The events that followed the fall of Rome were so diverse in both place and time that they fail to fit into neat segments. The so-called Dark Ages had many intermittent gleams of light. Furthermore, even though the history of the eastern Roman Empire based in Constantinople was strikingly different from what happened in Europe, the interaction between East and West persisted to such an extent that an effort to sharply distinguish the two chronicles would be more confusing than illuminating.
The preoccupation with gold was one of the primary forces that tied the two areas together. Gold as both money and adornment played a central role in Byzantium. In Europe, brand-new kingdoms whose leaders had never heard of Croesus or Crassus launched their gold coinage as soon as they could; the jeweler's art flourished as well, even under the most primitive political conditions; and the traditional marriage between golden ornamentation and religion-though bumpy, like many marriages-never quite came to a state of divorce.
We look first at Constantinople, in part because its history is less familiar than Europe's. More important, gold was a dominant factor in the Byzantine Empire long before it became such a preoccupation in the West.
The Byzantine emperors ruled from Constantinople for over one thousand years. By and large, they were a decadent, corrupt, conspiratorial, cruel bunch of people. The grisly story of Irene was typical. In 780, Irene became guardian of her ten-year-old son, Constantine VI, but the degree of power that guardianship provided her was both insufficient and too transitory for her taste. She organized a conspiracy against young Constantine in 792, had him arrested, and then blinded him to be sure he would remain out of action. Irene reigned for ten years not as empress but as emperor. In 802, it was her turn to be thrown out: she was overthrown by Nicephorus, her minister of finance, and exiled to Lesbos.2 Nicephorus managed to hold the throne for nine years before he was trapped and killed in a mountain defile while campaigning against the Bulgars. Krum, the Bulgar leader, had Nicephorus's skull lined with silver and used it as a drinking cup.;
My favorite in the sequence of emperors was Basil II (also known as Basil Bulgaroctonus, or "Slayer of the Bulgars"), who ruled from 976 to 1025. Basil was a role model for the villain in early Hollywood movies. He is described as "mean, austere, and irascible," with full, bushy whiskers that he liked to twirl with his fingers at moments of wrath or even while just giving an audience .4 Basil was at least as murderous as he looked. After a great victory against the Bulgarians, he blinded the entire enemy force that survived his onslaught, sparing only each 100th man so that there would be someone to lead the poor survivors back to their tsar. Upon the arrival of his mutilated troops, the tsar promptly died of a heart attack from the shock.'
The Byzantine emperors may have debased their regimes morally and politically, but the integrity, purity, fame, and acceptability of Constantine's golden bezant was an overriding preoccupation with all of them. The entire history of the Byzantine Empire is marked by its obsessive focus on gold, not only as money but also as an advertisement of unrivaled opulence. Gold served as the key instrument that the emperors used along with cruelty and repression to bind together their sprawling, disparate territorial domains. The golden bezant financed the empire's imports, its armies, and its alliances with other nations.
Justinian's effort to surpass Solomon in the building of the church of Saint Sophia out of an inherited hoard of some three hundred thousand pounds of gold was just one instance of the lavish use of golden displays to shout power. All the labyrinthine palaces that the emperors maintained on the banks of the Bosporus were overlaid with copious decorations of gold and precious jewels; understatement was not their style. Emperor Theophilus deserves the prize for ostentation for the tree of gold he created to shade the gold throne. The tree and the throne were flanked by golden birds, lions, and griffins; at the arrival of a visitor, the lions would swish their tails and roar as the birds warbled a welcome.6
The uses of gold were so varied and so extensive that Constantinople's skilled goldsmiths were in demand throughout Europe, especially in Italy. The goldsmiths were the principal artists of the Dark Ages, during the centuries before painting, sculpture, and architecture became the predominant forms of art. They worked on the mosaics that cover the portals of Saint Mark's in Venice, on the breathtaking mosaics to the south of Venice on the Church of San Vitale in Ravenna, and as far off as Monreale outside of Palermo. When the European goldsmiths saw the beautiful and delicate work of their counterparts in Byzantium, the Byzantine style became the high fashion of the early Middle Ages. In fact, the patron saint of goldsmiths, Saint Eloi (641-660, also known as Saint Eligius), was a monk and mintmaster from seventh-century Gaul who learned his skills in Constantinople.' His frequent appearance in paintings right through to the fifteenth century testifies to his importance and prominence. The English goldsmiths had their own patron saint, Saint Dunstan, a Benedictine monk and skilled artist who was Archbishop of Canterbury from 960 to 988. He must have been quite a man: a golden embroidery of 1470 shows him in his workshop tweaking the nose of the devil."
