A gold solidus of Theodosius II
Priscus, who went to Attila's court himself, records the price of peace: 6,000 pounds of gold at once, 2,100 pounds every year, and twelve coins like this one for every escaped Roman prisoner. A solidus was struck at 72 to the pound, so the first payment alone was 432,000 of them.
Based on many surviving coins of the Constantinople mint, not one in particular.
What it is
A small gold coin struck at Constantinople in the reign of Theodosius II, who ruled the eastern Roman empire from 402 to 450. It weighs about four and a half grams. Constantine had fixed the standard at 72 coins to the Roman pound, and it held for centuries. They survive in large numbers, which is why the picture on this card is based on many of them rather than one.
When the price was paid
Tradition attaches these terms to the peace of 443, after Attila's first war on the eastern empire. A minority of scholars move them to the settlement after 447. The Attila page on this site gives both, and so does this card.
What it cost
Priscus adds that senators sold their wives' jewellery to pay. That is hostile rhetoric, best taken as colour. Modern historians reckon the empire could afford the gold. What stung was being seen to pay it.
- Priscus, fragment 9.3 (Blockley): the terms of the peace
- Blockley, The Fragmentary Classicising Historians of the Later Roman Empire II (1983)
- Hendy, Studies in the Byzantine Monetary Economy c. 300–1450 (1985), on the solidus standard
- Picture: made with AI for The Ember Atlas, an imagining, not a record of how it looked.