Nicephorus II Phocas

Nicephorus II Phocas came out of the Phocas military aristocracy of Cappadocia and reached the throne through field command rather than palace politics — as Romanus II's domestikos ton scholon of the east he led the long-prepared expedition that recovered Crete from the Emirate of the Cretan Saracens in March 961, ending more than a hundred and thirty years of Muslim rule on the island and removing the corsair base that had dominated the central Aegean since the 820s. Romanus II's sudden death in March 963 left two infant porphyrogenetoi (the future Basil II and Constantine VIII) and an opening in which the army acclaimed Nicephorus emperor at Caesarea on 2 July; he entered Constantinople and was crowned by the patriarch Polyeuctus on 16 August, and within weeks had married the empress-widow Theophano and assumed the senior position alongside his two stepsons. The six-year reign that followed pushed the eastern frontier deep into the Cilician plain and the northern Syrian massif — Tarsus and Adana fell in 965, Cyprus was recovered the same year, and Antioch, taken by his general Michael Bourtzes in October 969, was the first Byzantine recovery of the patriarchal see since its loss to the Arabs in 638. On the night of 10–11 December 969 Nicephorus was killed in his sleeping chamber in the Boukoleon palace by his nephew John Tzimiskes, who succeeded him as John I. The coinage of the reign matters out of proportion to its length because Nicephorus introduced the lighter gold tetarteron alongside the standard-weight histamenon, the first deliberate Byzantine departure from the pure-Constantinian gold standard that Constantine I had fixed at one seventy-second of the Roman pound in 309 and that had held without reform for six hundred and fifty-four years.

Two threads carry weight far beyond the six-year reign itself. The histamenon-tetarteron split is the first deliberate Byzantine state action to issue gold below the seventy-two-to-the-pound Constantinian standard that had held without reform from Constantine I's edict of 309 through six hundred and fifty-four years and twenty-six intervening rulers; the lighter coin runs at only about eleven-twelfths of the heavier, so the reform is a modest one in numerical terms, but the structural break is total — the principle that gold coinage might be issued at more than one weight standard for fiscal convenience, once introduced, becomes the structural foundation on which Constantine IX's mid-eleventh-century debasement and Alexios I's full overhaul of 1092 are built. Separately, the anonymous Class A bronze follis attributed to the close of the reign opens a century-long Byzantine tradition of imperial-anonymous circulating bronze — small bronzes carrying the bust of Christ and the IhSUS XRISTUS bASILEU bASILE inscription in place of any emperor portrait — that runs through John I, Basil II, Constantine VIII, Romanus III, and Michael IV, removing the emperor's face from the most-circulated denomination of the empire as a deliberate iconographic statement about the location of sovereignty in the figure of Christ rather than in the reigning prince.

Key Events

Coinage

The reign sits on a single structural change: the introduction of the gold tetarteron alongside the gold histamenon, which converts six hundred and fifty-four years of single-standard Byzantine gold (one nomisma of about four and a half grams, holding the Constantinian seventy-two-to-the-pound weight from 309 onward) into a deliberate bimetallic-within-gold convention that runs from Nicephorus II forward into the eleventh century. The histamenon retains the full traditional weight and the slightly concave (later increasingly scyphate) flan; the tetarteron is struck on a smaller, thicker, flatter module at roughly eleven-twelfths of the histamenon weight — approximately four grams against four and a half — and is intended, in the Cedrenus and Skylitzes reading, for tax receipts and salary settlements, where the lighter coin could be issued out by the treasury while the heavier coin remained the accepted reckoning unit. Iconographically both denominations continue the Christ-Pantocrator obverse that the early Macedonian emperors had restored after the close of the Iconoclast period — Christ facing, nimbate, holding the Gospels — and on the reverse Nicephorus appears either alone in loros holding patriarchal cross or paired with the Virgin Mary standing facing, the Theotokos crowning or supporting the emperor in a composition that is read as the visual programme of the militant-Marian theology of the reign. The silver miliaresion runs in the cross-potent-on-steps-with-five-line-inscription formula that Leo III had introduced in 720 and that the Macedonian emperors had kept unchanged. The bronze follis of the opening years carries an emperor portrait over the inherited large-M denomination mark; the anonymous Class A follis — small-module bronze with the facing bust of Christ on the obverse and the IhSUS XRISTUS bASILEU bASILE inscription on the reverse, in place of any imperial portrait — is attributed by Grierson to the close of Nicephorus II's reign and opens a century-long Byzantine tradition of imperial-anonymous bronze that runs through the reigns of John I, Basil II, Constantine VIII, Romanus III, and Michael IV. The mint base is narrow: Constantinople is essentially the sole significant issuer, with occasional bronze attributed to Cherson. The reference framework is Philip Grierson's Catalogue of the Byzantine Coins in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection, Vol. III, Part 2 (Basil I to Nicephorus III, 867–1081), with Sear's Byzantine Coins and Their Values (2nd ed., 1987) for the working pricing reference.

Collecting Guide

The standard-weight gold histamenon with the Virgin-and-Nicephorus reverse is the dominant denomination type of the reform and the abundant top of the market: every other price line in the reign descends from that anchor, because the histamenon-tetarteron split created by the reform itself ladders the gold into two collecting surfaces with different scarcity profiles. Attribution authority is DOC Vol. III.2 (Grierson 1973) supplemented by Sear's Byzantine Coins and Their Values; NumisLens does not maintain a per-emperor catalogue for the late-tenth-century Macedonian gold. The histamenon trades in the $400–$1,200 band in VF and $1,500–$3,000 in choice EF at CNG, Roma, Künker, Heritage, and Leu. The lighter gold tetarteron, scarcer in surviving volume and carrying the historical premium attached to the reform-introduction issue, clears at $700–$2,500 in VF and routinely higher in choice EF. Silver miliaresia run $200–$600 in VF, the better-style five-line-inscription examples climbing into the upper end of that band. The anonymous Class A bronze follis is widely available at $50–$200 — but the specific attribution to Nicephorus II (rather than to John I or to the joint Basil-II–Constantine-VIII period) is contested in the Grierson framework and the price is sensitive to how confidently the dealer catalogues the close-of-reign window. Portrait folles from the opening years of the reign are the small-bronze rarity of the series at $150–$500 depending on portrait clarity.

Market Overview

Nicephorus II material is a focused mid-tier Byzantine market: the histamenon and tetarteron together draw the central demand, with the tetarteron pulling steady premium for its standing as the introductory issue of the reform that redefined Byzantine gold for the following century and a half. Cross-collector demand reaches in from two non-Byzantine fields — Mediterranean medievalists who buy the gold against the recovery of Crete, Cyprus, and the Cilician-Syrian frontier of the mid-960s, and monetary-history specialists who collect the histamenon-tetarteron pair as the pre-Comnenian inflection point in late-antique and medieval gold. The anonymous Class A folles are pursued separately by a distinct collector segment that builds the imperial-anonymous bronze sequence across the late-tenth and eleventh centuries as a stand-alone iconographic study.

Related Resources

Further Reading

• Catalogue of the Byzantine Coins in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection, Vol. III, Part 2 — Basil I to Nicephorus III (867–1081), Philip Grierson
• Byzantine Coins and Their Values (2nd edition), David R. Sear
• Nikephoros II Phokas: A Study in the Reign of a Soldier-Emperor, Rosemary Morris