The gold for display was just on the surface, however. Behind the scenes, the emperors amassed huge hoards of gold coins and gold bars. Basil Bulgaroctonus had over two hundred thousand pounds of gold, much of it hidden away in subterranean chambers. Around 530, Emperor Anastasius owned a store of some three hundred thousand pounds. And Empress Theodora, who ruled about forty years after Irene, died with one hundred thousand pounds in her possession. These were huge sums for their time but make a dramatic contrast with our own era in which gold stocks are measured in thousands of tons rather than in thousands of pounds.
The gold was a security blanket. The Byzantine rulers frequently went to war, when troops had to be paid in gold, but the emperors never reached a point where their enemies ceased to threaten. The empire was constantly menaced by Bulgarians and Germanic hordes to the west and, after the seventh century, to the east and south by militant Muslims attacking every infidel in sight. Since the Byzantines could not fight on all fronts simultaneously, they paid out a never-ending stream of gold tribute to keep their enemies at bay by buying off potential aggressors directly and by bribing European allies to provide protection. Today, we would call it outsourcing security.
That approach was especially important in the case of the Lombards, with whom the Byzantine emperors carried on a long but unstable relationship. The Lombards, originally known as the Langobards (longbeards), came from what is now modern Hungary. During 568-569, with the aid of Saxons and Slavs, they invaded Italy one hundred thousand strong under the leadership of their king, Alboin-which is why northern Italy is still known as Lombardy.* Poor Alboin came to a bad end in 572. During a carousal, he attempted to ape the ghoulishness of the Bulgar Krum by trying to persuade his wife Rosamund to drink from the skull of her father, king of an enemy tribe whom Alboin had murdered. Rosamund would have none of it: she did Alboin in on the spot.'
The imposing Lombard invasion of northern Italy threatened the priceless Byzantine possessions of Venice and Ravenna. Without gold, all would have been lost. First, the emperors bribed some Lombard factions to fight with other Lombard factions. Then they paid out gold to recruit as allies the Franks, another Germanic tribe that had established itself in Gaul, or modern France. Gold continued to move from Byzantines to Franks, from Byzantines to Lombards, and even back and forth between Lombards and Franks, as each group used the gold to buy off or bribe the others.
Internecine warfare among the Lombards continued at a high level until the middle of the eighth century, at which point they finally got their act together. The monarchy the Lombards established was so firm and threatening that the Byzantines were not alone in deciding the job had to be finished, once and for all-even the pope for once took the side of the Byzantines. In 754 and 756, they joined in supporting a major invasion of Lombardy by the Franks, greased along by a bribe of fifty thousand gold solidi." Having beaten back the Lombards, the Franks then proceeded to co
llect gold tribute from both their allies and their defeated enemies-at one point they were collecting an annual tribute of twelve thousand solidi." The accumulation of all that gold in what would one day be France explains why it was the Merovingian monarchs who led the way back to gold coinage in Europe after the fall of Rome. In 773-774, Charlemagne, Merovingian king of the Franks, conquered the Lombard kingdom outright and annexed it to his own empire. In return, the pope crowned him emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in the year 800. For centuries thereafter, the French coveted Lombardy as part of their natural realm, until Francis I reclaimed it for France in 1515. On this occasion, however, Francis was given only a gala meal by the pope-and not long afterward he lost Lombardy again to the current emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.
