Anastasius I

Born around 431 in Dyrrhachium (modern Durrës, Albania), Anastasius came to the throne from within the palace service, reputedly a silentarius before Empress Ariadne chose him to succeed her husband Zeno in 491. Known for his distinctive two-colored eyes—hence the nickname Dicorus—he combined a clerk’s attention to detail with a reformer’s nerve. He faced immediate tests: restive Isaurian warlords from the mountains of Asia Minor, religious disputes between Chalcedonians and Miaphysites, and a population weary of wartime exactions.

Anastasius’s decisive contribution to this timeline is monetary. In 498 he reformed the bronze currency, introducing large, clearly marked folles stamped with numerals—M for 40 nummi, K for 20, I for 10, E for 5—so that the clatter on market tables matched real, predictable value. The “M,” big as a palm and dark as old copper, made wages and provisioning legible from city bakeries to frontier forts. He paired coin reform with fiscal discipline, abolishing the chrysargyron (a crushing tax on trades) and strengthening revenue flows. The result was a surplus reputed at 320,000 pounds of gold and strategic investments like the Long Wall across Thrace. Anastasius thus supplied the empire with the working money and managerial habits that later emperors used to finance law, building, and war.

He governed amid controversy. The Isaurian War (492–497) required ruthless persistence. The Vitalian revolt (513–515) exposed the depth of religious division and the political costs of imperial theology. Anastasius could be stubborn, even austere; his economy and administrative neatness earned praise, while his religious stance drew riots and street-fight sermons. Yet his personality—frugal, orderly, and unafraid of unglamorous fixes—matched the problems he faced. He preferred balancing ledgers and strengthening walls to planting banners in distant provinces.

Anastasius’s legacy is the empire’s fiscal backbone. The bronze denominations he introduced framed Byzantine small change for generations, and the calmer tax climate he engineered soothed cities and barracks alike. By the time Justinian launched law codes, reconquests, and domes that scraped the sky, the cash drawers, mints, and accounting practices Anastasius stabilized were humming. In the story of whether law, money, and war could hold the Roman world together, Anastasius supplied the money and the method—the quiet arithmetic behind imperial ambition.