By Mike Markowitz for CoinWeek …..
Thanks to generations of intermarriage within a relatively narrow elite, almost everyone in the Byzantine ruling class of the 12th century was related to everyone else. As a result, politics took on the character of fratricide: the war of brother against brother. This was the background against which the catastrophic events of the Fourth Crusade (1202 – 1204) unfolded. We are unusually well-informed about this crusade because written accounts survive from participants on both sides–notably the French knight Geoffroi de Villehardouin (c. 1150 – 1213)[1] and the Byzantine official and chronicler Niketas Choniates (c. 1155 – 1217)[2].
In 1198, Lotario dei Conti di Segni, from a family that produced nine cardinals and four popes, became Pope Innocent III[3]. He proclaimed a Fourth Crusade on August 15 of that year. The purpose of the Crusades was to regain the holy city of Jerusalem from the Muslims, who had captured it in 1187. Preoccupied with their own quarrels, the rulers of Europe were reluctant to campaign in the East, and it took several years to organize an army of Crusaders. It was agreed that the first target would be the powerful Muslim Ayyubid dynasty in Egypt, and the army would assemble at the great maritime city of Venice.
Unfortunately, the Venetians had other plans.
On September 12, 1185, the brutal and unpopular Byzantine emperor Andronikos I Komnenos was overthrown by his cousin, the rebel Isaac II Angelos, who killed an imperial officer sent to arrest him. Isaac took refuge in the great cathedral of Hagia Sophia and appealed to the population of Constantinople for support:
…[T]he mob broke into the palace, falling on everything of value that it contained … Andronicus, bound and fettered with a heavy chain around his neck was brought before Isaac for punishment. His right hand was cut off and he was thrown into prison … he was blinded in one eye and brought forth on a scrawny camel to face the fury of his erstwhile subjects (Norwich, 153).
After three days of torture and mutilation, Andronikos died. The “Game of Thrones” in Constantinople was a rough sport.
Byzantine coinage of this era consisted of three main denominations. The gold hyperpyron weighed about 4.4 grams and was 21.5 carats fine (89.58% pure). The silver aspron trachy (usually described as “electrum” because it contained a few percent of gold) had the same weight. Officially, three or four of these traded for one gold hyperpyron. A cup-shaped copper coin with a few percent of silver, confusingly called the trachy, weighed about 3 grams, and 184 of them could be exchanged for a single hyperpyron. The flat copper tetarteron of about 3.5 grams served as small change, with 864 — or more! — exchanging for one gold hyperpyron.
Isaac II
The nobleman whose sudden outburst of unwonted temerity has raised him to the throne was a weak, incompetent young man of thirty, with florid face and red hair, and the vanity of a peacock. The national situation was desperate … the accession of Isaac Angelus to power was little short of disastrous (Goodacre, 285).
For 10 years, Isaac II Angelos ruled a disintegrating empire. He defeated a Norman invasion in the Balkans but lost Bulgaria to a revolt provoked by the heavy taxes he imposed on the peasants. Isaac especially revered the Archangel Michael, who figures prominently on his coinage.[4] To finance his extravagant building projects, he debased the coinage – the electrum aspron[5] falling to just 4 carats (16.6% gold) and the billon trachy[6] to just 2% or 3% silver. The humble copper tetarteron bears the facing bust of Archangel Michael on one side and the emperor on the reverse.[7]
In 1195, Isaac was deposed by his elder brother, who took power as Alexios III. Isaac was blinded and imprisoned.
Alexios III
Alexius III proved to be in some respects a more despicable ruler than the brother he supplanted. In his personal appearance, he had the advantage, being handsome and of engaging manners, but he was entirely under the thumb of his wife, Euphrosyne Ducaena… (Goodacre, 290)
Alexios III was born around 1156 and came to the throne at about the age of 30. His coinage is relatively common. The gold hyperpyron[8] bears a standing figure of Christ on the obverse. On the reverse, Alexios stands beside Saint Constantine I, his sainthood indicated by a halo. The fourth-century founder of Constantinople is inaccurately shown bearded (he was actually clean-shaven) and dressed anachronistically in 12th-century Byzantine imperial garb. On the electrum aspron, Christ is enthroned on the obverse, and the two figures on the reverse hold a labarum (a kind of military standard) between them.[9] The billon trachy bears a facing bust of Christ, with the two standing figures on the reverse holding a small globe topped by a cross (a globus crucifer).[10]
Alexios III attempted to negotiate with the Crusaders when their fleet arrived at Constantinople but rejected their demand to abdicate in favor of young Prince Alexios, the son of Isaac II, who had promised them an extravagant amount of money in exchange for their help in putting him on the throne. On the night of July 17, 1203, the Crusaders stormed the city, setting part of it on fire. Alexios III fled, taking “1,000 pounds of gold” (roughly 72,000 gold coins). Eventually captured, he was traded around as a VIP hostage for years, dying in a monastery around 1212.
Released from his dungeon, the blind Isaac II was restored to the throne (even though blindness was legally disqualifying), and his 14-year-old son, the prince, was crowned as Alexios IV.
Isaac II Restored with Alexios IV
No coins were known from this brief joint reign (July 1203 – February 1204) until the 1970s when a few copper tetartera turned up in Istanbul. The Dumbarton Oaks catalog lists six examples (Hendy, 424). A coin with an exceptionally clear inscription brought the astonishing price of $14,000 in a 2012 U.S. auction.[11]
Isaac’s blinding and long imprisonment had undermined his mental health and he was an invalid. Young Alexios managed to alienate the population and many of the elite by openly fraternizing with the hated Crusaders. An official named Alexios Doukas (known by the nickname Mourtzuphlos meaning “bushy eyebrows”) staged another palace coup. Alexius IV was imprisoned and later strangled, while Isaac died either of natural causes or was killed. Alexios Doukas was crowned as Emperor Alexios V on February 5, 1204.
