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19 results

  • 7 - Money and Barbarians: Same Coins, Different Functions

  • Andrei Gandila, University of Alabama, Huntsville
  • Book:
    Cultural Encounters on Byzantium's Northern Frontier, c. AD 500–700
    Published online:
    08 October 2018
    Print publication:
    25 October 2018, pp 243-279

  • Summary

    This chapter explores economic and non-economic functions performed by coins. While precious metal coins have been connected with political payments, current interpretations of Byzantine bronze coins found outside the frontier are chiefly economic. Ethnographic research assessing the impact of money on traditional societies in the colonial period can shed some light on the Byzantine case. Drawing on such anthropological parallels for the use of monetary instruments by traditional communities, the chapter demonstrates that coins served mainly non-economic purposes. Byzantine bronze coins were brought by barbarians recruited in the Byzantine army or by prisoners taken to the lands north of the Danube. From an economic, but non-monetary, perspective coins were more attractive for their intrinsic value as raw material for the production of jewelry. As one moves farther from the border, the social appropriation of coins as amulets, souvenirs, and objects of prestige increases. Many were included in graves as “Charon’s obol” or mounted into earrings, finger rings, and necklaces. The local imitation of Byzantine coins further confirms the high demand and underscores the non-economic function.

  • 3 - Christianity North of the Danube

  • Andrei Gandila, University of Alabama, Huntsville
  • Book:
    Cultural Encounters on Byzantium's Northern Frontier, c. AD 500–700
    Published online:
    08 October 2018
    Print publication:
    25 October 2018, pp 101-130

  • Summary

    This chapter tackles one of the most debated issues of the past decades: the empire’s religious influence beyond the frontier. Current interpretation present sixth-century Christianity in the lands north of the Danube frontier as the culmination of a centuries-long process of Christianization and Romanization. The validity of the standard narrative needs to be reassessed in light of the archaeological evidence. As part of the Empire’s political agenda of cultural integration, items with religious significance arrived north of the Danube as prestige objects for local elites or as Christian artifacts for believers; however, the archaeological context of such finds is inconclusive and their religious designation cannot be fully ascertained. No churches have been yet discovered north of the river and burials reveal a series of mixed practices. There are no imperial initiatives for the Christianization of newly arrived groups in the Danube region; furthermore, Christians from existing settlements were left to their own devices. Without a coherent institutional framework to guide and regulate practices, religion evolved in an unsystematic fashion.

  • 4 - Contact and Separation on the Danube Frontier

  • Andrei Gandila, University of Alabama, Huntsville
  • Book:
    Cultural Encounters on Byzantium's Northern Frontier, c. AD 500–700
    Published online:
    08 October 2018
    Print publication:
    25 October 2018, pp 131-153

  • Summary

    Drawing on post-colonial theory and new directions in world-systems analysis, this chapter offers an archaeological reinterpretation of the Danube region as a cultural interface between Early Byzantium and barbaricum. The surge of Byzantine artifacts across the frontier, such as amphorae, lamps, brooches, and buckles, points to different channels of distribution and particular preferences associated with the creation of elite identity. This cultural dynamic reshaped the nearby barbaricum into a “negotiated periphery” due to the active agency of “barbarians” in taking control of their cultural identity, while interaction itself brought benefits to both sides. However, it also developed into a “bipolar periphery,” since cultural contact was equally the result of cooperation and conflict, of “barbarians” drawn into the empire’s service and “barbarians” drawn by the empire’s wealth and bent on plunder. In the end, both helped spread Byzantine goods, fashions, and religious ideas in the northern world. More importantly, it becomes clear that the Danube’s political function of separation could not function unless there was sufficient cultural interaction between the two sides of the river.

  • 2 - Cultural Diversity in the Danube Region and Beyond: An Archaeological Perspective

  • Andrei Gandila, University of Alabama, Huntsville
  • Book:
    Cultural Encounters on Byzantium's Northern Frontier, c. AD 500–700
    Published online:
    08 October 2018
    Print publication:
    25 October 2018, pp 33-100

  • Summary

    This chapter is a detailed analysis of the archaeological evidence of cultural interaction on the Early Byzantine Danube frontier. This is all the more necessary as the topic has been excessively politicized in the previous century under the ideology of national-communism. The cultural heritage of modern nations in Eastern Europe was often explained in terms of continuity/discontinuity - an identity acquired after the Roman conquest and later maintained through close contact with the Byzantine world. The study of archaeological material demonstrates that the Empire’s influence did not target a specific ethnic group. Basic items of little value in the frontier fortresses took on a special social significance once they crossed the Danube. Common brooches and buckles became status symbols and mass-produced amphorae showcased the owner’s ability to gain access to Roman wine and olive oil. We are dealing with a group of societies having distinct cultural preferences. Some of them were dictated by the need to preserve cultural identity in the highly competitive world of barbaricum, while others were driven by a long-standing tradition of building social prestige in relation to Byzantium.

