Gold Coinage and Its Use in the Post-Roman West

Abstract

One of the most tangible sets of changes associated with the fall of the Western Roman Empire was that which affected the monetary system. By AD 600 the multitiered late Roman currency had shriveled to a shadow of its former self. Copper-alloy issues, which for most of the populace had been the principal coins utilized on a day-to-day basis, were effectively gone, as were those in silver. Little local production of unofficial coin to plug this gap took place (as had happened in the third-century West and parts of the fifth-century East), suggesting a genuine collapse of the mechanisms that had supported small-scale monetized exchange. This slump forms part of a wider picture of drastic simplification in exchange and economy, the pace and extent of which varied from province to province. In Britain it was most severe. There, circulation of any coin at all was minimal after the early fifth century. Vandal Africa, however, possessed a vibrant currency of small change, comprising newly made nummi as well as reused fourth-century coins; Ostrogothic Italy too saw the survival of a more diverse currency. Copper-alloy and silver coins continued to be produced and used in Byzantine North Africa and Italy down to the eighth century, albeit in dwindling quantity. Gaul, Spain, the Lombard lands of Italy, and other territories of the Western Empire fell between those extremes. Yet what united most former provinces was the persistence of gold coinage. Where copper alloy and silver declined and fell, gold endured, often on an impressive scale—enough to qualify the general picture of post-Roman monetary contraction.