The Aegean coastlands under threat: Some coins and coin hoards from the reign of Heraclius

Abstract

The new Rome inherited from the old a strategic situation in the Mediterranean world that was essentially similar at the beginning of the seventh century to what it had been in the first. Persia, vetus hostis, was still a threat in the east, while in the north there was the less organized but no less persistent threat of migratory peoples pressing across the Danube. By the middle of the seventh century the Byzantine supremacy in the east Mediterranean had been destroyed, and a profound reshaping of the state had been set in train. In discussing some coins and coin hoards from the reign of Heraclius (610–41), I wish to draw attention to the place of the Aegean coastlands in the regional economy of the Byzantine Empire as it was before the Arab expansion. The revival of commerce in the provinces in the ninth century seems to have begun in the coastal cities of the Aegean: this prompts an inquiry into their importance in the sixth and seventh centuries. The second and third decades of the seventh century were a time of disaster for the Empire, when it was attacked from both the east and the north. The Persian armies conquered Syria in 611 and thereafter were able to make incursions into western Asia Minor, on occasion reaching as far as the shores of the Bosporus. Thomas Presbyter records that they carried captives away from Rhodes, while in the same year the Slavs invaded Crete. The Miracula S. Demetrii gives a graphic account of a naval blockade of Salonica by the Slavs and mentions sea raids on the whole of Thessaly and near-by places and the Greek islands which depopulated many cities and regions. The Avars, in alliance with Slavs, Bulgars, and Gepids, besieged Constantinople itself by land and sea, while the Persians occupied Chalcedon. The records of events in the first part of the reign of Heraclius are fragmentary in the extreme, and the chronology in particular has been the subject of much debate.

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