The Other Empire: A First Glimpse of Byzantine Coinage

In the spring of AD 476, the last Western Roman emperor — a teenage boy named Romulus Augustulus, whose name ironically combined the founder of Rome with its first emperor — was deposed by a Germanic general named Odoacer. The event is conventionally treated as the moment “Rome fell.”

This is one of the most misleading dates in popular history.

While the Western Empire collapsed in the fifth century, the Eastern Roman Empire — ruled from Constantinople, the city Constantine the Great had founded on the Bosphorus a century and a half earlier — survived. It would continue to exist as a unified imperial state for another one thousand years after the so-called fall of Rome. It maintained its Roman identity, its Roman law, its Roman bureaucracy, and (for some centuries) its Roman language, while gradually transforming into something its inhabitants would still call Romanía but which modern historians would label Byzantine.

The Byzantines did not call themselves Byzantine. They called themselves Rhōmaîoi — Romans. To them, there was no break. The empire of Augustus and Constantine had simply continued, with its capital moved east and its religion now Christian. The break exists in our textbooks, not in their understanding of themselves.

And throughout those thousand years — from the sixth century reforms of Justinian to the final fall of Constantinople in 1453 — the Byzantine state continued to strike coinage. Byzantine coins survive in remarkable quantities. They circulated from Britain to Persia. They were copied by Islamic mints, Crusader kingdoms, Italian city-states, and successor monarchies across the medieval world. They constitute one of the longest continuous numismatic traditions in human history.

And almost nobody knows anything about them.

If you have spent any time with Roman coinage, you have probably encountered Byzantine coins in passing — those large, sometimes crude-looking bronzes with cryptic letters on the reverse, the obverse showing a stiff, frontal portrait of an emperor wearing what appears to be a tall hat. They look strange after the elegant naturalism of Roman portraiture. The Greek lettering can be intimidating. The denominations are confusing. The emperors have names most people have never heard.

This post is a first introduction to that world. Through four coins from the collection, spanning nearly 750 years of Byzantine history, we’ll trace the basic visual language of Byzantine coinage, the political and religious context that shaped it, and why this often-overlooked tradition deserves serious attention from anyone interested in the ancient world.

What Makes a Coin “Byzantine”?

There is no precise moment when Roman coinage becomes Byzantine coinage. Scholars use various conventional starting points:

• AD 330 — Constantine founds Constantinople, often treated as the birth of the eastern capital
• AD 395 — The empire is permanently divided at the death of Theodosius I
• AD 476 — The western empire formally ends with Romulus Augustulus
• AD 491 — The reign of Anastasius I, who issued a major currency reform (introducing the follis with its distinctive “M” mark) that defined Byzantine bronze coinage for centuries

Most numismatists use Anastasius’s reform of AD 498 as the practical dividing line. Before that, late Roman bronze coinage was a confused mess of tiny, debased coins called nummi — most worth so little that you needed hundreds to buy anything. Anastasius introduced larger denominations with clear value marks visible on the reverse, restoring rationality to the imperial currency.

That reform produced the coin format that would define Byzantine coinage for the next thousand years: a large bronze with a frontal portrait of the emperor on the obverse, and a giant Greek numeral on the reverse marking its value. The numeral M meant 40 nummi (the unit called a follis). The numeral K meant 20. The numeral I meant 10. The numeral E meant 5. A clear, mathematical, accessible system, designed for the everyday economy of an empire that still operated in cities, markets, and provincial mints across the Mediterranean.

The coins in the collection that follow that tradition span from the late sixth century to the early fourteenth — across all four “phases” of Byzantine history.

Coin 1 — Tiberius II Constantine: The Generous Emperor

The obverse shows the emperor’s crowned facing bust — a frontal portrait rather than the profile view used on Roman coinage for centuries. This shift toward the facing portrait is one of the most visible markers of the Byzantine transition. A profile portrait shows a man — a specific individual with characteristic features, like an actor on a stage. A facing portrait shows an icon — an image meant to be seen as if from inside a church, a frozen presence of imperial authority. The Byzantine emperor was not just a magistrate; he was the earthly representative of Christ’s authority, and his portrait was a kind of secular icon.

