Bezant

A bezant was the name used in medieval western Europe for gold coins from the Byzantine Empire and, by extension, for other gold coins of the eastern Mediterranean, especially Islamic dinars and their imitations. It was never the official name of a single coin. It was a western label, derived from Byzantium, the old name of Constantinople, and its meaning shifted over the centuries as the coins it described changed.

In its original sense a bezant was a Byzantine solidus, the successor of the Roman aureus, which Greek speakers called the nomisma, and later the hyperpyron that replaced it in 1092. Western writers also used the word for gold dinars from the Islamic world and for coins struck by the Crusader states. Today it survives mainly as a term in heraldry.

The word came into English through Old French besant, from the medieval Latin byzantius, "of Byzantium", short for a phrase meaning "Byzantine coin". It appears in western sources from roughly the tenth or eleventh century. At that time most of western Europe used silver coinage based on the denier, the descendant of the Roman denarius, and struck little or no gold of its own. Gold coins arriving from the East through trade, diplomacy, pilgrimage and war were therefore notable, and a single name covered them.

For centuries the Byzantine gold coin held its weight and fineness to an unusual degree, which made it attractive to merchants and useful for large payments, gifts and tribute. Italian trading cities such as Venice, Amalfi and Genoa did extensive business with Constantinople, and Byzantine gold moved west through this international trade. Bezants also served as a unit of account in contracts and records of payment, even where few actual coins changed hands.

The eleventh-century debasement of the Byzantine coin weakened its standing. The hyperpyron introduced by Alexios I restored a reliable gold coin, though at a slightly lower fineness than the old solidus, and western sources continued to call it a bezant.

Gold dinars from the Islamic world, which themselves grew out of the Byzantine-influenced Arab-Byzantine coinage of the seventh century, were often called "Saracen bezants" in the West. In the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem and the County of Tripoli, mints struck gold coins imitating the dinars of the Fatimid caliphs, complete with Arabic inscriptions, and these imitations circulated widely in the Levant. After papal objections in the mid-thirteenth century to coins carrying Islamic religious formulas, the inscriptions were changed to Christian texts, still written in Arabic.

The term was stretched further over time. Some sources refer to "white bezants", meaning silver coins or coins of lower gold content, so the value of a bezant in a given document often depends on its date and place.

Western Europe resumed regular gold coinage in the thirteenth century, most influentially with the Florentine florin of 1252 and the Venetian ducat of 1284. These coins took over the role of hard currency in European trade, while Byzantine gold coinage itself ended in the fourteenth century. The word bezant gradually dropped out of commercial use.

It survives in heraldry, where a bezant is a gold roundel, a plain gold disc, on a coat of arms. The arms of the Duchy of Cornwall, for example, show fifteen bezants on a black shield. In monetary history the bezant shows how a trusted coin could become a common standard across borders, as the silver Spanish real and the thaler later did in their own eras.

• British Museum: Collection online
• American Numismatic Society