“He will ruin many from among the people”: market exchange in the Byzantine Empire and the reform of Emperor Anastasius I (拜占庭帝国的市场交易与阿纳斯塔修斯一世的货币改革)

Emperor Anastasius I (491-518) reformed the copper coinage of the Byzantine Empire in the year 498. Previously, the low-value coinage of the Empire had been made up of tiny ‘nummi’, manufactured over the previous century and a half, each perhaps worth 1/7200 of the Empire’s gold solidus. The reform replaced these with a hierarchy of coins worth 40, 20 and 10 nummi, marked with their denominations. However, it is disputed whether the coins were made at specific weights, or if they were valued purely by their denomination, irrespective of size and weight. Unusually, written sources of the time refer to this coin reform. Historians have read these sources differently, some seeing the reports as positive but others emphasising contemporary condemnations of Anastasius as an oppressor of the poor. This paper argues that the negative portrayal is the correct one, and that it derives from the mismatch between these competing notions of face-value, fiduciary, coinage and coinage valued by weight. This conforms with recent work on the nummus coinage from all around the Mediterranean and helps explain the sources on Anastasius I in a new way.