HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

MONETARY HISTORY OF KIEV IN THE PRE-MONGOL PERIOD 389quantity of gold, silver, and silks " 26 Avarice was apparently so welldeveloped among the Rus' princes that the chroniclers took special note ofthose who did not hoard gold and silver in their treasuries but distributedsome of their wealth among retainers and others. 27 Of course, the monkchroniclersmay have had a vested interest in'encouraging princes to sharetheir wealth.The picture of Kiev's tremendous wealth found in the written sources isin complete accord with the material evidence. Archaeological discoveriesas well as chance finds have uncovered huge quantities of tangible wealth inand around Kiev. It has been estimated, for instance, that hoards found inKiev from the pre-Mongol era contained over 3,000 pieces of jewelry madefrom gold, silver, and their alloys. 28 Individual pieces of jewelry found duringarchaeological excavations should be added to this sum. In her fundamentalstudy of treasure hoards from pre-Mongol Rus', Korzukhinadescribed 3 hoards from Kiev dating between the mid-tenth and earlyeleventh centuries, 2 hoards from the eleventh and early twelfth centuries,and 47 hoards deposited between the 1170s and 1240. 29 Thirty percent ofall treasure hoards found in the Rus' lands that date from between the ninthcentury and 1240 originated in the city of Kiev. To this vast wealth of Kievmust be added the coins and ingots not found in treasure hoards.The study of Kiev's monetary history should give us some insights intothe vitality and prosperity that made pre-Mongol Kiev the premier city inRus'.** *To facilitate our analysis, the pertinent finds of each of five types of coinsand ingots are given in a separate appendix (appendix A = Islamic coins;appendix B = Byzantine coins; appendix C = West European coins; appendixD = monetary ingots; appendix E = Rus' coins). Since Sotnikova andSpasskii have recently completed a comprehensive study of Rus' coinage, Ihave reproduced their catalogue of finds here, as appendix E. 30 AppendixesA-D represent my own work. Scholars specializing in chronicles and26RPC-L, p. 164, s.a. 1075.27Kievan Chronicle, p. 301, s.a. 1172; p. 375, s.a. 1178; p. 423, s.a. 1187; p. 483, s.a. 1197.28Novoe v arkheologii Kieva (Kiev, 1981), p. 350.29G. F. Korzukhina, Russkie klady IX-XIII vv. (Moscow and Leningrad, 1954), pp. 83-84,no. 12-14; pp. 90-91, no. 29-30; pp. 105-126, no. 65-111.30M. P. Sotnikova and I. G. Spasski, Russian Coins of the X-XI Centuries A.D.: RecentResearch and a Corpus in Commemoration of the Millenary of the Earliest Russian Coinage,trans. H. B. Wells (Oxford, 1982); idem, Tysiacheletie drevneishikh monet Rossii: Svodnyikatalog russkikh monet X-XI vekov (Leningrad, 1983).