I apologize in advance for the sheer size of the following text, I might even have to post this in two seperate posts because I'm not allowed to post over 15.000 characters (somehow including spaces and such). Anyhow I did some general nerding-around and came up with a few theories about the significance of the fact that this pattern only shows on the copper coinage, while entirely absent from the gold. Keep in mind that I'm by no means an expert on the many intricacies of the imperial court or Eastern-Roman (I flat-out refuse to resort to the pejorative term
Byzantine, F U Petrarch) society as a whole. Please consider this post to be nothing more than the thought-excersise of an overly excited and probably extremely subjective fanboy.
So let us begin with taking a moment to appreciate just how delicate (read dangerous) the position of the emperor was at any given time. These individuals where basicly in perpetual life threatening danger. There would be, at any given time, a myraid of disgruntled faction
members seeking the purple either for themselves or their benefactor. This meant that any sign of weakness, regardless of the gravity of said weakness, could (and at times would) be an opportunity for these noblemen to overthrow the sitting emperor and replace him with a candidate of thier choosing. No wonder really that so many of these individuals grew to become paranoid tyrants. This was actually (according to Gibbon I believe, so not to be taken at face-value) a weakness of the Empire stemming from its very inception as the Principate under
Augustus. Unsurprisingly this actually is a lot more complicated since
Roman society was by no means static for entire centuries on end, but there might just be a pattern here stretching from the Principate, throughout the later Dominate and maybe even up until the dying remnants of the Palaiologoi iteration of the Eastern-Roman Empire in the later 15th century.
So keep the above in mind when we shift our focus to the actualities of the Justinian plague. This
man, the absolute zenith of imperial power in the mediterennean at this point in time, caught (according to the sources) the bubonic plague in 542. This would mean that the
man was basicly comatose and on the brink of death for an extended period of time. For reasons explained above, this would most certainly have lead to an uproar in the upper echelons of Eastern-Roman society, and perhaps even lead to outright civil-war to determine who's to replace our magnificent lawgiver. Two particularities are key factors in this specific (although miraculously hypothetical) power struggle. Firstly, the fact that Justinian was childless at this point in time (and I believe he remained so for the rest of
his life) and he therefore lacked an obvious heir. Secondly, I believe there was an actual direct descendant of emperor
Anastasius living in
Constantinople at this period in time, behind which the disgruntled
nobility could (and I believe they at one point actually did) unite to replace Justinian. Meanwile in the lower tiers of Eastern-Roman society the (alleged) condition of the mighty emperor also caused somewhat of an uproar. Keep in mind that the Justinian plague, really the first of it's kind, was ravaging the mediterreanean at this point in time. Public memory
had never experienced anything like this kind of an epidemic before (although epidemics were known to have taken place in
antiquity, like the Antonine Plague of the second century C.E., historians to this day are uncertain as to what
type of disease caused the Antonine terror, but there is a general consent among historians that the plague of Justinian was the first instance of a large outbreak of the bubonic plague in the mediterennean, moreover this particular outbreak supposedly came from grain transports from
Alexandria, but I digress). Anyhow, there's also a mayor
quality to societies that look to divine providence to explain the world around them. Any
type of mayor disaster, be it war, disease or natural, made people question the divine mandate of their ruler. And this is just as true for an emperor as it is for a duke, a
sultan or a shahanshah. Something along the lines of "Should our beloved ruler be virtuous, honorable and just, concerning the common
good of mankind, our God will never allow this to happen" and "Should our beloved ruler be a tyrannical, wicked despot, he will corrupt society as a whole and therefore God will punish society as a whole". So one can imagine the Public-Relations nightmare this outbreak grew to become when approximately a quarter (and don't quote me on the specifics) of the population succumbed to the bubonic plague. Allegedly the undertakers at
Constantinople eventually
ran out of burial sites outside the walls (yes THOSE walls), so they resorted to mass-graves within the walls and when even this would no longer suffice they decided to store the plague-riddled corpses in vacated guards towers or stack them on rowing vessels and sent them adrift across the mediterennean (this last solution also didn't exactly
help with the containment of the outbreak, as one can imagine).
