Byzantine Coins
The Coinage of Byzantine Coins
Byzantine coinage didn't begin as something new — it was Roman coinage that kept going for another thousand years after Rome itself fell. Constantine's gold solidus, introduced in the 4th century, stayed remarkably stable in weight and purity for roughly seven centuries, making it one of the longest-running currency standards in human history. What changed around it was everything else: the empire turned unmistakably Christian, and its coins turned into religious statements as much as economic ones.
That religious turn produced one of the strangest chapters in all of coin design. During the Iconoclasm controversy of the 8th and 9th centuries, images — including on coins — became genuinely dangerous political territory, and mints stripped imagery back to bare crosses and inscriptions for decades at a time. When portraiture returned, it came back changed: Christ Pantocrator, not the emperor, was now the dominant face on Byzantine gold.
Every coin below is organized by period — from the early empire's continuation of Roman tradition, through the Iconoclasm era and its aftermath, to the fractured successor states that kept minting “Roman” coins even after Constantinople itself had fallen to crusaders. Browse a category, or search for a specific emperor, mint, or reference number.
Explore Byzantine Coins
Early Byzantine
The direct continuation of late Roman coinage after Constantinople’s founding — same solidus standard, same imperial portrait tradition, gradually diverging in style and language from its Roman roots over the centuries leading up to Iconoclasm.
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Late Byzantine
A shrinking empire minting increasingly debased coinage, competing for trust against foreign currency (Venetian ducats circulated widely in Byzantine markets by this point) — the coins of an empire visibly running out of both silver and time before 1453.
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Middle Byzantine
The Iconoclasm controversy and its aftermath. Coin imagery briefly disappeared almost entirely, then returned transformed — this is also the period of the Macedonian dynasty’s artistic revival and, later, Alexios I Komnenos’s 1092 reform that introduced the distinctive cup-shaped scyphate coinage.
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Nicaea & Successor States
After crusaders sacked Constantinople in 1204, Byzantine claimants didn’t stop minting — they just did it from exile. Nicaea, Epirus, and Trebizond each struck coinage asserting Roman imperial legitimacy, until Nicaea recaptured Constantinople itself in 1261.
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Did You Know?
In 692 AD, Emperor Justinian II did something no Roman or Byzantine ruler had done in over a thousand years of coinage: he put Christ's portrait on the obverse of his gold solidus and moved his own image to the reverse — quietly admitting, in the most visible medium the empire had, that the emperor now ranked second to Christ on his own currency.
Coins in Byzantine Coins
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