Tiberius II wears consular robes and holds two objects: a mappa (the ceremonial cloth used to signal the start of chariot races at the Hippodrome) and an eagle-tipped scepter topped with a cross. The mappa was an explicit link to the ancient Roman office of Consul — the highest republican magistracy, dating back to the founding of Rome in 509 BC. By holding it, the Byzantine emperor was claiming continuity with the entire Roman tradition stretching back over a thousand years. The cross atop the eagle scepter signaled that this Roman tradition was now Christian.

The reverse is dominated by a large M — the Greek letter mu, used here as the numeral 40. This is the follis, the largest copper denomination, worth 40 nummi. Above the M is a cross. To the left, ANNO (Latin for “in the year”). To the right, ЧII — Year 7 of the emperor’s reign. Below the M, CONE — the abbreviation for Constantinopolis, with the Greek letter epsilon (E) marking the fifth workshop of the great Constantinople mint.

Every element of this coin tells you something about the Byzantine world. The use of Latin (ANNO) alongside Greek numerals reflects a state still officially Latin-speaking in its administration but increasingly Greek in its daily culture. The cross above the value mark proclaims a Christian empire. The workshop letter (E for the fifth officina) tells you this came from one of multiple production lines running simultaneously at Constantinople’s enormous mint complex. The regnal year and emperor’s name in the legend would have allowed any literate citizen to verify the coin’s authority and freshness.

Tiberius II was, by all accounts, an extraordinarily generous ruler. He removed heavy taxes. He distributed massive donatives to soldiers and the poor. He was beloved during his lifetime and praised by Christian sources as a pious emperor. He also nearly bankrupted the state — his successors would spend decades dealing with the empty treasury he left behind. The coin in your hand is, in some sense, a piece of his generosity: large, weighty, well-struck, generously sized. The empire he ruled could still afford such substantial bronze coinage.

This was the Early Byzantine period — the world before Islam, before the great seventh-century crises, when the empire still controlled all of the eastern Mediterranean and was the largest, wealthiest, and most sophisticated state in the western world.

Coin 2 — Maurice Tiberius: Holding the Frontier

That name will be unfamiliar to most readers. It was the name given to Antioch after a series of catastrophic earthquakes in the AD 520s and 530s nearly destroyed the city. Justinian I rebuilt it on a grand scale and renamed it in honor of its Christian survival. Antioch had been one of the great cities of antiquity for over eight centuries — the third-largest in the Roman Empire after Rome and Alexandria, a metropolis of half a million people at its peak. As Theoupolis, it remained the strategic linchpin of the eastern Roman frontier against Persia.

Maurice Tiberius succeeded the generous Tiberius II and faced the consequences of his predecessor’s spending. He was a capable, hardworking emperor who managed the imperial budget carefully, won a major war against the Sassanid Persians, and even installed a friendly Persian king on the throne of the empire’s traditional enemy. He was eventually overthrown and brutally murdered by a usurper named Phocas in AD 602 — an event that triggered a chain of disasters that would nearly destroy the Eastern Roman Empire.

But in AD 585-586, when this coin was struck, the empire was holding firm. The half follis (20 nummi) was the everyday currency of Antioch’s markets — used for bread, wine, oil, and small transactions. The obverse follows the same template as Tiberius II’s coinage: the facing imperial portrait, the consular robes, the mappa and eagle-tipped scepter. Byzantine coinage rapidly developed standardized iconography that persisted across reigns.

The reverse shows a large XX — the Greek numeral for 20. To the left, ANNO. To the right, II II — Year 4 of Maurice’s reign. Above the XX, a cross. Below, THЄUP — the abbreviation for Theoupolis.

This coin tells you something specific that Tiberius II’s Constantinople follis does not. The empire still operated regional mints producing distinct local coinage that named their cities of origin. Anyone holding this half follis in 580s Syria would have known immediately that it was struck nearby — that the imperial authority was present at their local mint, that taxes and trade flowed through their city, that they were not forgotten on the imperial periphery.

Within two generations of this coin’s striking, that would change forever. The Persians would invade and briefly conquer Antioch (AD 611-628). Then, in the 630s, Arab armies emerging from the deserts of Arabia would conquer Syria permanently, ending Roman rule over Antioch after seven centuries. Theoupolis would never again strike Roman coinage. By AD 700, the eastern provinces that had produced this coin had been lost to the new Islamic Caliphate, and the Byzantine Empire had shrunk to less than half its former size.

