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Foreign Coin Circulated in 11th, 12th Century Russia
 | By Bob Reis, World Coin News
December 29, 2008 |
More old business. I was provided the answer to my question on Romanian spelling in the 1950s and '60s by Brad Vrebete and a confirmation by another. There is actually a Wikipedia article.
Briefly, yes indeed, the change in spelling of the national entity from Romania to Republica Romana to Romina back to Romana again was political. The occupying Russians thought "Romina" referenced the Slavic connection of Romania, so the spelling became part of its propaganda. It became Romana again when the nationalists took over. Write me for more of the story.
OK, back to Russia in the late 1100s, just before the Mongols came. We need to look at the geography again: the eleven time zones west to east, the grass-covered hills and plains of the steppe in the south to the tundra in the north.
Look, "Russia" is gigantic and multidimensional. Lots of different things are going on all the time, too many to mention everything. It is just impossible. No matter how much detail one goes into, something will go unnoticed, often something big. It is a big, big country with an infrastructure at about the level of Alaska for most of the country.
Russia today has about 145 million citizens. About 80 percent of them are ethnic Russian. Most of the other ethnic groups were conquered in one way or another. Some have had a long history of bellicosity. Someone should analyze all of the known military engagements within the borders of modern Russia for peaceful periods. My guess is that no 10 years of consecutive peace will be found.
We were discussing Kievan Rus and how it became strong then became decadent and fell apart. That's southern Russia and Ukraine. They partook in agriculture and trade with Europe, the middle east and Asia. And they sent agents out into the steppe as far as the Urals, mostly to get furs.
East of the Urals was Asia. It wasn't so much the mountains, which are low and gentle, that made it not-Europe. Rather it was the people. They looked this or that way that was different from the people to the west, they did things this or that different way. The people on both sides felt like that. It was very much "us and them." (Not that they weren't all the time fighting among themselves on both sides of the mountains!)
East of the Urals is now called "Siberia." The name comes from a Turkish Khanate overthrown by a Russian expedition in 1580. It came to mean all of the territory to the Pacific Ocean. Then, only a few years ago, greater Siberia was split into two "federal districts," Siberia and the Far East. Those two federal districts account for two-thirds of the territory of the Russian Federation.
The Russian Federation is composed of many ethnic groups, many with officially recognized home territories. Wikipedia lists 93 groups from the Russian census, each with an administrative homeland and a recognized cultural identity and various formal guarantees pertaining (regardless of what kind of hard time they might be having in real life). A lot of them, probably most, did not used to live where they do now. There has been a lot of moving around. Quite a few of those ethnic groups were nomads for centuries or millennia. Others were conquered and deported from where they used to be to someplace else. Or they were administratively assigned for various reasons. And through all of that mass moving around there has been a movement of individuals of all kinds of ethnic groups following their individual stars where they happened to lead.
In the west, if things got bad, maybe you could head east, cross the low Ural mountains and disappear into the vastness. Maybe you'd avoid the nomads, or maybe they'd adopt you. Maybe you could carry on, away from those overbearing busybodies who wanted to run your life for their benefit back in Kievan Rus.
In the 10th century those Russians down in southern Russia and Ukraine were a small ethnic group among other ethnic groups. To the north, from the Moscow-Petersburg latitude up to the Arctic, were hunting and reindeer herding people. They were still mostly neolithic but had some traded metal and other southern technical products. The further south they found themselves, the more agriculture they did. Some were Balts of various flavors, proto-Estonians, etc. Others were Finno-Ugric peoples, their languages related to Turkish: Mordvinians and Muromanians. There were also Maris, Karelians (www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karelians), Komi (/wiki/Komi_peoples), Udmurts (/wiki/Udmurts), Mari (/wiki/Mari_people), Khanty (/wiki/Khanty) and Mansi (/wiki/Mansi).
On the western coast the Balts were interacting fairly extensively with the wandering Scandinavians, who would pick up amber, furs, slaves, etc., for trade south. They would leave some coins, spices, etc. Scandinavians of course had earlier followed the rivers down all the way to the Black Sea - settling and intermarrying all along the way - contributing to the modern Russian ethnic group.
There were many more peoples in Siberia: Nenets, Enets, Nganasan, Selkups, Permyaks (/wiki/Permyaks) and more. The same latitudinally determined lifestyles pertained: hunting in the north (without reindeer herding), more agriculture further south and trade.
In the far east were still more ethnic groups: Yenets, Ostiaks, Kottes, Samyeds, Chukchi, Tungus and more. In their southern zone, Manchuria and Korea, they interacted with Chinese culture, in their north, they had that arctic culture of hunting that we used to call "eskimo" before that term came to be deemed pejorative.
In the 12th century the whole of the northernmost zone was not only coinless but almost entirely without metal. In the Moscow latitudes there was metal but no coins, except for a few that got left along the fur and amber trade routes. To find coin striking cultures you'd have to go south all the way to Ukraine, and further east to Tajikistan, etc., north of Afghanistan. In the far east the nomad Liao kingdom made Chinese style coins in Manchuria from the 8th century, but there was no circulation to speak of to their north.