Where did all this gold come from? The towering position of the bezant in the medieval world did not depend on domestic sources of gold. The gold supplies from the Pactolus River that seemed like a bottomless well to Croesus had long since been exhausted, and no other important sources were known to exist in Byzantine territory. Although some gold came in from beyond the eastern borders from as far as Russia, the richest source of mined gold came from the old Nubian mines in southern Egypt and Sudan.
Unfortunately, Nubia was a source for the Byzantines for only a short time. The Arabian Muslims conquered those territories in the seventh century, formed lasting relationships with the Nubians,* and, in one fell swoop, cut off this seemingly bottomless source that Byzantium had enjoyed for so long.
The shock was profound. As one historian, Robert Sabatino Lopez, a distinguished scholar of monetary history, has described it, "The empire that amazed the world by the profusion of its riches and by the abundance of its gold coinage was constantly threatened with exhaustion of its stock of precious metals."12 Now trade, military campaigns, taxation, and raw plunder were the only means of sustaining the golden passions of the emperors that were essential to the illusion on which so much of their power depended. Military victories brought more than booty from defeated enemies (when Nicephorus captured the Bulgarian royal treasury, he planted the imperial seal upon every object)." Not unlike modern privatization schemes, confiscated lands could be distributed to officials, soldiers, and sailors, a move that created new income from taxation. Nevertheless, triumphs on the field of battle were an uncertain and interruptible source. Taxation was more predictable, and the ruthless, cold-blooded, and pitiless efforts of the emperors' agents on this score would be the envy of an IRS agent in our own time. But even taxation has limits.
Consequently, after the loss of Nubia, trade and commerce became the prime means of bringing gold into the coffers of the emperors as well as to the merchants and manufacturers on whom the stream of tax revenue was so heavily dependent. Byzantine trade followed an essentially triangular pattern involving Europe in one direction and the Muslims to the south in the other. Byzantium imported hardly anything from the Europeans but sold them luxury items including the finest of textile products and the arts of the goldsmiths. The silken fabrics woven in Constantinople were as highly prized in Europe as the jewelry and adornments of the goldsmiths and were so much in demand that the Byzantines finally started to grow their own raw silk. These net exports earned sufficient gold to balance Byzantium's chronic import surplus with the Muslim countries. The Muslims also maintained a positive trade balance with Europe, selling luxuries, olive oil, and horses in exchange for timber, iron, and slaves.14
Immediately after the loss of Nubia, the emperors established a wide variety of arrangements to facilitate commercial activity with other countries, including a significant improvement in port facilities where officials could protect the merchandise from thieves. The emperors also imposed restraints on trade, such as severe restrictions on the export of gold and essential foodstuffs, and made a sustained effort to limit imports to food and raw materials not produced in the empire. All of this kept customs officials busy inspecting the luggage of travelers, making surprise raids on shops, checking on movements of gold bars and gold bezants, and preventing forged coins from entering into circulation.
Nevertheless, the Byzantine government failed to develop any systematic plan to encourage industry or even to keep book on the balance between imports and exports. Keeping track would have been virtually impossible in any case, without a central bank or other institution through which all the money flow could ultimately pass. Each merchant and trader settled up his own balances with his counterparts in other countries, so the gross flows of coinage in both directions were large but the net inflow or outflow was obscured.
