Solidus

• 1. Introduction

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  For seven hundred years, the solidus held its weight at close to 4.45 grams of gold, coin after coin, dynasty after dynasty. It first appeared in the early fourth century, taking the place of an older Roman coin called the aureus. That kind of stability was rare for any currency, let alone one that survived the fall of an empire.

  In Byzantine hands, this same coin went by another name and kept circulating long after Rome itself fell. Refiners could rarely strike it fully pure. But its name, from the Latin word for solid, promised gold as close to solid as a mint could manage. Its story would eventually stretch from imperial mints to modern paychecks, bank balances, and even a punctuation mark. How did one coin's design outlast so many rulers, and where did its influence finally run out?

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• 2. A New Gold Standard

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  Diocletian struck the first solidi in small issues before Constantine the Great relaunched the coin for mass circulation. Constantine's mints struck it at a rate of 72 coins to a Roman pound, a pound then equal to about 326.6 grams of gold. Each coin weighed 24 Greco-Roman carats, worth about 189 milligrams per carat.

  By this time, the solidus was worth 275,000 of the increasingly debased denarius, the older Roman silver coin. Each denarius held just 5 percent of the silver it had contained three and a half centuries earlier.

  With the exception of Constantine's earliest issues and coins struck by occasional usurpers, the solidus today is a relatively affordable Roman gold coin to collect. That affordability does not extend to the coins of Heraclius, Honorius, or later Byzantine emperors, which remain harder to find. That stability meant the solidus would outlast the Western Empire itself, still circulating from a capital called Constantinople.

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• 3. Byzantine Refinements

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  Between the sixth and seventh centuries, mints struck lighter solidi worth 20, 22, or 23 siliquae. Each siliqua equaled a twenty-fourth of a full coin. These lightweight coins were especially popular in the West, and many have turned up across Europe, Russia, and Georgia. Mints marked the 20 and 22 siliquae coins in the exergue, and the 23 siliquae coins with stars in the field.

  Despite governing a largely Greek-speaking population, the empire kept its coin inscriptions in Latin well into the eighth century. Under Emperor Heraclius, the lettering began losing its classical Latin appearance. By the early years of the ninth century, during the reign of Constantine VI, Greek script had replaced Latin entirely.

  In practice, refining limits capped the coin at about 23 karats fine, or 95.8 percent gold, even though in theory it was struck from pure gold. In the Greek-speaking world, people called this coin the nomisma, plural nomismata.

  In the tenth century, Emperor Nicephorus II Phocas, who reigned from 963 to 969, introduced a new, lighter coin called the tetarteron nomisma. From that point, the older coin became known as the histamenon nomisma in Greek-speaking regions. At first the two were hard to tell apart, sharing the same design, dimensions, and purity, with no marks of value. The only real difference was weight: the tetarteron weighed about 4.05 grams, while the histamenon kept the traditional 4.5 grams.

  Basil II ruled from 975 to 1025. During his reign, the histamenon nomisma was struck as a thinner coin with a larger diameter, but with the same weight and purity as before. From the middle of the eleventh century, mints struck the larger histamenon on a concave, cup-shaped flan. The smaller tetarteron continued to be struck on a flat, smaller flan. That concave, cup-shaped flan was still standard when economic pressure began pushing the empire's rulers to tamper with the gold, starting in the eleventh century.

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• 4. The Long Fall

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  A former money changer named Michael IV the Paphlagonian took the Byzantine throne in 1034 and began quietly debasing both the tetarteron and histamenon nomisma. The decline was gradual at first, then accelerated. Purity fell to about 21 carats, or 87.5 percent, under Constantine IX Monomachos, who reigned from 1042 to 1055. It dropped to 18 carats, or 75 percent, under Constantine X Doukas, who ruled from 1059 to 1067. It fell further, to 16 carats, or 66.7 percent, under Romanos IV Diogenes, from 1068 to 1071.

  After Romanos lost the disastrous Battle of Manzikert to the Turks, the empire's ability to raise revenue collapsed further, and debasement continued. Purity reached 14 carats, or 58 percent, under Michael VII Doukas, from 1071 to 1078. It fell to 8 carats, or 33 percent, under Nikephoros III Botaneiates, from 1078 to 1081. During the first eleven years of Alexios I Komnenos, who reigned from 1081 to 1118, purity dropped as low as 0 to 8 carats.

