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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;kevin McGonigal, post: 4517866, member: 72790&quot;]I suspect that it had something to do with simply the amount of gold versus silver ore from the&nbsp; mines. What would be interesting to know is what the price ratio of gold to silver was as the Empire tottered to its decline.&nbsp; It was about 12 to one in the early Empire. If silver became harder to get out of the ground while the extraction of gold ore remained a constant that would have raised the price of silver and made the silver coinage more valuable relative to gold. Whatever the reason was, it affected the Eastern Empire long after the West had collapsed. Silver coinage was something of an anomaly throughout most of the Byzantine Empire and rarely formed more than a token coinage, except toward the end when &quot;the gold of that country was no good&quot;, according to an Islamic merchant travelling about the later Empire. There is a good deal about the coinage and monetary policy of the Ancient World we simply do not know.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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