Crusader Coins: an introduction to their typological and stylistic analysis
María LAURA MONTEMURRO
Original title: Monedas de las Cruzadas: introducción al análisis de su iconografía y estilo
Published in The Middle Ages and the Crusades
Keywords: Coin types, Coinage, Coins, Crusader, Latin East, Numismatics.
The numismatic material offers an outstanding opportunity for iconographic studies, often neglected by art historians. For ages, coinage has not simply served as a medium of financial or commercial exchange, but also (and more interestingly for the art historian) as a vehicle that conveyed, through a wide territorial span, design and iconographic concepts of enormously influential gravitation. Crusader coins are not an exception: on the contrary, its influence in the late mediaeval coinage in regards to iconography and other devices was paramount. This paper attempts to draw attention to several aspects related to the iconography of the Crusader coins, their probable typological models and derivations, that it, its decisive influence in the later Mediaeval and early modern coinages.
Women and the supreme power in Byzantium (5th-11th centuries). Numismatic approach
José María de FRANCISCO OLMOS
Original title: Las mujeres y el poder supremo en Bizancio, siglos V-XI. Aproximación numismática
Published in Mulier aut Femina. Idealism or reality of women in the Middle Ages
Keywords: 5th-11th centuries, Byzantium, Empresses, Numismatics.
This paper studies the evolution of the role of Byzantine women in relation to the Empire government, with special attention to the numismatic evidence. The analyzed period goes from the beginning of the Empire in the 5th century to the middle of the 11th, with a detailed analysis of those reigns that seem most significant in the evolution of this issue, that is those of Pulcheria, Irene and the sisters Zoë and Theodora, with whom women finally became able to assume the government in their own names, without any shade of fiction, as seen on the previous cases.
