlemagne’s solidus was later copied as an Anglo-Norman coin, becoming the shilling in medieval Latin patois. That’s why there are 20 shillings in a pound.

Charlemagne’s pennies were struck with unusually good dies, perhaps because his wide region of rule permitted him to bring in Italian craftsmen who still had some of the old skill. He wanted to control all minting in Aachen, his capital, but the region was just too large. His deniers were minted in Milan, Pavia, Paris, Lyon, Rouen, Maastricht and other cities, in addition to Aachen.

During Charlemagne’s time, and that of his immediate successors, he was able to control the value and quality of the denier. With the break-up of his empire, of course minting again went out of control. The coins during this time were often quite debased with other metals or bad weighing. Even some abbots minted coins.

During the Middle Ages, many European rulers rewarded faithful followers not with direct payments of cash or land, but with a royal charter—permission—to take up some sort of regulated business. This way, the monarch didn’t need to pay directly. Instead, the charter allowed its owner to skim fees, fines, and tolls directly from the economy. The most lucrative sort of charter was for minting coins. Kings gave as few of these charters as possible, trying to keep the power of coin minting close to their own capital of administration.

The coin minting business model was simple. A moneyer collected old coins to melt down. He weighed and cut new coins, stamping them with a new die to show when and where each was made. Part of his charter to authorize coins stated that he was allowed to keep some portion of the coin metal back. In collecting 100 old coins, he was not required to issue 100 new ones. Any time coins were re-issued, it was an opportunity to skim the hoard.

Minting coins also included enforcing coin weight standards, so the moneyer could require merchants to have their coins checked. Of course, he charged a fee for this service.

Most charters were issued to noblemen, but there were private moneyers as well. When mints decided how their coins would look, they were creating a competitive product; laws dictated only the value, not the appearance. Among their decisions, they chose what alphabet the coin would use. Overall, nearly all European coins used the Latin alphabet and expressed information about value and date in Latin itself. But sometimes moneyers created coins with Arabic or Greek, either with or in place of Latin. These coins were intended for international use. In some very rare cases, private Jewish moneyers in Poland made some coins with Hebrew lettering.

Corrupt moneyers could debase their currency by diluting pure gold, silver or copper with alloys or by cutting coins smaller. Kings were usually not involved in such actions, but instead tried to maintain a steady coin value. However, in a few cases, kings directly debased the currency on purpose. These experiments showed that royal power was limited in fact, if not in theory, because merchants were not required to take poor coins. Debasing currency sometimes led to riots, as in 14th century Paris.

Creating coins had a naive concreteness in the Middle Ages. When a nation discovered that it had a deposit of gold or silver, it could start creating coins. Silver had long been mined in the Mediterranean area, though it was mixed with lead and copper, so it needed to be refined. New deposits of silver were found in Germany and Bohemia during the medieval period. These regions were newly rich, and they also put a lot of resources into metal-refining technology, which led to the region’s early prominence in chemistry.

Gold came from overseas, as a general rule. Traders brought it from Africa, but most gold came through Constantinople’s trade with the east. Because it had to be brought from afar, gold was not much used for medieval coins. But in the 15th deposits of gold were discovered in Hungary, as well as in Germany and Bohemia. Hungary may have supplied most of Europe’s gold for later medieval coins.

Medieval coins were stamped by a round, carved die, but they were defined in value by weight. This meant that sometimes a coin’s stamped round part was not sufficient to make up its value, so the coin had to include some metal outside the stamp. It was a perfect opportunity for a special kind of bank heist: coin shaving.

Copper and silver coins, which were the most common in daily circulation, could be shaved to match the stamped circle. They looked right, but their weight was no longer the correct value. Only a merchant or smith who had a very accurate balance for gold and silver could tell if a coin was still accurate or not.

Then again, supposedly accurate, official coins might have been made wrong. In that case, they could be shaved without changing the value of the coin. And the individual who did the shaving would make a profit at the government’s expense. Very accurate balances were controlled by goldsmith guilds; in medieval Germany, it was specifically illegal for a private person to own one.

Additionally, there was always the problem of purity of metals. Copper and silver could form alloys with tin or lead, while looking much the same. Tin and lead had their uses, but scarcity and value were not among their attributes.

