Justin II

Nephew of Justinian I through the emperor's sister Vigilantia, Justin II inherited the throne in November 565 along with a treasury drained by his uncle's reconquests of Africa and Italy and by the indemnities paid to keep the Persian frontier quiet. His response (refusing to renew Justinian's annual subsidies to the Avars and the Persians, and pulling garrisons inward) was almost immediately punished: in 568 the Lombards under Alboin crossed the Julian Alps and tore the interior of Italy out of Byzantine control within a single campaigning season, and in 572 the Persian war he had himself declared went badly enough at Dara that he suffered a documented psychological collapse in 574. From that point his wife Sophia governed alongside the new Caesar Tiberius until his death in 578. The coinage of these thirteen years is unusually personal for a Byzantine reign: the bronze folles and half-folles from multiple mints show Justin and Sophia jointly enthroned in equal scale and regalia, one of the only sustained Byzantine coin types of any denomination in which a reigning empress sits beside the emperor as an iconographic equal.

Two threads matter beyond the reign. The first is the joint-enthroned bronze: earlier empresses had been struck on consular and consecration medallions, and Theodora had appeared on Justinian's coinage in small format, but the sustained, full-frontal, equal-scale seated portrait of Sophia beside Justin on the most-circulated denomination of the empire (the bronze follis that paid soldiers and traders by the basketful in every market in the eastern Mediterranean) is the first time a Byzantine reigning empress is given iconographic parity with the emperor on the metal that did the daily work of the state. The type prefigures by two centuries the iconographic ground on which Irene of Athens would later claim sole rule on the gold itself. The second is the continued M-follis output of Ravenna, Rome, and Carthage through the 568–578 collapse of the Italian interior: the bronze of the western mints keeps the dated Justinianic format running ANNO by ANNO even as the territory the fisc was meant to serve contracts around the exarchates, and the resulting denominational stratigraphy is one of the cleanest fiscal records of a sixth-century territorial loss.

Key Events

Coinage

The gold of the reign continues the Justinianic conventions almost unchanged: the Constantinople solidus carries a diademed and cuirassed facing bust of Justin holding a cross on globe, with a reverse showing Constantinopolis (the helmeted female personification of the city) seated facing, holding spear and globus cruciger, with the legend VICTORIA AVGGG and the CONOB mintmark in exergue (Sear 345; DOC I·3–4). The semissis and tremissis use the cross-potent-on-steps reverse. The personalised iconography of the reign sits on the bronze. The 40-nummi follis and 20-nummi half-follis from Constantinople, Cyzicus, Nicomedia, Antioch/Theoupolis and the western mints carry on the obverse a jointly-enthroned, equally-crowned Justin and Sophia, the emperor holding a globus cruciger and the empress holding a cruciform sceptre, with the reverse showing the large M (or K) denomination mark, mint signature, officina letter, and (by inheritance from Justinian's reform of 538/9) a regnal year in Greek numerals in the right field. The folles thus self-date from ANNO I (565/6) through ANNO XIII (577/8) and provide one of the few year-by-year quantitative datasets for a sixth-century Byzantine reign. The Italian and African mints (Ravenna, Rome, Carthage) keep striking the M-follis, the K-half-follis, and the smaller bronze through the Lombard invasion and the loss of the Italian interior, a fact that documents the geographic resilience of the late Roman fiscal apparatus better than the chronicles do. Dumbarton Oaks Catalogue Volume I (Bellinger & Grierson, 1966) is the working reference for the reign; Sear's Byzantine Coins and Their Values supplies the standard market identifiers (Sear 345 for the Constantinople solidus; the seated-pair bronze runs through the Sear 360–410 range).

Collecting Guide

Sophia seated equal-scale beside Justin on the daily-circulation M-follis is the single most consequential image of the reign for the market, and the cross-collector premium attaches to that empress-portrait bronze before anything else on the iconographic-significance axis. Catalogue work runs against DOC I and Sear's Byzantine Coins and Their Values, since NumisLens does not yet maintain a per-emperor catalogue for the sixth-century Justinianic succession. The jointly-enthroned Justin-and-Sophia M-folles command $80–300 VF at the major Byzantine sales (CNG, Roma, Leu, Heritage) for common Constantinople and provincial issues, with sharply-struck Cyzicus or Antioch examples on choice flans reaching $400–600 and the better-style Carthage and Italian-mint pieces (particularly Ravenna ANNO of the post-568 years) passing $500–800 when the seated pair shows clear detail. The half-follis K with the same obverse type carries a similar premium structure at the smaller module. The standard Constantinople solidus (the Justin-bust obverse with Constantinopolis-seated reverse) is the working gold-tier entry point: $300–700 in VF, $800–1,500 in choice EF, abundant relative to provincial gold. Bronze workhorse acquisitions follow the regnal-year axis. Constantinople ANNO I–XIII issues are abundant in $40–150 VF, with the early and late years carrying a small premium. Silver miliarenses of the reign are sporadic enough that any genuine example is a special-listing event.

Market Overview

Demand on the reign concentrates on the seated-pair bronze, where the empress iconography draws specialist Byzantine empress-portrait collectors (paired in cabinet sets with the later Irene of Athens and Theodora of the Macedonian dynasty) and lifts hammer prices on the folles and half-folles above what comparable Justinianic bronze would warrant. The Constantinople gold solidus is a steady, well-supplied entry point at the higher tier, but does not carry the empress-iconography premium that the bronze does. Dated M-folles of Constantinople, Antioch, Cyzicus, and Nicomedia cross the major sales every cycle in volume, and Italian and African issues turn up more sporadically through CNG, Roma, Naumann, and the dedicated Byzantine sales at Leu and Roma. Provenance from named twentieth-century Byzantine cabinets (Bendall, Hahn, the relevant DOC-illustrated specimens) carries a measurable premium on the seated-pair bronze and on the better-struck Italian issues.

Related Resources

Further Reading

• Dumbarton Oaks Catalogue of the Byzantine Coins, Volume I: Anastasius I to Maurice 491–602, Alfred R. Bellinger & Philip Grierson
• Byzantine Coins and Their Values, David R. Sear
• Justin II: A Political Biography, John Martindale (in The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, Vol. IIIB)