“The Coinage and Money in the Latin Empire of Constantinople” Revisited: What is a Coin in the Early 13th-Century Balkans and Anatolia?
A little more than twenty years ago, Alan Stahl’s “Coinage and Money in the Latin Empire of Constantinople” presented a simple yet insightful twofold argument: that the Latin Empire of Constantinople never produced its own coinage due to the contrast between the European and Byzantine monetary systems, and that Venetian coinage penetrated into the Balkans not as an act of imposition by the Republic but as a natural entry into a monetary vacuum. And yet, the most recent scholarly works on imitative coinages in the early thirteenth century see the hand of Venice as operating as early as 1208, even 1206 or 1204. Not only this, some scholars have gone as far as arguing that Venice produced Byzantinestyle imitative coins and then exported them en masse to be used not only in the Latin Empire of Constantinople, but also in neighboring lands like Bulgaria. In this paper, I will present how Stahl’s short paper can act as the key to understanding the post-Byzantine monetary economy of the first half of the thirteenth century in the Balkans.