Now we need to discuss the Turks. We have already met with a Turkic people in this discussion of Russia. That was the Khazars, a group that was quite advanced in their technology and political culture, that kept Islam at bay in Ukraine and nurtured the development of Kievan Rus, the polity that eventually supplanted them. Actually, from at least the 5th century A.D. on, Turks of various kinds were the dominant factor in central Asian affairs from western China to Ukraine. They were everywhere. Some were nomads, some farmers. But in the time frame corresponding to the European dark ages and early medieval period they were on the move, migrating southward and east or west (mostly) in response to pressure from other peoples, themselves on the move, perhaps because of climate change. By the 12th century they were showing up in the settled zone as Muslims, but they were still Turks. They were really good with horses, and they liked to fight.
Nomad or not, Turks tended to form strongman political organizations they called khanates. There were elements of popular selection in the choice of khan, but there was a strong tendency of khans to want to perpetuate a family dynasty.
Turks appeared in the "west" in the 11th century in the polity of the Seljuks. These people had been hanging out on the steppe from the Volga to Kazakhstan before descending into Iran, becoming Muslim. They really liked what they found in Iran, culturally speaking, and politically used the governing structures there to expand westward into Anatolia, Syria, Palestine.
In Palestine the Seljuks encountered the European pilgrim movement. Christians had been coming to the Holy Land for centuries. Some degree of extraterritoriality had developed by agreement with the local governments. It looked messy and dangerous to the Seljuks, and there was also, obviously, money to be made. The Seljuks took steps to tighten up the tourist operations there, imposing transit fees and taxes, taking over security, making certain activities illegal and certain zones off limits. The European response was a crusade - one of many.
The crusades really riled up the Seljuks and they retaliated both militarily and economically, not just against western Catholics but against Christians in general. Trade fell off all over the middle east. Included in the depression was the silk road business and the north-south fur and amber economy, in which was heavily involved that Slavic polity, Kievan Rus.
The rulers of Kievan Rus had been developing governing problems due to the tendency of local governors to ignore the interests of the center. The Seljuk squeeze on the middle east trade and the subsequent wars left Kievan Rus high and dry. Bad government and no money, it lost its coherence and was essentially a bunch of independent towns by the 13th century.
Yet another problem for Kiev was the arrival of the Kipchak (Cuman) Turks who set up a khanate just a day's ride away. The Kipchaks proceeded to raid westward and safety minded people tended to leave Kiev for safer places to do their business. Among them were Vladimir, Suzdal, Rostov, Chernigov and Novgorod. These towns grew as Kiev shrank.
A primary figure of the period was Vladimir Monomakh, who ruled Kiev from Chernigov and fought many battles with the Kipchaks. His second wife was a Kipchak princess who birthed several children. One of them became Yuri Dolgoruki, founder (more or less) of Moscow, Pereyeslavl, Kostroma and other towns in central Russia.
Yuri was involved in fairly constant warfare with rulers of the various cities in his region. This was part of the essentially anarchic rhythm of the times. He was a bridge to the future. The cities he founded and others he fought over were the ones that grew and eventually prospered in centuries to come.
Let's talk about the coins. The srebreniki of the late 10-11th centuries were struck mostly in Kiev, and a few were struck in Novgorod. They were all special purpose coins, coronation commemoratives, etc. The money on the street, revealed from hoards, was almost entirely imported silver and billon pennies/deniers from western Europe, mostly Germany. That was where the trade was going then. The Arab dirhams of the previous century were all gone, the flow shut off by the Seljuk wars.
You know, now that I think of it, there is no single reference for Russian coins from Kievan Rus to the present. For the srebreniki, the book is Millennium of Russian Coins by Sotnikova & Spassky, in Russian and out of print. For everything from then until Ivan the Terrible, there is only Russian Monetary System by I. G. Spassky, in Russian and English versions and also out of print. It's a survey and historical discussion. It is inadequate and has low quality pictures.
There was a major change in the German coinage in the 13th century, with debasement in some places and development of bracteates elsewhere. Neither of these new products were exported to Russia to any extent, and coinage tended to disappear, replaced on the streets of Novgorod and Kiev with, wrote Spassky, squirrel and marten heads. Cuna, they were called. He mentions some cowries and beads, but not enough to make plausible their use as coin substitutes.
In the shops the wholesale business was carried on with ingots of silver (rarely gold) in standardized shapes and weights, called grivna.
We don't have any small animal skulls in the old Russian coin market, but there have been more than a few of the silver ingots pass through the auctions of the last two decades. I couldn't find any for sale precisely now. The ones from Kiev are elongated hexagons. From Novgorod they are kind of like flattened cigars. Some are curved like a canoe, often with lines and/or names scratched on them. Prices used to be a thousand dollars or two but are probably considerably higher now. And I think I remember reading about modern fakes in the Journal of the Russian Numismatic Society.
Spassky pointed out that very few if any of the ingots have been found in any way hacked to make small change. This tends toward the thought that they were not circulating objects, rather mostly or entirely for hoarding and large transactions.
Spassky wrote several pages on the "coinless period," which lasted about 200 years both before and during the Mongol interlude. He found it hard to accept that when the old records wrote of "heads of squirrels and martens" that the little skulls were actually being used as small change. He mentioned as well references to "leather money" but went on to write that no trace of such objects have ever been found. A mystery absolutely unsolved to this day.
The Mongols showed up in 1238. That will be the story next time.
Please get in touch with comments, corrections, information or pictures for upcoming articles. My addresses: P.O. Box 26303, Raleigh, NC 27611; e-mail: reisbiz@earthlink.net.
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