Dec 05 Editorial 29/11/05 4:27 pm Page 374secondary mint, wherever that might have been, otherwise itshould have contained a few coins of the last issue of thesecondary mint unless, of course, the two issues of the secondarymint were contemporary with the first two issues of the mainmint and the secondary mint had closed before the end of Isaac’sreign after which the only coins commonly available wouldpossibly only have been billon trachea of the first issue 30 and thetrachea and tetartera of the third issue of the main mint whichmight account for the fact that there was only a single coin of thefirst issue of the secondary mint and no coins of the second issueof the main mint in the hoard since all coins of Isaac except forDO 2 are very rare.The writer would like to thank Dr. D. M. Metcalf, Dr. W. Schultze,Dr. I. Touratsoglou, Ms. Yorka Nicolaou and Mr. T. Eden for theirhelp. The suggestions put forward here are entirely those of thewriter.Footnotes:1. ‘A Cypriot Coin of Richard Lion-heart’, NCirc., April 2002, vol. CX, no. 2.2. It is possible that this coin is in the Nicosia Museum.3. A correspondent has recently told the writer that he was shown twospecimens of this type in Larnaca which seems to indicate the existanceof at least four specimens of this type.4. “A New Type of Electrum Trachy of Isaac Comnenus of Cyprus (AD1184-1191)’, NCirc. May 1989, vol. XCVII, no.4. The writer hadproduced a more ‘popular’ version of this article entitled ‘IsaacComnenus: just a little empire on Cyprus’ in the Celator, vol. 3, no. 2,February 1989 and at that time he obviously did not know of the hoarddiscussed in addendum II. All coins illustrated in the NCirc article withexception of no. 1 were in the writer’s collection and, with the exceptioneither no. 3 or 6, were stolen in Los Angeles in late 1989. If any reappearon the market the writer would like to be informed.5. M. F. Hendy, ‘Coinage and Money in the Byzantine Empire, 1081-1261’,Dumbarton Oaks Studies XII, Washington 1969, pp. 136-142. Hendyalso listed a trachy (DO 5) and a tetarteron (DO 10) as ‘uncertainattribution’ (pl. 21, nos. 12-14.).6. M.F. Hendy, ‘Catalogue of the Byzantine Coins in Dumbarton OaksCollection and in the Whittemore Collection’, vol. IV, Washington 1999,pp. 354-364.7. There appears to be some evidence that those coins of Heraclius depictingthree standing figure with a Cyprus mint mark may not have been struckin Cyprus since none seem to have been found on the island. P. Pavlougave a paper (unpublished) to the Oriental Numismatic Society severalyears ago which touched upon this matter. In addition, when Cypriotcollectors come to London they tend to buy all the three standing figureCyprus folles they can find which might confirm that these coins are notfound in the island, although since writing this, I now understand theyare.8. In the catalogue and plates in DOC IV these two issues are in the wrongorder since these parts of the catalogue had been completed some yearsbefore the writer published these overstrikes in 1989 (see footnote 4). Inhis late completion of the catalogue Hendy did note this overstrike in thetext.(DOC IV, vol. I, p. 357).9. ‘The Kingdom of Cyprus and the Crusades, 1191-1374’, Peter W.Edbury, CUP 1991. The first two chapters touch upon the backgroundand earliest years of Lusignan rule.10. Edbury, op. cit., p.29.11. G. Jeffery, ‘Cyprus under an English King in the Twelfth Century’, CyprusGovernment printer, 1926.12. ‘Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium’, vol. I, OUP 1991, p.567.13. D.M. Metcalf, ‘Byzantine Lead Seals from Cyprus’, Cyprus ResearchCentre, Texts and Studies of the History of Cyprus XLVII, Nicosia 2004,p. 37.14. ‘Byzantine Mediaeval Cyprus’, Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation,Nicosia, 1998.15. D. M. Metcalf, ‘The White Bezants and Deniers of Cyprus 1192 - 1285’,Texts and Studies of the History of Cyprus XXX, Cyprus Reseach Centre,Nicosia 1998, pp. 11 - 13.16. Edbury, op. cit., pp. 8 and 13.17. The writer acquired the two electrum trachea that he published in 1989in August 1988 from