Ancient Byzantine Coins
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Current, continuously updated, auctions of common, scarce and rare Ancient Byzantine coins. (Previous links to books about Ancient Byzantine coins at Amazon.com; also see, Ancient Byzantium at Wikipedia.) Mintmark.com is officially affiliated with Amazon.com and eBay.
". . . The Byzantine coinage in gold, silver and bronze reflects surprising little of the great periods of Byzantine art in the sixth and eleventh centuries. In the time of Justinian, the types were still fixed, as they had been in the late Roman period, with the emperor's helmeted bust full-face, or, as on the triens (one-thrid of a solidus), his diademed profile, neither of which had even the merit of being well drawn. By the time of the second period under Alexius Comnenus (1081-1118), the coinage was already beginning to show signs of economic degeneration, which has usually been discouraging to artists. The coins of finest style were struck between these two periods, beginning in the reign of Heraclius (610-41), when Byzantine die-engravers seem first to have found their idiom, which was one of sensitive observation disciplined by extreme formality of composition, and ending soon after Michael IV (1034-41) began to tamper with the purity of the solidus. ¶ The iconoclast controversy was, until the Fourth Crusade, perhaps the most deeply felt experience in Byzantine history, and both sides left their mark on the coinage. The image of Christ was introduced on the reverse of the solidus in the first reign of Justinian II (685-95), and on some coins it was, it seems, even intended to supplant the emperor as the principal figure. It was suppressed in 717 by Leo III, founder of the iconoclastic Isaurian dynasty. For a period, even secular portraits were formalized and the facing busts of the emperors were deliberately drained of all personality, their features treated as pure pattern. The silver, on which no representation of the emperor appeared, became even more austere, its whole design an abstraction of lettering and symbols. But the precedent of Justinian II was not forgotten, and after the restoration of the icons in 843, the Pantocrator was adopted as a regular type on both gold and bronze, while the Virgin was represented on gold after the time of Leo VI (886-912), who was especially devoted to her cult. ¶ The Byzantine coinage was conservative, but not unchanging. As a minor battleground between Greek and Latin in its inscriptions and between iconoclast and iconodule in its imagery, it gives a fair picture of that remote and contentious civilization . . ." — Coins, by John Porteous
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