  Alexios reformed the coinage in 1092, eliminating the solidus, or histamenon nomisma, altogether. In its place he introduced a new gold coin, the hyperpyron nomisma, at about 20.5 karats fine, or 85 percent gold. Its weight, dimensions, and purity stayed stable until the Sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204.

  After 1204, the exiled Empire of Nicea kept striking a debased hyperpyron nomisma. Michael VIII Palaiologos recaptured Constantinople in 1261, and the restored Byzantine Empire continued striking a debased hyperpyron. Production stopped during the joint reign of John V Palaiologos and John VI, from 1347 to 1354, who struck the final Byzantine gold coins. After that, the hyperpyron survived only as a unit of account, no longer struck in gold. The hyperpyron lived on as an accounting term even after the gold ran out. The empire's mints, once scattered from Trier to Carthage to Antioch, had a much longer story of their own.

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• 5. Minting Across An Empire

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  From the fourth to the eleventh century, most solidi were struck at the mint in Constantinople, though branch mints operated too. In the fourth-century West, Trier, Rome, Milan, and Ravenna produced most gold coins, while Constantinople, Antioch, Thessalonica, and Nicomedia struck them in the East. Germanic invasions in the early fifth century closed many provincial mints. By 410, only Rome, Ravenna, Constantinople, and Thessalonica still struck gold solidi.

  The Fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 ended official Roman coinage in the West. Germanic successor kingdoms, including the Ostrogothic Kingdom and the Franks, kept striking imitative solidi, still bearing the portrait and title of the emperor in Constantinople.

  Justinian I's reconquests in the sixth century reopened several mints across the former Western Empire. His conquest of the Vandal Kingdom reopened the mint at Carthage, where huge numbers of solidi were struck. In the early seventh century, that mint began striking small 'globular' solidi, about half the normal size but much thicker. This style was unique to Carthage, and production continued there until the Arab conquest in 698. Justinian's campaigns also reopened imperial mints at Ravenna and Rome. Under him, Antioch in Syria resumed minting solidi after a 150-year hiatus. A small number were also struck at Alexandria in Egypt, coins that are very rare today.

  The mint at Syracuse grew from the mid-seventh century, during the reign of Constans II, who briefly moved the empire's capital there. Through the eighth and ninth centuries, Syracuse produced large numbers of solidi that fell short of Constantinople's standards. These coins ran lighter, about 3.8 grams, and only 19 karats fine, or 79 percent gold.

  Many solidi have turned up far outside imperial borders, in Russia, Central Europe, Georgia, and Syria, despite a law that forbade merchants from exporting them. Enforcement of that law was loose. Lightweight solidi in particular seem to have been intended for foreign trade. By the seventh century, they had become a desirable currency across Arabian countries. Once outside the empire, these coins were never used to pay taxes, so they were never reminted, and the soft, pure gold quickly wore down.

  Through the end of the seventh century, Arabian copies of the solidus began circulating outside Byzantine territory. These were dinars minted by the caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, who had access to gold from the upper Nile. They corresponded in weight to only 20 karats, matching the lightweight, 20-siliquae solidi already circulating in those regions. The two coins traded side by side for a time.

  Mints also struck fractional coins alongside the full solidus: the semissis, worth half a coin, and the tremissis, worth a third. The solidus itself never carried a marked face value at any point in its production. These smaller coins were especially popular in the West, where a simplified economy rarely called for a denomination as large as the full solidus. The English word soldier comes directly from solidus, a reminder that soldiers were once paid in this very coin.

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• 6. From Sou To Sueldo

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  In medieval Europe, where the only coin in circulation was the silver penny, or denier, the solidus survived as a unit of account worth 12 deniers. Local languages reshaped the word solidus into a whole family of currency names.