an American Armenian dealer who made frequenttrips to Istanbul. The specimen sold through Baldwins in 1995 wasbought in 1989 in a German auction (often a sign of a Turkish source)while the two most recent electrum trachea, one of each type, sold in theGemini I auction (see footnote 21) also came from a Turkish dealer inMunich.Perhaps we should consider the provenance of the first threespecimens of the first type of electrum trachy (DO 1). The specimen in theBibliotheque in Paris came from the Lambros collection and was acquiredin Cyprus. The pierced specimen in the Goodacre collection (Christiesauction, 24 April 1986, lot 324), was bought by Goodacre from Seaby’s17. in 1942 for 15/- (75 p) and is now in DO. The third specimen, from theWhitting collection, is in Barber Institute in Birmingham. Whittingpurchased it from Baldwins on 23 April 1969. It must have been sold tohim by the writer who has no recollection of doing so and possibly misidentifiedit. The writer may have purchased it at the time or found in oldstock. Since Goodacre bought most of his coins in London it seems likelythat both his and Whittings specimens of DO 1 came from Cyprus whichwas ruled by the British at that time - but did these these coins come fromwhat is now Turkish occupied northern Cyprus?18. M. F. Hendy, ‘Studies in the Byzantine Economy, c. 300-1450, CUP 1985,pl.31, no.13 (unmentioned in the text) and catalogued but not illustratedas DOC IV (8 bis).This coin belonged to the late John J. Slocum of Newport, RhodeIsland, whose coins of Isaac of Cyprus were sold through Sothebys inauction LO 9447 of 14th Oct. 1999, lots 179-186 although this uniquetetarteron was missing. Only its ticket arrived with the collection whichindicated that it had been purchased from <strong>Spink</strong> and Son. It was onlywhen Sothebys received the collection from Slocum’s heirs that it wasdiscovered that a number of coins had been stolen by a domestic servant.The writer thinks it unlikely that Hendy and Slocum were in contact andit may be that the reason that the writer ‘mislaid’ his photograph of thecoin and was unable to illustrate it in either of his 1989 articles whileHendy was able to illustrate it in 1985 was because the writer had sentthe photograph to Hendy by 1985. In the 1970’s and 1980’s the writersent photographs of most of his ‘discoveries’ to Hendy. About 40 coinsillustrated in DOC IV belonged to the writer and are now in theAshmolean Museum. That this particular coin is not illustrated in DOC IVis because the plates were in proof by c. 1980 and any new coinsdiscovered after that date could not be illustrated.19. Hendy suggested that Isaac did not begin to strike coins until he hadrepulsed Isaac II’s attempt to recapture Cyprus in 1187 and that he hadceased issuing coins even before the arrival of Richard I (DOC IV, p. 357).It seems unlikely that so many different types would have been struck inonly four years but if this was the case then Isaac preceded the post-1204Byzantine emperors in changing the design of his coinage annually.20. Four electrum trachea, possibly only four billon trachea and possibly adozen tetartera although it seems possible that more trachea andtetartera from the hoard noted in addendum II might exist in Cypriotcollections. A specimen of DO 8 fetched $1420 as lot 1355 in the wintermail bid sale of NFA of 14 December 1989. This coin is unlikely to havecome from the hoard listed in addendum II and its extremely high pricereflected its rarity at that time when it was obviously considered unique.21. Isaac does not appear personally on his imperial seals which depict St.Theodore (Metcalf, op. cit. pp. 338-339). What significance St. Georgehad for Isaac is uncertain although the saint also appears on thecommonest and apparently earliest of Isaac’s billon trachea (DO 2).22. Two other specimens have appeared in auctions - A.H.Baldwin auction 5,11 Oct. 1995, lot 273 (acquired from a German auction in 1989) andGemini I, 11-12 Jan 2005, lot 516. Gemini was a joint auction ofFreeman and Sear and Harlan J. Berk held at the New York