When the Crusaders stormed and sacked Constantinople on April 12, 1204. Alexios V fled the city, taking refuge with his exiled father-in-law, the deposed Alexius III, who had him blinded. Eventually hunted down and captured by the Crusaders, he was flung to his death from the top of the 40-meter (130-foot) tall Column of Theodosius[12] in Constantinople in December 1204. No coins are known from his brief reign.
Enrico Dandolo
Born about 1107, Enrico Dandolo, the 41st Doge (chief executive) of Venice, was already elderly and blind when he was elected in 1192. He introduced a major reform of the Venetian coinage, which consisted mainly of tiny crude denari of debased alloy (less than 50% silver) weighing a fraction of a gram.[13] Dandolo’s new coin, the grosso (“big one”) of nearly pure silver (98.4%) weighing about 2.2 grams[14], was valued at 24 of the little denari. The coin bore a seated figure of Christ on the obverse and the standing figures of the Doge and Saint Mark (patron of Venice) on the reverse. British historian Peter Spufford (1934-2017) suggests that the grosso was needed as a convenient way to pay Venetian shipyard workers and mariners for the Crusade (Spufford, 226).
Dandolo died in 1205 and was entombed in Constantinople’s Hagia Sophia. When the Byzantines regained control of the city in 1261, they threw out his bones, but the inscribed marble lid of his tomb can still be seen there.
Latin Empire
After taking control of Constantinople, the Crusaders divided up the Byzantine Empire.[15] The Byzantine heartland became the “Latin Empire of Constantinople”, with Baldwin of Flanders[16] as its emperor. The short-lived Latin Empire was strapped for cash, and many ancient bronze statues throughout the city were melted down and made into small change. These “Latin imitative trachea”[17] copy 12th-century Byzantine coins but are cruder and even more poorly struck. The inscriptions are usually garbled or illegible.
Philippe II
Image: CNG/CoinWeek.
Much of the coinage brought East with the Crusaders would have been the circulating base silver of Western Europe–for example, the Paris Mint denier[18] of French king Philippe II, who ruled from 1180 to 1223. Weighing a bit more than a gram, these were struck in billon, an alloy of less than 50% silver. In Western Europe, large sums of money were usually expressed in “marks” (notionally defined as half a pound of good silver), but there were many different standards for this unit of account. The agreement with Venice in 1201 specified that the Crusaders would pay 85,000 marks for the transportation of their army, but they managed to come up with only 51,000 (Williams, 218). The debt was finally settled with the enormous amount of loot from the sack of Constantinople – including some of the transplanted treasures of ancient Rome itself.
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Notes for Coins of the Fourth Crusade
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_of_Villehardouin
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niketas_Choniates
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Innocent_III
[4] CNG E-auction 570, September 11, 2024, Lot 603. Realized $375 USD (estimate $200)
[5] Leu Web Auction 30, July 13, 2024, Lot 3130. Realized CHF 270 (about $302 USD; estimate CHF 75).
[6] CNG E-auction 548, October 18, 2023, Lot 730. Unsold (estimate $100 USD).
[7] Leu Web Auction 17, August 14, 2021, Lot 3221. Realized CHF 180 (about $195 USD; estimate CHF 50).
[8] CNG Mail Bid Sale 72, June 14, 2006, Lot 2190. Realized $1,200 USD (estimate $400).
[9] CNG E-auction 408, October 25, 2017, Lot 606. Realized $300 USD (estimate $200).
[10] CNG E-auction 546, September 13, 2023, Lot 552. Realized $400 USD (estimate $150).
[11] CNG E-auction 464, July 25, 2012, Lot 447. Realized $14,000 USD (estimate $100).
[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forum_of_Theodosius#Column_of_Theodosius
[13] CNG E-auction 379, July 27, 2016, Lot 530. Realized $95 USD (estimate $100).
[14] CNG E-auction 464, March 25, 2020, Lot 211. Realized $1,500 USD (estimate $300).
[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitio_terrarum_imperii_Romaniae
[16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldwin_I,_Latin_Emperor
[17] Numismatik Naumann Auction 67, July 1, 2018, Lot 778. Realized €70 (about $82 USD; estimate €50).
[18] CNG E-auction 464, March 25, 2020, Lot 81. Realized $250 USD (estimate $100).
References
Goodacre, Hugh. A Handbook of the Coinage of the Byzantine Empire. London (1960)
Grierson, Philip. Coins of Medieval Europe. London (1991)
Hendy, Michael. Catalogue of the Byzantine Coins in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection: Volume Four, Alexius I to Michael VIII 1081-1261. Washington (1999)
Kaldellis, Anthony. The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium. Oxford (2024)
Madden, Thomas. Enrico Dandolo and the Rise of Venice. Baltimore (2003)
Malloy, Alex. Coins of the Crusader States, Second Edition. Fairfield, CT (1994)
Nicolle, David. The Fourth Crusade 1202-1204: The Betrayal of Byzantium. Oxford (2011)
Norwich, John. Byzantium: The Decline and Fall. New York (1996)
Riley-Smith, Jonathan. Atlas of the Crusades. New York (1991)
Sear, David. Byzantine Coins and Their Values, Second Edition. London (1987)
Spufford, Peter. Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe. Cambridge (1988)
Williams, Paul. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to The Crusades. Indianapolis (2002)
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