Anyhow, now the stage is set for us to look to the actual rusty pieces of copper we all know and love. The fact that Justinian visibly has the plague on the copper, whereas on the gold he doesn't, might also have to do something with Eastern-Roman society as a whole. Keep in mind that the copper pieces were probably the pocket change of the lower tiers of society (by no means take this for a fact, as you people might know this a lot better then I do). In juxtaposition to this, the upper echelons of society pobably never even saw these worthless pieces of junk. The senators, higher ranking millitary officials and the wider aristocracy counted their (probably immense) fortunes in the gold pieces (i.e. the solidi and the tremisses). And this meant (should this argument be within the realm of historical realism, which it very well might not be) that this economic segregration made the copper pieces an immensely powerfull tool for the communication of a certain message to a very specific
part of Eastern-Roman society; the
part that was succumbing to the bubonic plague by the thousands and as a result thereof was questioning the divine mandate of their emperor. Should this argumentation even be remotely reasonable (which I strongly suspect it to be, but again this is grounded in speculation), this leads me to two divergent, but by no means irreconcilable, sequences of events that led to the disparity between the gold and copper pieces.
First of all is the sequence of events where we take the sources at
face value, without questioning their historical accuracy (which absolutely no one in the
history of
history should've ever done
nor should any one in the future for that matter). In this line of thinking Justinian personally caught the bubonic plague in 542 and
his wife, empress
Theodora,
had to take over the entirety of the state apparatus of the Eastern-Roman empire. She then, in a feat of unimaginable strength, proceded to avert all the imaginable calamaties that absolutely should have followed from an heirless comatose emperor that was (to all appearances) very close to meeting
his maker. This fact alone would make her one of the most capable (female) rulers in mediterennean
history. She handled the upper echelons of society by obscuring from imperial affairs those individuals who seemed all to eager to fill the power vacuum resulting from a comatose emperor. Those who rose their flag in outright rebellion she crushed (for example the faction that sought to replace Justinian with the nephew of
Anastasius, Probius I think was
his name?). And all this while her husband (and these people genuinely loved eachother according to the source material) lay comatose in bed dying from the bubonic plague. During all of this she could simply not afford to show any kind of weakness whatsoever. The smallest display of weakness on her
part towards the
nobility would be detrimental to her husbands, in indeed her own, survival. The empire needed to appear to function as intended, with or without it's actual emperor. And this is why I believe, in this line of thinking, the gold pieces do not show Justinian with a bloated
face. The message communicated to those individuals who actually
had the resources at their disposal to overthrow and replace the emperor was of one of resilience. Even when the person of Justinian was succumbing to disease, the symbol of Justinian as emperor served (among other more powerfull things of course) to remind any potential plotters that imperial authority was by no means a joke. The presence of Justinian with a bloated
face on the copper pieces on the other hand, can also (in this line of thinking) be explained by looking at the tiers of society that actually dealt with them the most. These people were succumbing to the bubonic plague by the thousands and would never aquire the means to threaten the position of the emperor without outside
help. So these people also recieved an image of Justinian that was customised to the specific circumstances those people were facing. In this case the image , on the coinage was one of compassion. Just take a moment to imagine the power of such an image. Approximately a quarter of the people you know and love have passed away as a result of this plague and all the sudden you are presented with an image of the most powerfull, most noble and all around most awesome individual in the known world. Moreover this allmighty demigod is also visably affected by this abominable disease. I wont argue this would silence those questions about divine mandate, but I can imagine a well-coördinated PR-campaign (of which this might very well be a
part) would be able to mediate these questions to a certain extent. In short, I believe that, should Justinian actually have personally caught this disease, the disparity between the
gold coinage and the copper coinage can possibly be explained by looking at the different cicumstances that different tiers of society
had to deal with at this particular point in time. Furthermore, I believe that these different tiers of society were presented a customised image of imperial authority, tailored to their specific circumstances. And in conclusion I believe that, if Justinian actually caught the disease, all of this could be (but a small
part of) a well-coördinated PR-campaign orchestrated by empress
Theodora and her advisors.