The Maurice Tiberius half follis is therefore a particularly poignant artifact: a piece of normal commerce from a city that was about to disappear from the Roman world forever. Within the lifetime of children who might have spent this coin in an Antioch marketplace, the markets themselves would be operating in Arabic under Caliphal rule.

The Long Silence — and What Happened In Between

Between Coin 2 (Maurice Tiberius, AD 586) and our next Byzantine coin (Theophilus, AD 829), nearly two and a half centuries passed. These centuries were the most catastrophic in Byzantine history. The empire that emerged from them was a radically different institution from the one that had ruled in the sixth century.

A brief summary of what happened:

The seventh century saw the Persian invasion (614), the loss of Egypt (621) and Syria (636) to the Arab Caliphate, the Arab siege of Constantinople (674-678), and the permanent contraction of the empire to Asia Minor, the Balkans, and a few Italian footholds. The population collapsed. Trade networks disintegrated. Cities shrank or disappeared. The empire became a smaller, poorer, more militarized state focused on survival.

The eighth century brought the Iconoclastic Controversy — a religious conflict over whether Christians could legitimately depict Christ, the Virgin, and the saints in religious imagery. Successive emperors banned and then restored religious images, splitting the empire and church for over a century. Byzantine coinage during this period reflects the controversy: some emperors removed Christian imagery from their coins entirely, others restored it. Religious iconography on currency was not a casual decoration; it was a political statement.

By the early ninth century, when our next coin was struck, the empire had stabilized and was beginning a long recovery. The Iconoclastic period was ending. The Caliphate was fragmenting. Constantinople remained the largest city in Christendom. The Byzantine state had survived everything thrown at it and was ready to expand again.

Coin 3 — Theophilus: The Last Iconoclast

Look at this coin and compare it to the Tiberius II and Maurice Tiberius coins above. The differences are not subtle. The portrait style has changed — less specific, more iconic, more stylized. The Latin has nearly disappeared from the legends. The reverse no longer carries a giant numeral with regnal year and mint mark; instead, it carries a four-line religious inscription running across the entire field.

This is Middle Byzantine coinage. The aesthetic, the layout, and the function have all evolved.

Theophilus was the last emperor of the iconoclastic period. He banned the veneration of religious images, persecuted iconodule monks who continued to produce and venerate icons, and aggressively reformed both the imperial administration and the coinage. His death in AD 842 was followed within a year by the Triumph of Orthodoxy — the formal restoration of icon veneration by his widow Theodora, which has been celebrated annually in the Orthodox Church for nearly twelve hundred years.

The obverse shows the emperor in elaborate ceremonial dress holding a cross-tipped globe and a labarum (a Christian military standard). The portrait is heavily stylized — barely recognizable as the same individual whose face appears in surviving Byzantine art. By the ninth century, Byzantine imperial portraiture had become almost purely iconic, with little attempt at individual likeness. The emperor was the office, not the man.

The reverse shows a Greek inscription reading approximately:

+ ΘЄO / FILЄ AVG / OVSTЄ SV / NICAS

This translates as: “Theophilus, Augustus, may you conquer!” — a direct address to the emperor in the imperative voice, asking divine blessing upon his reign.

This is a profound shift from earlier Byzantine coinage. The Maurice Tiberius half follis told its holder what the coin was worth (XX = 20 nummi) and where it came from (Theoupolis). The Theophilus follis told its holder what to pray for. The coin had become a portable prayer — a daily religious object that put a blessing for the emperor into every transaction.

This was no accident. Middle Byzantine coinage was deliberately designed to participate in the empire’s religious life. By the ninth century, the boundary between civic and religious authority had effectively dissolved. The emperor ruled by divine sanction. Every coin was both currency and devotional artifact.

The empire that produced this coin was smaller than Maurice Tiberius’s empire but more religiously unified, more militarily disciplined, and on the verge of a long expansion. Theophilus’s successors would launch the so-called Macedonian Renaissance — a two-century revival of Byzantine literature, art, scholarship, and military power that would push the empire’s frontiers back into Syria, southern Italy, and the Balkans. By the year 1025, Constantinople would once again be the dominant power in the eastern Mediterranean.