  In French, which evolved from vulgar Latin, solidus shifted through soldus, then solt, then sol, and finally sou. Once the Carolingians adopted the silver standard, no more gold solidi were minted. From then on, the sol was a paper accounting unit worth one-twentieth of a pound, or livre, of silver, divided into 12 deniers. This unit disappeared with decimalisation, when the French First Republic introduced the franc during the French Revolution in 1795. The 5-centime coin, a twentieth of the franc, inherited the nickname 'sou'. In the first half of the twentieth century, people still called a 5-franc coin 'cent sous'. Today, the French word solde means the balance of an account or invoice, or a seasonal sale. It is also the specific term for a soldier's pay. Though the sou itself vanished more than two centuries ago, French phrases still use it as a synonym for money. Avoir des sous means being rich; être sans un sou means being penniless.

  In Canadian French, sou and sou noir became common terms for the Canadian cent, alongside cenne and cenne noire. Quebec never adopted the European French centime. Canada officially calls one-hundredth of a dollar a cent in both English and French. In practice, a feminine form, cenne, has mostly replaced the official term outside bilingual areas. Quebec French colloquially calls the quarter dollar trente-sous, or thirty cents, a nickname born from a chain of currency changes. After the British conquest of Canada in 1759, French coins fell out of use, and sou became a nickname for the halfpenny, a coin of similar value. Spanish pesos and United States dollars also circulated in the colony. From 1841 to 1858, the exchange rate was fixed at four dollars to one British pound, or 400 cents to 240 pence. That made 25 cents equal to 15 pence, or 30 halfpence: trente sous. In 1858, Canada abolished pounds, shillings, and pence in favor of dollars and cents. The nickname sou then shifted to the 1-cent coin, but the term un trente-sous for the 25-cent coin endured.

  The medieval Italian silver soldo, plural soldi, was coined from the eleventh century onward and takes its name from solidus. Italians still use the plural soldi today with the same meaning as the English word 'money'. The related word saldo, much like the French solde, means the balance of an account or invoice, or a seasonal sale; German borrowed it directly as Saldo, with the same meaning.

  In Italian-speaking Switzerland, soldo still carries its archaic meaning: the pay soldiers receive. French-speaking Swiss soldiers refer to il soldo or la solde, and German-speaking Swiss call it der Sold. The Italian verb soldare, or assoldare, means to hire, usually soldiers or mercenaries, taking its meaning directly from this history.

  In Spanish and Portuguese, the word for soldier is soldado, pronounced almost the same in both languages. The medieval Spanish sueldo and Portuguese soldo, which also means salary, both trace back to solidus. The Philippine term sweldo, used in Tagalog and Cebuano among other languages, comes from the Spanish. Spanish and Portuguese saldo, like the French solde, means an account balance, and the word is also used in German and Afrikaans.

  Some have suggested that the Peruvian sol also derives from solidus, but Peru's standard unit was actually the real until 1863. Across the Spanish-speaking world, the dollar equivalent was 8 reales, or 'pieces of eight', which circulated legally in the United States until 1857. That legacy lives on in the American phrase 'two bits' for a quarter dollar. It also survives in the stock market's old accounting currency 'real', used until 2001.

  Peru introduced the sol at a rate of 5.25 to the British pound, just under four shillings. The term soles de oro appeared in 1933, three years after Peru abandoned the gold standard. In 1985, a thousand old sols became one new currency, the inti, named for the Inca sun god. By 1991, a million intis became one newer sol, after which the currency stayed reasonably stable. Across the English Channel, the same Latin root would take a very different path, ending up not as a coin but as a punctuation mark.

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• 7. Shillings And Xu

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  King Offa of Mercia began minting silver pennies on the Carolingian model around the year 785. For centuries afterward, English coinage stayed limited to the penny. The Old English scilling, understood as the value of a cow in Kent or a sheep elsewhere, was purely a unit of account worth 12 pence.

  The Tudors minted England's first actual shilling coins. Before decimalisation in 1971, the abbreviation 's.', taken from solidus, stood for shillings, just as 'd.', from denarius, stood for pence, and '£', from libra, stood for pounds. Under the influence of the old long S, these '£sd' abbreviations eventually developed into the use of a slash. That is why the symbol carries the ISO and Unicode name 'solidus' today.

  The French term sou entered Vietnamese as the word xu. Vietnamese speakers use xu simply to mean 'coin', often in compounds like đồng xu or tiền xu. The modern Vietnamese đồng is nominally divided into 100 xu, the furthest point a Roman gold coin's name would ever reach.

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