My good friend found a golden byzantine coin today.. JOHN III, EMPIRE OF NICAEA, 1222-1254, HYPERPYRON, 4.5o gr...
The red Boscoreale toning is lovely. I think that's supposed to imply that the soil it was buried in was sulfur rich? Lovely coin in any event and awesome find.
Amazing find! Sadly, I live in Canada.... Best thing i ever found was a 1900-H Large Cent. My Dad, once found some Roman copper coins when he was digging a foundation for a tool shed. But that was in Julich which had a long history of coinage dating back to the Romans.
when he saw what he found, he was staring at the coin, in total shock, for a few minutes..his first golden coin!!!
At the time of the coin's minting there was not much left of the Byzantine Empire and the purity of the metal, originally 24 carats, had been tampered with by the time so the bezant or solidus was no longer the international coin it once was. As such it would be instructive to know where it was found as evidence of its circulation area by the 13th century. Can you tell us where it was located?
Yes, I was wondering how far that coin might have circulated from Nicaea. If at some distance, the bezant might have still been important in Mediterranean trade or, if in Western Europe, brought there by a returning Crusader but if close to the city, these coins, because of recent debasing and lightening, may no longer have had more than regional currency. That is one reason why where a coin was unearthed, its milieu, is important to archaeologists and historians as well as numismatists.
