Byzantine Empire

For over one thousand years, from 330 AD to 1453, Constantinople (now Istanbul), the capital of the Byzantine empire, was the bridge between eastern and western cultures and the link, too, from the world of gold in Roman times and the modern era. The empire was the focal point not just of the gold trade, but set the style for its use in coin, jewellery, art and architecture. Its gold coin, evolving from the Roman solidus into the nomisma (often known as the bezant), was “accepted everywhere from the ends of the earth,” an observer in the 6th century noted. He added, “It is admired by all men and in all kingdoms, because no kingdom has a currency that can be compared to it”. The bezant personified gold coinage from the fall of the Roman empire to the rise of Venice with its famous golden ducat.

The Byzantine empire began in 330 AD when the Roman Emperor Constantine adopted the city of Byzantium as his seat of power, renaming it Constantinople. By 395 AD the Roman empire was divided in two, with separate emperors for Rome and Constantinople. As the power of Rome, assailed by barbarians from the north, thereafter disintegrated (the Romans pulled out of Britain in 410), Constantinople prospered.

The Emperor Anastasius (491-518) exercised rigorous financial control and ultimately bequeathed a treasury containing 104 tonnes (3.34 million ounces) of gold – an astonishing accumulation, amounting to at least 20 years world gold output then.

With that firm foundation the Emperor Justinian I (527-565) created the golden age of Byzantine civilisation with the true flowering of Christian art in antiquity in churches and basilicas adorned with frescoes, illuminated manuscripts, icons and mosaics. Gold itself was central to that fertile period, not so much as a metal (although jewellery and gold leaf were everywhere) but for its colour. “Artists used, in particular, bright gold and luminous blues for their paintings or panels or in manuscripts,” observed the great art historian E. H. Gombrich. A gold sky or golden hills were the setting in which to make a figure stand out. Never was gold venerated so much for its colour.

This great period of early Christian art is best preserved for us to admire today in mosaics at Ravenna, just south of Venice. In the 6th century AD Ravenna was a flourishing Adriatic port, that served as Byzantium’s Italian stronghold. Two churches there, Sant’Apollinaro Nuovo and San Vitale, are unequalled in western Europe as the most precious examples of Byzantine architecture, sculpture and magnificently coloured mosaics. “These mosaics owe their compelling power to the brilliancy of the gold grounds,” wrote the French art historian André Grabar. Mosaics were composed of small cubes, known as tesserae, made of stone, tile or glass laid out in a bed of mortar. The golden tesserae were made by affixing gold leaf to the cubes. In Ravenna’s churches we can still see not just mosaics of religious images, such as the Virgin and Child with golden haloes, but the Emperor Justinian himself set against a gold background with his wife Theodora beside him draped in gold jewellery.

Constantinople itself had similar splendours, not least in the great church of Haghia Sophia, completed for Justinian in 537. Besides mosaics and wall paintings, the internal columns of the brick-built church were covered with gold leaf. “In the evening the interior was so radiant that one could suppose the sun was shining,” a visitor reported. The Emperor’s own palace had a throne room lined with gold mosaics and in the courtyards around goldsmiths plied their trade (as they still do today in little workshops around Istanbul’s great churches and mosques). The emperors sought to preserve their wealth by insisting on taxes being paid in gold, which could then be used for building, for paying their armies, civil servants or foreign subsidies.

Property and wealth, however, were increasingly shifting into the hands of the Church. Churches and monasteries were endowed with gold, and gold coin was melted to make plate and ornaments for the church. Moreover, pressure was building to ban all religious images, such as those on mosaics or wall paintings. A ‘dark age’ closed in on the Byzantine empire soon after 700 and lasted until 850. All mosaics and frescoes were destroyed in Constantinople but, fortuitously, not in Ravenna. The empire survived, but what emerged was initially less prosperous and less creative. In 856 the treasury of the Empress Theodora was only 35 tonnes (1.14 million ounces) of gold, one-third of the treasure held by Anastasius 350 years earlier. Fresh gold supplies were limited. The bezant gold coin was increasingly debased; by 1081 the gold content was only six carats (250 fine). The Emperor Alexius I Comenus restored credibility in 1092 with a new coin of 4.4 grams (0.14 ounces) called the hyperpyron, which many still nicknamed bezant and the Venetians called perpero. But the coin never gained the prestige of the nomisma five hundred years earlier and since gold production was still small, circulation was not widespread. When gold output did appreciate sharply after 1300 it was the Venetian ducat that became supreme in the Mediterranean world and the east.

Byzantine goldsmiths and artists, however, achieved a final burst of creativity. The goldsmiths perfected the skill of making a dazzling display of enamels, made from finely ground coloured glass, which were either set into metal settings, technique known as cloisonné, or laid into engraved channels in the main metal (champlevé). Brilliant gold and blue enamels were favoured. Byzantine artists also excelled themselves in creating icons. The icons were largely painted on screens separating the sanctuary from the nave of Byzantine churches. They were objects for contemplation, their religious images designed to explain the sacred word. Each icon had to follow strict traditional patterns and technical rules. Usually a wooden panel was faced with linen, covered with gold leaf as the vital background on which the picture was then painted in egg tempera. New mosaics with gold settings were also created in Haghia Sophia and in the Church of St Saviour in Chora, now known as Kariye Camii. Those in Kariye Camii, in particular, are the supreme legacy in Istanbul to have survived from this final flowering of Byzantine art before the Ottoman conquest of the city in 1453 brought to an end over one thousand years of Christian rule.

The gold coins of Byzantium can be seen in many museum collections, including the British Museum’s HSBC Money Gallery, which sets them in the context with the evolution of money from Roman to Venetian times. The great surviving mosaics of the early Byzantine period are in the churches of Sant’Apollinaro Nuovo and San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy; these churches are normally open from 8.30 am until noon and 2 pm until 5 or 6 pm. In Istanbul itself Haghia Sophia, where some mosaics from the later period of Byzantine art survived its conversion to a mosque after the Ottoman conquest, is normally open from 9.30 until 5 pm every day except Monday. Kariye Camii (Church of St Saviour in Chora) which has the pride of later Byzantine mosaics and frescoes is open from 9.30 am until 4.30 every day except Tuesday.