In Coinage and Money Julian Baker offers a complete monetary history of medieval Greece, encompassing numismatic and documentary sources, and contributing to the general historiography.

Coinage and Money in Medieval Greece 1200-1430, by Julian Baker, is a monetary history of medieval Thessaly, mainland Greece and the Peloponnese, Epiros, and adjacent islands. The central focus of the book is the record of coin finds and coin types, which this study presents in a fully developed political, socio-economic, military, and archaeological/topographical context. In medieval Greece there is a strong symbiosis between monetary and historical developments. The general level of documentation is also vastly superior to the preceding middle Byzantine period. Volume Two presents and evaluates these data. Volume One offers analyses on major historical themes, which demonstrate that the monetary sources can hold narratives in their own rights, complementing and at times contradicting the established accounts.

Reveals how the concept of money did not materialize until the invention of Greek coinage

The papers in this volume re-assess the role of coined money in the ancient Greek world. Using new approaches, the book makes the results of numismatic as well as historical research accessible to students and scholars of ancient history. The chapters provide a wide-ranging account of thepolitical, social, and economic contexts within which coined money was used. In Part One the book focuses on the theme of monetization and the politics of coinage, while Part Two provides a series of case studies relating to the production and use of coined money in different areas of theGreek-speaking world, including Asia Minor, Egypt, and Rhodes as well as Greece itself. The individual chapters cover a broad chronological range from Archaic Greece to Roman Egypt. The book as a whole offers fresh insights into an important aspect of the ancient Greek economy.

Most people have some idea what Greeks and Romans coins looked like, but few know how complex Greek and Roman monetary systems eventually became. The contributors to this volume are numismatists, ancient historians, and economists intent on investigating how these systems worked and how they both did and did not resemble a modern monetary system. Why did people first start using coins? How did Greeks and Romans make payments, large or small? What does money mean in Greek tragedy? Was the Roman Empire an integrated economic system? This volume can serve as an introduction to such questions, but it also offers the specialist the results of original research.

This book was the first to undertake a comprehensive analysis of the impact of money on the economy, society and culture of the Greek and Roman worlds. It uses new approaches in economic history to explore how money affected the economy in antiquity and demonstrates that the crucial factors in its increasing influence were state-formation, expanding political networks, metal supply and above all an increasing sophistication of credit and contractual law. Covering a wide range of monetary contexts within the Mediterranean over almost a thousand years (c.600 BC–AD 300), it demonstrates that money played different roles in different social and political circumstances. The book will prove an invaluable introduction to upper-level students of ancient money, while also offering perspectives for future research to the specialist.

This book reconstructs the origins and spread of precious metal money in the Iron Age eastern Mediterranean (1200-600 BCE).