The whole process would have been a failure without the bezant. In both military affairs and in trade and commerce, the foundation of Byzantine wealth and financial clout was this wondrous golden coin. The emperors used every means to pursue the Lydian tradition of using gold coinage not just as money but also as public relations and advertising to emphasize their power and wealth. As a contemporary of Justinian described it, the gold money of the empire "is accepted everywhere from end to end of the earth. It is admired by all men and in all kingdoms, because no kingdom has a currency that can be compared to it." Another contemporary proclaimed, "It is not right for the Persian king or for any other sovereign in the whole barbarian world to imprint his own likeness on a gold stater, and that, too, though he has gold in his own kingdom; for they are unable to tender such a coin to those with whom they transact business." One hundred years later, Justinian II (685-711) went to war against the Arabs because the Caliph had struck gold coins with his own portrait. Justinian lost, but defeat did not discourage the Byzantine chronicler, who insisted, "It is not permissible to impress any other mark on gold coins but that of the Emperor of the Romans."15 Furthermore, Justinian won a moral victory in that struggle, for the Muslims later replaced the portraits and religious figures of the bezants with quotations from the Koran, thus distinguishing the Arab dinars for hundreds of years.16
The fame of the bezant has not faded with the passage of centuries: as recently as 1951, Lopez characterized the bezant as "the Dollar of the Middle Ages." Maybe even better than the dollar: "The bezant outstripped the dollar in stability and intrinsic value. Indeed, its record has never been equaled or even approached by any other currency."17 Lopez goes on to assert that "The bezant was more than a lump of gold. It was a symbol and a faith, the messenger of the divine emperor to his people and the ambassador of the chosen people to the other nations of the world.""
The early issues of bezant coins portrayed the image of the emperors, occasionally their spouses, and frequently their sons. Then Justinian II decided to proclaim not only his importance but his piety. He took the revolutionary step of exhibiting the haloed bust of Christ on his coinage. For its time, this was too much. Justinian's presumption helped ignite the Age of Iconoclasm, when populace and emperors rose up to eradicate all image-venerating doctrines and practices in the churches. The coinage was incidental. The primary focus of the movement was on the golden-haloed icons that decorated the walls of the churches and that had become objects of a cult-like veneration as channels from which superhuman power descended to mankind. The result for the emperors was far from a total loss: they filled their coffers with the gold torn from the places of religious worship by the iconoclasts. Thus, the gold from the Byzantine icons did not disappear any more than the gold in the Roman coinage had disappeared; it merely showed up in a new location and form.
Iconoclasm became official policy in 730 under the reign of Leo III (717-741), leading to more than one hundred years of savage persecution of reluctant clergy, accompanied by military battles with all who dared to harbor the old ideas. Leo, as it happens, had been a favored protege of Justinian II, the ill-behaved coin-maker. In an echo of the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece, Justinian grew suspicious of Leo and sent him off on a highly risky assignment to the far reaches of the eastern frontier. Leo surprised Justinian by accomplishing his mission and returning to Constantinople in one piece. Two emperors later,
in 717, Leo marched on the capital with his troops and seized the throne for himself.
Leo was a powerful military leader who won many victories in addition to those against the opponents of iconoclasm. He ruled over an empire that included all of modern Turkey and an additional three hundred miles beyond the eastern end of the Black Sea, the islands of Cyprus and Crete, everything on the west side of the Adriatic, and all of southern Italy to about one hundred miles north of Naples. He defended his territory against repeated attacks on both land and sea by the Arabs, who were eager to establish a bridgehead in southeastern Europe. When he was not fighting the good fight of the iconoclasts on the religious front, Leo forced the Jews under his domain to submit to baptism. 19
The first effort to restore image worship took place at the instigation of Emperor Irene, who organized a general church council in Constantinople in 786. For this, the Orthodox Church promoted Irene to sainthood, despite her failures of character and virtue."" The Age of Iconoclasm finally came to an official end in 843, by order of Theodora, who had more modestly assumed the title of empress. The icons were returned to their previous locations and their veneration was restored to orthodox dogma. Coinage design rapidly followed suit. Busts of helmeted emperors now appeared holding a cross; occasionally Christ showed up on the opposite side from the emperor's portrait. Emperor John I Tzimisces went so far as to issue coins showing him being crowned by the Virgin herself, with the hand of God above."
The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession Page 7