A Mysterious Hoard of 12th-13th Century Billon Trachea at Dumbarton Oaks

In the summer of 2024, I was awarded the Summer Fellowship in Byzantine Studies at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. As part of my Fellowship, I was conceded the opportunity of investigating a mysterious hoard of 792 coins. The hoard was found inside a wooden box in the coin cabinet of Dumbarton Oaks, but it had never been accessioned or studied by any scholar. After consulting the archives of DO, it became clear that the hoard was purchased c. 1930 by the Italian diplomat and numismatist Tommaso Bertelè in Prishtina, Kosovo. The initial fabric of the coins was scyphate, but they had been hammered flat, allegedly by the man the hoard was purchased from, who had planned to make them into buttons. Initially, it was believed that the hoard contained silver Bulgarian coins. However, upon closer inspection under a microscope, I discovered that the coins were not actually silver, but were silvered by the same button-maker in order to pass them off as genuine silver. The hoard contains original 12th-century Byzantine coins of Manuel I, Isaac II, Alexios III, coins of Nicaean emperor Theodore I Lascaris’s First billon coinage, as well as all three types of Bulgarian imitations and some early Latin imitations (both Constantinopolitan and “Thessalonican” types). The chronological profile of the hoard suggests a terminus ante quem for its deposit of c. 1210 and is similar to that of other hoards from modern-day Serbia. This unique hoards confirms and also increases our knowledge of the history of Southern Serbia and Kosovo in the turbulent years between the Sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204 and the addition of Kosovo to the Medieval Serbian kingdom in the late 1210s. The hoard and its analysis will be published in a forthcoming article in Dumbarton Oaks Papers.