Partly due to these two problems, use of coins in the medieval market was completely unlike ours today. First, we value old coins today; to them, old coins were much less valuable than new ones. Old coins were more likely to be shaved, after all. Newly-minted coins had some indication of the time they were struck; before the Anno Domini year counting system had become widespread, the king’s image placed the coin at least within his reign, and there was probably a number to indicate which year of his reign.

Second, today we take it for granted that a national currency is used within its country of origin. International medieval fairs were more like today’s black markets, where a buyer might offer German marks or US dollars, and the seller can choose which he’ll take. At a medieval fair, currency of all sorts circulated. Big fairs had money traders who managed exchange rates, which at first were just based on people’s preferences.

Strong central governments controlled currency; weak ones did not. In effect, a strong king like Charlemagne only permitted his appointed officials to mint coins, because he had the military power to punish anyone who minted coins without permission. Strong central governments wanted their money to be readily accepted at fairs, so they oversaw coin minting and made sure that pure metals and accurate weights were used.

During the medieval period, much or most of Europe did not have this type of strong government. Any small governing entity could strike coins, as long as it had some metal to make them with. Bishops and counts made coins, as did private moneyers. Every modern European nation, however small, was cut into even smaller portions during the Middle Ages. The Netherlands was divided into at least ten smaller parts, each of which minted coins—including dukes, counts and bishops.

There was a regular cycle of new coins that were shaved and worn down, then collected and remelted, then struck into a slightly newer design and released again. The newest coin from the strongest ruler was your best bet for lasting value. If you accepted a poor coin from a weak ruler, you might find yourself unable to give it away, let alone buy anything with it at a large fair. At a big fair, there might be a hundred competing coins in circulation.

The story of Europe’s medieval period is really the narrative of how a heavily forested, cold place gradually caught up with the habits and inventions of the Mediterranean cultures, and at last began to pass them. All but the fringes of the region knew from the start what they were trying to catch up with: Rome, with its roads, coins, letters, legions, forts, medicine, and chemistry. The coins of Rome came with the first legions and stayed around for a long time, so from the start, most of Europe used coins.

In the far north, gold and silver were valued only as personal decoration. Precious metals went into finger and arm rings, which were presented to successful fighters. These rings went into heavy locked chests, hoarded for later use in trade, as ransom, or to recycle into rewards for younger warriors. Ordinary trade didn’t use money in the far north, though Roman coins were of interest as trade items. Sometimes, the northerners drilled holes in Roman coins and strung them into necklaces. Mostly they added Roman silver and gold to their hoards. It took a long time for the far north to accept coins as pieces to trade off freely for things like cattle or boats.

In the Frankish heartland of early medieval Europe, Roman coins provided a model to the Merovingian kings. Unfortunately, it was many centuries until Europeans had the metalworking skill to equal Roman coins. Early medieval coins were clumsy, childlike imitations.

Roman and Greek coins were made from blank bronze, silver, or gold disks, called planchets. These disks were heated and struck while hot, so that the metal took a clear impression before cooling. Stamping dies were well-carved, with high relief and precision in their letters and images. When a coin cooled, its impression remained through centuries of handling.

Early Europe tried to imitate the coins, but it seems unlikely that they had the opportunity to learn the technique from Romans. Instead of starting with blank disks, they started with a large sheet of silver. Their stamping dies were made of iron, and the designs and letters had low relief and poor uniformity and accuracy. Letters often came out backwards, and they were hard to read since they had been stamped into the die with cutters made of set shapes like curves, bars and wedges. Images of kings‘ heads were simple and clumsy compared to Greek and Roman bas-relief art.

Coins from the Dark Ages typically bulged on one side, as the die had tipped a little when being struck with a hammer. Cold silver took little impression from the stamping process, and ordinary handling quickly wore it down. These early coins were often cut irregularly, too. Some of the original sheet of metal sticks out beyond where the stamp struck it.

Here are some samples of Merovingian Frankish coins.

I thought I’d start a new short series on medieval coins and jewels. The previous series about containers closed with locked chests and purses, which led me to think about what might go inside them.