NumismaticConvention. Lot 515 of the Gemini I sale was a specimen of DO 1, bothcoins coming from Turkey.23. ‘Two Rare Byzantine Coins of the Comnenian Dynasty’, NCirc., vol CIX,no. 5, Oct. 2001, no. 2.24. Just as he had completed this article the writer received a photo of yetanother tetarteron which is illustrated as fig. 5 by kind permission of theowner. This coin (illustrated c. x 1.5 actual size) is the same as DO 7except that Christ appears not as a bust but as a half-length figure withright hand raised in benediction and holding the Gospels. Hendy wasunable to tell what Isaac was holding in his left hand from the specimenhe illustrated in DOC IV but other coins indicate that he holds an akakia.It is difficult to tell whether this new coin is merely a variant of DO 7struck from a single die where the engraver had mistaken hisinstructions. A second specimen might solve the problem. If anotherspecimen is struck from different dies or if Isaac holds a globus instead ofan akakia this type must be a separate issue. Although Isaac’s title is notvisible, the fact that the the emperor has looped pendilia should indicatethat this too is an issue of the primary mint.25. These analyses were carried out at Durham University but unfortunatelythe equipment was so new that it not been calibrated and it was notpossible to give exact figures except to say that there were similar smallamounts of silver in both the trachea and tetartera.26. The writer noted that seven specimens of DOC 2 had retrograde legendsand pendilia with single drops. This information certainly came from thewriter’s first informant, since these were features the writer failed to notewhen he acquired the hoard. However, when this article was almostcomplete, the writer found that he still had two trachea of DO 2 and onetetarteron of DO 8 left from the hoard. One of the trachea seems to be oneof these retrograde coins referred to. Both pendilia end in single pellets,the left hand one possibly having a side loop and the right hand one plain.Isaac’s name is not visible but, on the right, the name of St. George isengraved in retrograde letters. The note of a retrograde legend seems torefer only to the letters and does not mean that the names weretransposed.374 NUMISMATIC CIRCULAR
Dec 05 Editorial 29/11/05 4:27 pm Page 37527. The Baldwin list noted five tetarteron of DO 8. The writer had presumedthat he had acquired more since they are so rare that five would havebeen easily saleable and if he did not have more than five why does he stillpossess one? The reason is possibly because this tetarteron and the twocoins of DO 2 which the writer recently found were the coins he sent formetal analysis and mislaid when they were returned. Since Baldwinsmade a note of the hoard and noted a copper trachy (DO 5) rather than atetarteron (DO 10) it seems likely that there was only a single coin of thefirst issue of the secondary mint in the hoard and that it was a trachy.28. In all the years that the writer was a dealer, all the coins of Isaac ofCyprus appearing in London were duplicates sold by Cypriot collectors ontheir visits to the U.K. There was no other original source since thesecoins do not appear to be found outside Cyprus.29. The Turks occupied the north of Cyprus in 1974 and Greek Cypriotcollectors have not been able to acquire coins from this region ever since.A collector who recently visited the north of Cyprus and discreetly askedafter ancient coins found the laws extremely stringent. Does this meanthat the five electrum trachea found since 1988 were found in Turkey?This seems unlikely since there was little contact between the Byzantineempire and Cyprus during Isaac’s reign.30. In the draft of his May 1989 article the writer mentioned another hoardof coins of Isaac which consisted of 75 trachea of DO 2. This hoard wasowned by Mr. J. Slocum, although these coins did not appear in theauction of his collection. They might have been amongst those stolenwhich included his important collection of Urtukid and Danishmendidcoins.A Forgotten Find of Byzantine BillonTrachea of the Twelfth