![]() The frontier regions themselves constituted a heavily monetized zone, with coins exchanged to provide for the needs of the soldiers garrisoned there and to pay for commodities imported across the border. On the reverse pagan deities gradually gave way to generalized symbolic representations of Roman virtues and scenes of the emperor in military contexts explicitly Christian imagery was rare.īeyond the frontiers delimited by the limes, or boundaries, along the Rhine and Danube Rivers, Roman coinage was a familiar phenomenon, especially to those in direct contact with the empire. The obverse of late Roman coins generally bore the image of the reigning emperor, with his name and honorific titles making up the surrounding legend. By the fifth century as many as 7,200 copper nummi were needed to buy a gold solidus, with no intermediate denominations available. Copper coinage was relatively common, of varying weights and denominations. The silver denarius had been the basis of the Roman monetary system during the republic and early empire, but in the fourth and fifth centuries silver coinage was rare. Fractions of the solidus also were minted in the west the third, or tremissis, was most common (fig. 309 well into the tenth century, by which time it was called a nomisma. The standard coin of the late empire was the gold solidus, which was of pure alloy and an unchanging weight of 24 karats, or 1⁄72 of the Roman pound (4.5 modern grams), from its introduction in a.d. Spain, which had been an important source of bullion in the earlier empire, lacked a mint in the later period, as did England after the closing of the mint of London in a.d. The regular mints of Europe for the next two centuries included Lyons and Arles in Gaul Trier in Rhineland Germany Rome, Milan, Ravenna, and Aquileia in Italy Siscia (modern-day Sisak) in Pannonia and Thessalonica (now Salonika) in Greece. Minting, like many other aspects of the Roman state, went through a period of disarray in the third century, to be revived and regularized by the reforms of the Roman emperors Diocletian and Constantine I around a.d. It was only in the ninth century and especially the tenth century that lands beyond the Roman imperial frontiers began to produce their own coins to supply a monetized economy.Ĭoinage was unified throughout the western Roman Empire, with mints scattered across Europe producing coins of various denominations of gold, silver, and copper. This same monetary division of Europe, following approximately the valleys of the Rhine and Danube Rivers, survived the political dissolution of the Roman Empire and was maintained almost until the end of the millennium. the borders of the Roman Empire divided Europe into two monetary zones: (1) a southern and western zone, in which coins were minted and circulated more or less regularly as an intrinsic part of the economy, and (2) a northern and eastern zone, which made no coins of its own and imported coins sporadically as a result of various interactions, economic and otherwise. In the early centuries of the first millennium a.d.
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