The Other Side of the Coin

This book has addressed why coinage was struck, bronze and silver briefly in Chapter Two and gold more extensively in Chapter Four. In this final chapter, we flip to the other side of the coin, so to speak, to focus on how coinage was used. From the start, it is important to recognize usage is not the same as the state's purpose in minting, especially from the point of view taken in the earlier chapters. Under consideration here is the role of coinage in the economy, after and apart from minting. Bringing together a range of evidence will help to address the broader – and rather challenging – issue of the degree of monetization, signified by currency availability and utility, but by a strict definition “the share of transactions that are handled via the market and which involve the use of money.” By no means can the full scope of the Visigothic economy be surveyed in this section, and the backdrop of causative factors in economic behavior will rest on references to specific studies. One major point of reference in the last dozen years may serve for the general setting in which the place of early medieval currency must be underscored. Chris Wickham's Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800 established an excellent framework for considering the grand scale, in which economy and state are examined in interrelation and are viewed in one realm astride another for depth of comparison as well as an understanding of a whole process through several centuries.