Maurice

Maurice came to Constantinople from Arabissus in Cappadocia as a notary in the bureau of the comes excubitorum, then rose through the military as the eastern war against Khosrow I and Hormizd IV ground through its third decade. By 578 he was magister militum per Orientem; in 582 the dying emperor Tiberius II married his daughter Constantina to Maurice and acclaimed him Augustus on 13 August, the night before his own death. The reign's central act was finished within nine years: when Khosrow II was driven out of Persia by the usurper Bahram Chobin in 590, Maurice took the deposed king in, supplied him an army, and put him back on the Sasanian throne in 591 — in return the Treaty of Resafa transferred most of Persian Armenia and parts of Iberia to Roman control without a fought campaign, the most favourable eastern settlement any Roman emperor had achieved since the third century. Maurice spent the peace on the Balkan frontier against the Avars and Slavs, wrote (or commissioned in his name) the Strategikon — a tactical manual still read in modern military academies — and was murdered with his five sons on the Chalcedon shore in late November 602, deposed by his own Danubian field army under the centurion Phocas. The killing of his patron gave Khosrow II the casus belli for the twenty-six-year war that nearly ended the Byzantine empire.

Two strands of Maurice's coinage carry weight beyond the reign. The brief eastern-mint output that followed the 591 Treaty of Resafa — gold and bronze signed at Theoupolis and at the small Armenian and northern-Mesopotamian mints recovered from Khosrow II — is one of the most concrete numismatic records of late-antique diplomacy: territory exchanged for the restoration of a foreign throne, visible on surviving metal in mint signatures the Roman frontier had not produced since the third-century crisis. Separately, the regnal-year dating of the M-folles makes the chronological endpoint of the reign — the issues of regnal year XX, dated 601-602 — one of the most consequential break-points in late-antique numismatic chronology: the murder at Chalcedon is the proximate cause of Khosrow II's twenty-six-year war, the war that brings Heraclius to the throne, the wartime silver hexagram, and the empire that emerges on the far side of 628 as a fundamentally different polity from the one Maurice inherited.

Key Events

Coinage

Maurice's coinage runs on the Anastasian system as Tiberius II had refined it: gold solidi and their fractions at 72 to the pound, a small silver miliarense series, the rare experimental hexagram weighed at six scruples that prefigures Heraclius's wartime silver, and a regnal-year-dated copper anchored by the M-follis worth forty nummi, with K, I, and E subdivisions, each carrying an officina letter A-E and a Roman regnal numeral I-XX. The mature solidus shows the emperor's facing bust crowned, holding the cross-on-globe (globus cruciger) — an iconographic continuation of Tiberius II's consular-bust precedent — with a reverse of Angel standing facing, holding a long staff surmounted by the chi-rho and a globus cruciger, legend VICTORIA AVGG and an officina letter, mint signature CONOB in the exergue. The reverse vocabulary is the Tiberian inheritance: the cross potent on four steps that Tiberius had introduced as a reverse innovation continues on selected lighter gold and on the tremisses. The bronze legend reads D N MAVRC TIB P P AV on the obverse, the reverse the standard large M with ANNO and the Roman regnal numeral. The reign's most documentary issues are the brief output of the post-591 eastern mints recovered under the Resafa treaty — Theoupolis (Antioch, THEUP) and the small Armenian mints — which carry mint signatures that for the Roman empire had been silent since the third-century crisis. Bellinger's Dumbarton Oaks Catalogue Volume I (Maurice covered in pp. 295-381) is the working reference; Sear's Byzantine Coins and Their Values (Sear 463-705) gives the dealer numbers; Hahn's MIB II provides the gold die-framework on the Constantinople output.

Collecting Guide

Sourcing reference attribution for Maurice means working two volumes in tandem: DOC I (Bellinger covers Maurice on pp. 295-381) for the catalogue spine and Sear's Byzantine Coins and Their Values for the working dealer numbers, with no internal NumisLens record to fall back on. Maurice's coinage then organises most usefully around the Khosrow II diplomatic watershed of 591, because the eastern-mint vocabulary breaks open at that point in a way no Justinian-dynasty reign before it had managed. Pre-591 war silver and gold from Constantinople and Antioch supply the bulk of the market: standard Constantinople facing-bust solidi sit at $250-600 in VF and $750-1,800 in EF at CNG, Roma, Künker, Leu, and Nomos; the M-folles with sharp regnal-year dating trade at $50-180 in VF, with the early years (ANNO I-V) marginally scarcer and the bulk of supply concentrated in years VIII-XV. Post-591 peace silver from Theoupolis and the recovered Armenian and northern-Mesopotamian mints sits in a separate market — small surviving populations, attribution premium, and a documentary dimension that pulls cross-collector interest from the Sasanian side as well, where Khosrow II specialists buy paired issues from both empires for the dynastic-restoration narrative. The Italian-mint gold of Ravenna and the African gold of Carthage carry a clear style-and-scarcity premium over Constantinople of the same grade, and the rare silver hexagram — a Maurice-era experimental issue prefiguring the Heraclian wartime denomination — is the high-end specialist piece of the reign.

Market Overview

Supply on the standard Constantinople solidi and the dated M-folles is steady, with several dozen pieces of each crossing the major Byzantine sales every cycle and a narrow bid-ask spread on common types. The deeper specialist demand pulls from three non-Byzantine fields: Persian-war historians who buy the post-591 eastern-mint material for the Khosrow II restoration narrative and pair it with the Sasanian drachms of the same diplomatic moment; Slavic and Balkan-history collectors who attach the late-reign bronze (regnal years XV-XX, struck during the Avar and Slav campaigns) to the Strategikon and the Danubian frontier; and military-history collectors who buy the reign as the chronological frame of the manual itself. Provenance from the named twentieth-century Byzantine cabinets — Dumbarton Oaks duplicates, Whittemore, Bertelè, the Hunt sales — adds a durable premium across the reign, most visibly on the Italian and African gold.

Related Resources

Further Reading

• Catalogue of the Byzantine Coins in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection and in the Whittemore Collection, Volume One: Anastasius I to Maurice (491-602), Alfred R. Bellinger
• Byzantine Coins and Their Values, David R. Sear
• Moneta Imperii Byzantini, Band 2: Von Justinus II. bis Phocas (565-610), Wolfgang Hahn