and ThirteenthCenturiesDr. E. LiantaThe writer was recently given the opportunity to examine a hoard of374 Byzantine billon trachea acquired in the London numismatictrade in the 1960’s, and retained since then 1 . Nothing is known,unfortunately, about the coins’ specific geographical provenance. It ispossible, though, that the hoard was discovered in Turkey, sincenothing came out from Bulgaria until the fall of communism in1990. The hoard appears to have been deposited in the 1210’s, andcomprises eleven coin types, all of which have been previouslypublished. Nevertheless, the hoard places new find-evidence onrecord, and adds to our knowledge of the range of coinages that werein circulation in the first quarter of the thirteenth century.The contents of the hoard may be summarized as follows:Bulgarian Imitations (= Direct Copies)1-8. TYPE A (DOC 4, pl. XXVI, no. 1) 8 sp.(3.21g, 2.54g, 2.33g, 2.30g, 2.22g, 2.08g, 1.91g, 1.72g)9-19. TYPE B (DOC 4, pl. XXVI, no. 2) 11 sp.(3.73g, 3.70g, 3.01g, 2.75g, 2.68g, 2.61g, 2.50g, 2.20g, 1.92g,1.76g, 1.42g)20-156. TYPE C (DOC 4, pl. XXVI, no. 3) 137 sp.(5.33g, 4.06g, 4.02g, 3.95g, 3.91g, 3.80g, 3.56 (2)g, 3.54g, 3.52g,3.44g, 3.34 (2)g, 3.32g, 3.31g, 3.30g, 3.24g, 3.23g, 3.19g, 3.18g,3.17g, 3.12g, 3.10g, 3.07g, 3.04g, 3.02g, 2.99g, 2.96g, 2.95g, 2.94g,2.93g, 2.90g, 2.85 (2)g, 2.82g, 2.81g, 2.79g, 2.78 (2)g, 2.77g, 2.75(2)g, 2.73 (2)g, 2.72 (4)g, 2.70 (4)g, 2.69 (2)g, 2.68 (2)g, 2.67 (2)g,2.66 (2)g, 2.65g, 2.64g, 2.61 (3)g, 2.55g, 2.54g, 2.51 (2)g, 2.50g,2.47 (3)g, 2.46 (2)g, 2.43g, 2.42g, 2.41g, 2.38g, 2.37 (2)g, 2.36 (2)g,2.32g, 2.31g, 2.30g, 2.29 (2)g, 2.28 (2)g, 2.26g, 2.25g, 2.24 (3)g,2.22g, 2.19g, 2.18g, 2.17 (3)g, 2.13g, 2.12g, 2.11g, 2.04g, 2.03 (3)g,1.99g, 1.98g, 1.96g, 1.95 (3)g, 1.94g, 1.93 (3)g, 1.91g, 1.90g, 1.88g,1.85g, 1.82g, 1.81 (2)g, 1.73g, 1.72g, 1.71g, 1.70g, 1.68g, 1.63g,1.62 (2)g, 1.53g, 1.44g, 1.36g, 1.23g)Latin Imitations (1204-1261)157-158. CON. LARGE TYPE A(DOC 4, pl. XLVIII, no. 1; S. 2021)2 sp.(2.72g, 2.26g)159-160. CON. LARGE TYPE B(DOC 4, pl. XLIX, no. 2; S. 2022)2 sp.(2.62g, 1.72g)159-161. CON. LARGE TYPE C(DOC 4, pl. XLIX, no. 3; S. 2023)1 sp.(2.19g)162. CON. LARGE TYPE E(DOC 4, pl. XLIX, no. 5; S. 2025)1 sp.(2.47g)163-165. SMALL TYPE A(DOC 4, pl. LII, no. 30; S. 2044)3 sp.(1.73g, 1.54g, 1.44g)116-203. SMALL TYPE G(DOC 4, pl. LIII, no. 36; S. 2050)38 sp.(2.16 (2)g, 2.10g, 2.08g, 2.03g, 1.96g, 1.92 (3)g, 1.88g, 1.87g, 1.82g,1.78g, 1.73g, 1.63 (2)g, 1.61g, 1.60g, 1.58g, 1.55g, 1.51g, 1.47g,1.37g, 1.30 (2)g, 1.27 (2)g, 1.25 (2)g, 1.19 (2)g, 1.16 (2)g, 1.15g,1.10g, 0.92g, 0.82g, 0.78g)Theodore I (1204/5-1222)204-224. NICAEAN TYPE A(DOC 4, pl. XXVII, no. 5; S. 2061)21 sp.(3.52g, 3.22g, 3.17g, 3.06g, 2.83g, 2.81g, 2.79g, 2.74g, 2.41g,2.34g, 2.30g, 2.22g, 2.17g, 2.13g, 2.11g, 2.10g, 1.85g, 1.64g, 1.58g,1.17g, 1.14g)225-267. NICAEAN TYPE B(DOC 4, pl. XXVIII, no. 6; S. 2062)43 sp.(4.15g, 4.01g, 4.00g, 3.97g, 3.75g, 3.73g, 3.60g, 3.52g, 3.50g,3.40g, 3.38g, 3.34g, 3.32g, 3.29g, 3.26g, 3.18g, 3.17g, 3.09g, 3.03g,3.01g, 2.98g, 2.95g, 2.93g, 2.88 (2)g, 2.86g, 2.83 (3)g, 2.81g, 2.79g,2.72g, 2.71g, 2.64g, 2.60 (2)g, 2.56 (2)g, 2.46g, 2.42g, 2.23g, 2.16g,2.10g)Unclean and worn268-374. 107 sp.Other known hoards, which are similar in their range of contentsto this new ‘London 1966’ hoard and likewise terminate withNicaean billon trachea of Theodore I, are the Bulgarian hoards foundin Gurkovo 2 and Ustra 3 , and the Greek hoard discovered in Veroia 4 .As seen from Table 1 (overleaf), the London 1966 hoard containsfar greater quantities of Bulgarian Imitations 5 , which account for156 coins, or 41.71 per cent of the total, than the other comparablehoards. The London 1966 hoard is particularly striking for thenumerical predominance of Bulgarian Imitation Type C, which is thelargest single component of the hoard comprising 137 specimens, or36.63 per cent of the total. Of the identifiable coins, despite theirincomplete striking, five varieties (Var.) of the designs of the loroswaistswere observed (see Fig. 1) 6 .DECEMBER 2005 375
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