That recovery would not last forever.

The Long Decline

Between Theophilus’s reign and the next coin in our sequence, the Byzantine Empire underwent one of the most dramatic collapses in medieval history.

The eleventh century opened with Byzantium at its medieval peak. The Macedonian dynasty had ruled successfully for nearly two centuries. The empire stretched from the Adriatic to Antioch. Byzantine gold solidi — known as bezants in the medieval west — were the dominant international currency of the medieval Mediterranean.

By the end of the eleventh century, everything had changed. In AD 1071, at the Battle of Manzikert in eastern Anatolia, a Turkish army led by Sultan Alp Arslan annihilated the Byzantine field army and captured the emperor. The catastrophe opened all of Asia Minor — the empire’s heartland for centuries — to Turkish settlement. Within two decades, Byzantine authority in Anatolia had collapsed.

The twelfth century brought the Crusades. The First Crusade (1095-1099) created Latin Christian states in the Levant that the Byzantines treated as both allies and threats. The Fourth Crusade (1202-1204) was catastrophic: Western crusaders, diverted from their original target by Venetian financing, attacked and sacked Constantinople itself. The city was looted on a scale unprecedented in European history. The Byzantine state effectively dissolved, replaced by a “Latin Empire” of crusader rule and three competing Byzantine successor states.

In 1261, one of those successor states — the Empire of Nicaea — managed to recapture Constantinople. The Byzantine state was restored under the Palaiologos dynasty. But it was a shadow of what it had been. The empire of Andronikos II — our final coin — controlled little more than Constantinople, Thessaloniki, parts of the Aegean, and the Peloponnese in southern Greece.

It was no longer the great power of the medieval Mediterranean. It was a struggling regional state, threatened by Turkish expansion from the east, Catalan mercenaries from the west, Bulgarian kings from the north, and Italian merchant republics from the sea.

Coin 4 — Andronikos II Palaiologos: The Twilight

Andronikos II Palaiologos ruled from 1282 to 1328 — one of the longest reigns of any Byzantine emperor. He inherited the partially-restored empire from his father Michael VIII, who had recaptured Constantinople from the Latins in 1261. Andronikos spent his reign trying to manage decline. He cut military spending dramatically. He hired Catalan mercenaries to fight the Turks (a disaster — they turned on the empire and ravaged Greek territories for years). He attempted religious union with the Latin West and was rejected by his own population. He was eventually deposed by his own grandson in a civil war.

The basilikon was Andronikos’s attempt to introduce a stable silver currency that could compete with the Venetian grosso — the silver coin that had come to dominate Mediterranean trade. The basilikon was deliberately modeled on the grosso in size and weight, designed for international commerce rather than domestic markets.

Look at the iconography on this coin. The obverse shows Christ Pantocrator seated on a throne, his right hand raised in blessing, his left holding the Gospels. This is the most sacred image in Orthodox Christianity, normally found at the apex of Byzantine church domes. By placing Christ on the obverse — the position traditionally reserved for the ruler — the coin acknowledged that the true emperor of the Byzantine world was Christ himself. The earthly emperor was merely his representative.

The reverse shows Andronikos II standing alongside his son Michael IX, both wearing imperial regalia, both holding a long cross between them. This depicted the co-emperor system of the late Byzantine state, where succession was managed by appointing the heir as co-ruler during the lifetime of the senior emperor. The cross between them signaled their joint participation in Christ’s authority.

The Greek inscriptions name them in their full imperial titulature, in the Byzantine Greek that had been the language of administration and culture for centuries.

This coin, in other words, is fully medieval Byzantine — not late Roman, not transitional, but a distinct medieval Christian currency that has evolved into its own coherent tradition. The Latin inheritance is gone. The Roman precedents are gone. What remains is something that the Byzantines themselves would still call Romaikon (Roman) but which by every other measure is its own civilization.

Within 133 years of this coin’s striking, that civilization would end. On May 29, 1453, the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II would breach the walls of Constantinople, and the last Byzantine emperor — Constantine XI, who carried the same name as the city’s founder eleven centuries earlier — would die fighting in the streets. The Byzantine Empire would cease to exist.