  • 5 - The Flow of Byzantine Coins Beyond the Frontier

  • Andrei Gandila, University of Alabama, Huntsville
  • Book:
    Cultural Encounters on Byzantium's Northern Frontier, c. AD 500–700
    Published online:
    08 October 2018
    Print publication:
    25 October 2018, pp 154-190

  • Summary

    This chapter introduces coins as a key primary source for the study of political, diplomatic, and cultural interaction in the northern frontier region. The coin is not only the most widely and frequently circulated Byzantine object in barbaricum, but also the most reliable and chronologically sensitive. Notwithstanding its own limitations, numismatic material affords the rare opportunity to analyze vast frontier regions in comparison through the lens of a single historical source. This chapter focuses on the Danube and the north-western Black Sea region and demonstrates that Byzantine emperors used money to achieve stability on the frontier by sending gifts of gold coins to various tribal warlords. If gold coins clearly served such political purposes, low-value bronze coins reflect the circulation of common people. Since they are carefully dated with the regnal year of the ruling emperor copper coins confirm the continuous traffic of Byzantine goods across the Danube frontier and highlight the historical conditions responsible for periods of decline or interruption of cultural contact between the two sides of the river.

  • 1 - The Roman Frontier in Late Antiquity

  • Andrei Gandila, University of Alabama, Huntsville
  • Book:
    Cultural Encounters on Byzantium's Northern Frontier, c. AD 500–700
    Published online:
    08 October 2018
    Print publication:
    25 October 2018, pp 10-32

  • Summary

    This chapter is a reinterpretation of the Roman frontier in Late Antiquity. In the last decades, historians have described frontier rivers as primarily facilitating communication and cultural contact and less as borders of exclusion; contrariwise, archaeologists still concentrate their efforts on the military dimension. In many ways this dichotomy was engendered by insufficient conversation between historians and archaeologists and has delayed the development of a conceptual model which could help bridge such disciplinary divides. The chapter is an attempt to offer such a model, drawn from the anthropological study of frontiers. By doing so it is necessary to intrude upon several of the major questions of Byzantine history. What was the Byzantine worldview on frontiers? Is there any change from the early Roman centuries? Was there a Grand Strategy in Late Antiquity? A careful comparative study reveals enduring literary topoi but also an ongoing concern to use reinforced natural obstacles as political frontiers able to act as convenient barriers against “barbarians.” This chapter re-emphasizes the strategic role of the Danube in Late Antiquity and its political function of separation.

  • 6 - Putting the Danube into Perspective: Money, Bullion, and Prestige in Avaria and Transcaucasia

  • Andrei Gandila, University of Alabama, Huntsville
  • Book:
    Cultural Encounters on Byzantium's Northern Frontier, c. AD 500–700
    Published online:
    08 October 2018
    Print publication:
    25 October 2018, pp 191-242

  • Summary

    This chapter expands the analysis of the numismatic evidence through an exploration of the Byzantine coin flow to the Carpathian Basin and the Transcaucasus, two other important frontier regions in the sixth and seventh centuries. Gold is most abundant in the Carpathian Basin where the Avars, just like the Huns in the previous century, received millions of gold solidi in the form of annual tribute; this immediately developed into the most potent symbol of the Khagan’s power and the main instrument for maintaining the loyalty of the peoples under his suzerainty. Warfare in Italy and the conquest of Dalmatia provided additional channels for the distribution of Byzantine coinage in Central Europe. Silver predominates in Transcaucasia where ceremonial silver coins were used to buy the loyalty of Caucasian tribes. Heavy spending of gold and silver was required to keep Lazica in the Byzantine political orbit in the context of renewed hostilities with Persia. Later, the silver hexagram became the main unit of payment for the troops fighting against Persia in the seventh century, particularly in Armenia and Iberia where the Sasanian silver drachm had been for a long time the dominant coinage.

Cultural Encounters on Byzantium's Northern Frontier, c. AD 500–700
  • Coins, Artifacts and History
  • Andrei Gandila
  • Published online:
    08 October 2018
    Print publication:
    25 October 2018
  • In the sixth century, Byzantine emperors secured the provinces of the Balkans by engineering a frontier system of unprecedented complexity. Drawing on literary, archaeological, anthropological, and numismatic sources, Andrei Gandila argues that cultural attraction was a crucial component of the political frontier of exclusion in the northern Balkans. If left unattended, the entire edifice could easily collapse under its own weight. Through a detailed analysis of the archaeological evidence, the author demonstrates that communities living beyond the frontier competed for access to Byzantine goods and reshaped their identity as a result of continual negotiation, reinvention, and hybridization. In the hands of 'barbarians', Byzantine objects, such as coins, jewelry, and terracotta lamps, possessed more than functional or economic value, bringing social prestige, conveying religious symbolism embedded in the iconography, and offering a general sense of sharing in the Early Byzantine provincial lifestyle.