Constantine issues the solidus
Constantine introduced the solidus, a gold coin weighing 4.5 grams of nearly pure gold, struck at 72 to the Roman pound. Unlike the collapsed silver coinage, the solidus was maintained at essentially the same gold content for the next 700 years, circulating across the Mediterranean and into the Byzantine Empire. It became the template for what stable money looked like and was the benchmark against which European currencies were implicitly compared for the next millennium. The lesson was unambiguous: a currency tied to a fixed weight of a specific metal could survive where a politically managed one could not.
The solidus was called the bezant or nomisma in its later Byzantine form. Its remarkable stability came partly from imperial policy and partly from the fact that Constantinople controlled most of the Eastern Mediterranean gold supply. When the Byzantines finally did debase it — under Alexios I in 1092 — it triggered the economic crisis that opened Era 2.
01 · Coin Clipping
The earliest documented currency debasements happened in the Roman Empire, when emperors under fiscal strain began secretly reducing the precious-metal content of coins while leaving their face value unchanged. The mechanism was crude: mint the same denarius or antoninianus, but with less silver. Over roughly 240 years, the Roman silver coin went from about 97 percent silver under Augustus to under 2 percent silver during the Crisis of the Third Century. Each emperor who debased the coinage inherited a slightly lighter silver content and left it slightly lighter still.
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