The basilikon you might hold in your hand was struck during the empire’s penultimate century. Its iconography looked back to a thousand years of Christian Roman tradition. Its existence depended on a state that was running out of time.

What Byzantine Coinage Tells Us

These four coins span 740 years — from the era when the Byzantine Empire was still the largest Mediterranean state, through its catastrophic seventh-century contraction, its ninth-century recovery, its eleventh-century peak, its twelfth-century crisis, and its long late-medieval decline.

Several features run through all of them:

The emperor as icon, not individual. Roman portraiture aimed at recognizable likeness — Hadrian looks like Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius looks like Marcus Aurelius. Byzantine portraiture aimed at the eternal office — the emperor as the office, frozen in eternal frontal pose, his individual features subordinated to his symbolic role. This shift began with the late Roman emperors and matured into pure iconographic convention by the Middle Byzantine period.

The fusion of imperial and religious authority. Roman coins occasionally depicted gods. Byzantine coins were religious objects. The cross above the value mark, the Christ Pantocrator on the obverse, the prayer for the emperor on the reverse — these were not decoration. They were active participants in the Christian life of the empire.

The persistence of the imperial vocabulary. Even seven centuries after Tiberius II, the emperor was still styled autokrator and basileus. Even when the Latin was gone, the office it described continued. The Byzantines genuinely believed they were Romans — and on the evidence of their coinage, they had a strong case.

The visible compression of the state. Compare the sizes, weights, and metal content of Tiberius II’s follis (large, heavy, full Constantinople workshop infrastructure) to Andronikos II’s basilikon (modest silver, simplified, struck in an empire reduced to a fraction of its former territory). The coins record not just political continuity but material decline — the slow physical contraction of a state that had once spanned the Mediterranean.

Why Byzantine Coinage Matters

For a collector or a history enthusiast coming from Roman coinage, Byzantine coinage offers something genuinely different.

It is the longest continuous coinage tradition in human history. The Byzantine state struck coins continuously for over a thousand years, from Anastasius’s reform in 498 to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. No other state in any era has matched this. Their coins are the principal physical evidence we have for an entire civilization that history has often treated as a footnote.

It is remarkably affordable. Despite their rarity in the popular imagination, Byzantine bronzes survive in enormous quantities. A decent Byzantine follis or half follis can usually be purchased for $30-100 — comparable to or less than equivalent Roman pieces. Silver Byzantine coins are slightly more expensive but still accessible. For the collector building a chronological collection that extends beyond Rome, Byzantine coins fill the medieval gap in ways no other tradition can.

It is deeply tied to the broader history of the world we still inhabit. The Orthodox Church traces its visual and liturgical traditions back to Byzantine origins. Russian, Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian, and Romanian cultures all carry direct Byzantine inheritance. The medieval Mediterranean economy operated on Byzantine gold. The medieval university preserved Greek learning largely through Byzantine intermediaries. The Renaissance was partially fueled by Greek scholars fleeing the fall of Constantinople in 1453, bringing manuscripts to Italy. Holding a Byzantine coin is holding evidence of a civilization whose influence on our own remains underappreciated.

It is the bridge between antiquity and the medieval world. The transition from Tiberius II in 580 to Andronikos II in 1320 is the transition from late antiquity to high medieval Christendom. The coins record that transition in physical form — the gradual replacement of Latin with Greek, of imperial portraits with religious icons, of huge bronze folles with small silver basilikon, of a Mediterranean empire with a regional medieval state.

If you have collected Roman coinage, you have spent time with the empire of Augustus, Trajan, and Marcus Aurelius. Byzantine coinage lets you continue that conversation forward by another thousand years — through Constantine’s Christian transformation, through the Arab and Turkish wars, through the Crusades, through the long twilight, all the way to the morning of May 29, 1453, when the last Roman emperor died fighting in the streets of his city.

The empire didn’t fall in 476. It just moved east and changed its language.

The coins are still there to prove it.

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To meet the four Byzantine rulers featured in this post individually, see Maurice Tiberius, Tiberius II Constantine, Theophilus, and Andronikos II Palaiologos. To understand the late Roman imperial system that the Byzantine Empire inherited, see our post on the Third-Century Crisis and our guide to Roman coin denominations. To explore the wider collection including Greek, Roman, Sasanian, and Islamic coinage, browse the full archive.