117 5 Byzantine coins in Viking-Age northern lands1 MAREK JANKOWIAK • C ompared to some 400,000 I slamic dirhams from ninth- and tenth-century inds in northern Europe,2 the 1,250 Byzantine silver miliaresia from the area ap- pear to be a mere admixture. Does this proportion, roughly 1:300, relect the relative intensity of the contacts of the Scandinavians and Slavs with the two superpowers of the early medieval world, Byzantium and the Abbasid caliphate? Abundant written sources, archaeological inds, and cultural and religious inluences testify to the appeal of Byzantium in the north and suggest that simple mathematics does not allow us to make sense of the situation. Why, then, are there so few Byzantine coins in hoards from Scandinavia and the Slavonic lands? his question will loom in the background of this paper. Its primary goal, how- ever, is to provide an overview of the inds of Byzantine coins—mostly silver, but also gold and copper—from Scandinavia and the Slavonic lands. he area under considera- tion corresponds to the zone of intense silver hoarding in the early middle ages, which includes the whole of Scandinavia, the entire Baltic coast, the West Slavonic lands and Rus. Although the period of hoarding extended over three and a half centuries, from c. 800 to the mid-twelth century, very few miliaresia found in the north were struck before the reign of the emperor heophilos (829–842) or ater that of Constantine IX Monomachos (1042–1055). hese reigns deine the chronological limits of this investi- gation. Despite the relatively small number of inds, the inlow of Byzantine coins to the north in the ninth and tenth centuries has not yet been comprehensively studied. he 1 his paper was presented at various stages of completion at the ‘Byzantium and the Viking World’ conference in Uppsala and at the Late Antique and Byzantine Archaeology and Art Sem- inar in Oxford. I would like to thank Jonathan Shepard, Marlia Mango and Philipp Niewöhner for their invitations, and the participants for their comments. I also beneited from the com- ments of Cécile Morrisson and Luke Treadwell. All mistakes are mine. I was able to conduct this research thanks to a Newton International Fellowship and the AHRC-funded project Dirhams for Slaves. 2 Kovalev & Kaelin 2007, 563.