Coins and Coin Use in Northern-Europe:
from the Later Roman Empire to the beginning of the Early Middle Ages
Welcome to the website of the project Coins and Coin Use in Northern-Europe: from the Later Roman Empire to the beginning of the Early Middle Ages. Alongside a general description of the project and the selected archaeological sites, you will find on-line publications of coin finds.
From 1960 to 1988 the Coin Cabinet of the Royal Library of Belgium was involved in a project to catalogue all coin finds from the Iron Age, the Roman Empire and the Early Medieval period found in Belgium. This resulted in an impressive archive of coin finds and a computer database covering finds from modern Belgium from the 3rd century BC to the 7th century AD.
In addition to archival data, the Royal Library also holds a very rich coin collection with material found in Belgium. Together with newly identified coins from recent excavations in Wallonia and Flanders, this material is a unique historical source for the study of coin use and monetization in Northern Europe. The number of coin finds has increased dramatically since the early 1990s due to the increasing number of rescue excavations and the use of metal detectors by archaeologists.
The Coin Cabinet plans to re-launch this project in close collaboration with the Royal Museums of Art and History (KMKG - MRAH) as well as the Belgian Communities and Regions, to encourage research on the monetary unification and the development of coin use in Europe. This will be done by publishing and interpreting the available material from old and new excavations.
This project is part of the research projects by the Belgian Science Policy (initiative 1).
Within this broader framework, this project will concentrate on the transition of Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages and more specifically on the transition of the highly monetized society in the 4th century to a society in the 5th / 6th century where coins (and especially small change) played hardly any role at all. Late Roman writers inform us about the importance coins played in everyday life (e.g. John Chrysostomos, In Principium Actorum 4, 3 = P.G. 51, 99, 36-40) and from numerous coin finds we know that they circulated in even the remotest corners of the empire. All this changed dramatically in the first decades of the 5th century AD when Germanic people invaded the Roman empire and found it hard to maintain the institutions, tax systems and coinage of their predecessors. In the end the highly sophisticated monetary system of the Romans was replaced by one based on high value coins of gold only. This lack of coins and especially the absence of small change lasted to the very end of the Middle Ages.
Our knowledge of the monetary system in the 5th century is very partial. We know that the ruling classes possessed Roman and Byzantine gold coins before they started to coin their own series. However, on the use of small change we know hardly anything. The only certainty is that no copper coins and very rare silver ones were issued by the new Frankish rulers. That is why coins from well excavated and well documented sites are of prime importance to our understanding of the monetary history of this period and especially for the study of the use of small change. In this project, we will focus on well excavated Belgian sites with large numbers of late Roman coins and well documented contexts that should enable us to study the transitional period from the late 4th to the 5th century. For each site we will try to present a detailed description of the archaeological context and the function of the site, an analysis of the exact position of the coins, a complete catalogue of all coins from the Late Iron Age to the Early Middle Ages and an analysis of all the coin finds. All this information will contribute to our understanding of the evolution of a monetized Late Roman economy towards an Early Medieval one were coins are rare and evolve from all purpose to special purpose money.
Promoter
Prof. Dr. Johan van Heesch
Johan Van Heesch is curator of Coins and Medals in the Royal Library of Belgium. He specializes in Iron Age coins and coins and coin use in the Roman Empire; he has wide-ranging experience in the publication of coin finds from excavations and teaches numismatics at the universities of Louvain-la-Neuve and Leuven.
Project officer
Céline Ben Amar - celine.benamar@kbr.be
Koninklijke Musea voor Kunst en Geschiedenis - Musées royaux d’Art et d’Histoire - Royal Museums of Art and History Department of Merovingian archaeology