Solidus (coin)

The Byzantine solidus also inspired the zolotnik in the Kievan Rus' and the originally slightly less pure gold dinar first issued by the Umayyad Caliphate beginning in 697.

In Western Europe, the solidus was the main gold coin of commerce from late Roman times to the Early Middle Ages.

In Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the solidus also functioned as a unit of weight equal to 1⁄72 Roman pound (approximately 4.5 grams).

The solidus was initially introduced by Diocletian in small issues and later reintroduced for mass circulation by Constantine the Great in c. AD 312 and was composed of relatively solid gold.

By this time, the solidus was worth 275,000 increasingly debased denarii, each denarius containing just 5% (or one twentieth) of the amount of silver it had three and a half centuries beforehand.

Despite the Eastern half of the Roman Empire being predominantly Greek speaking, its coins were still inscribed in Latin well into the eighth century.

In the Greek-speaking world during the Roman period, and then in the Byzantine economy, the solidus was known as the νόμισμα (nomisma, plural nomismata).

To eliminate confusion between the two, from the reign of Basil II (975–1025) the solidus (histamenon nomisma) was struck as a thinner coin with a larger diameter but with the same weight and purity as before.

After Romanos lost the disastrous Battle of Manzikert to the Turks, the empire's ability to generate revenue deteriorated further and the solidus continued to be debased.

In the early seventh century, the mint at Carthage began to strike small "globular" solidi, about half the size of a normal solidus but much thicker.

The mint at Syracuse grew beginning in the mid-seventh century during the reign of Constans II, who briefly moved the empire's capital to the city.

Since the solidi circulating outside the empire were not used to pay taxes to the emperor, they did not get reminted, and the soft pure-gold coins quickly became worn.

Through the end of the 7th century, Arabian copies of solidi – dinars minted by the caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, who had access to supplies of gold from the upper Nile – began to circulate in areas outside the Byzantine Empire.

The fractional gold coins were especially popular in the West where the economy had been significantly simplified and few purchases required a denomination so large as the solidus.

Thenceforward, the solidus or sol was a paper accounting unit equivalent to one-twentieth of a pound (librum or livre) of silver and divided into 12 denarii or deniers.

To this day, in French around the world, solde means the balance of an account or invoice, or sales (seasonal rebate), and is the specific name of a soldier's salary.

Quarter dollar coins in colloquial Quebec French are sometimes called trente-sous (thirty cents), because of a series of changes in terminology, currencies, and exchange rates.

In Italian the verb Soldare (Assoldare) means hiring, more often soldiers (Soldati) or mercenaries, deriving exactly from the use of the word as described above.

The name of the medieval Spanish sueldo and Portuguese soldo (which also means salary) were derived from solidus; the term sweldo in most Philippine languages (Tagalog, Cebuano, etc.)

As on the continent, English coinage was restricted for centuries to the penny, while the scilling, understood to be the value of a cow in Kent or a sheep elsewhere,[10] was merely a unit of account equivalent to 12 pence.

Under the influence of the old long S ⟨ſ⟩,[citation needed] the abbreviations "£sd" eventually developed into the use of a slash ⟨/⟩, which gave rise to that symbol's ISO and Unicode name "solidus".