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later Michael III, whose beardless portrait appears on what is
generally admitted to be the latest type for this
reign. Bury5 reviews the literary and
numismatic evidence and suggests a different chronology. The central
problem has to do with Maria, a daughter of Theophilus who appears on
none of the coins. There is, however, a
type6 showing three other daughters. Now the
Continuation of Theophanes, 107,7 calls her
the youngest, and Wroth therefore assumes that she was not yet born
when the last mentioned type was struck. But Bury has shown that there
are insuperable difficulties in supposing her to have been the
youngest daughter, and he follows Brooks in assuming that the
Continuation of Theophanes was in error, and that she was actually the
eldest, but had died before the issuing of the coin with the other
daughters. He would therefore put this type in 838-839, just before
the birth of Michael III. He then places the birth of Constantine in
829-830, the first year of his father's
reign.8 But he argues that Constantine died
before 831, and that the coins of Theophilus and Constantine (our
No. 102) and those of Theophilus, Constantine, and Michael were
consequently struck in 830. His reason for this is the following:
Maria was married to a certain Alexius who was Caesar in
8319 .The presumption is that at this time
he was betrothed to Maria and that the reason for the betrothal and
for the elevation of Alexius to the rank of Caesar was that
Constantine had died and the Emperor was without male heir. His
arrangement of the issues is, then:
As to the date of the coins of Theophilus alone (our Nos. 67-101) he has no suggestion to make, but obviously they must come either in 829-830, or in 831-838. To consider the second alternative first: our hoard would contain an all but continuous series from 720 to 830, only I specimen of the two types struck in 830, and 3 5 of the one type struck from 831 to 838. This proportion is against all reason, and it is made more unreasonable by the fact that the coins of Theophilus, Constantine, and Michael, of which we have no specimens, are commoner than the type of which we have 35 (4 to 3 in Tolstoi, 7 to 3 in Wroth, which hardly shows the real difference, as any collector of Byzantine coins will recognize) and certainly commoner than the type of Theophilus and Constantine (our No. 102, of which Wroth and Tolstoi publish only I specimen each). We must therefore abandon the date 831-838, if we are to keep the rest of Bury's arrangement, and try the other alternative. But here we are met by a difficulty nearly as great. Theophilus came to the throne in |
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Created by the Digital
Documentation Center at AUB
in collaboration with Al
Mashriq of Høgskolen i
Østfold, Norway. 990216 PN - Email: hseeden@aub.edu.lb |