figure of the emperor as the “servant of Christ” in the accompanying inscription. Towards the end of the Byzantine period, however, the quality of coins had so deteriorated that the patterns became abstract. (The Byzantines are credited in history in which denominations were indicated systematically on coinage.)
THE CRUSADER KINGDOM AND ITS COINS:
The rise of power by the Seljuk Turks led to the Crusades, for the Emperors of Constantinople had appealed to the Popes in 1073 and 1095 for help against them. When Urban II preached the crusade, it was against the Seljuk Turks. It turned into a crusade to liberate Christian holy sites from the Moslems. After the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem in 1099, control over the Holy Land reverted to the Christians, and Jerusalem became the capital of the Latin Kingdom.
The earliest coins struck in the Kingdom of Jerusalem were imitations of gold dinars from the Fatimid period and bore Arabic inscription. Later coins depicting the cross and Christ’s portraits based on the Byzantine type were struck in the mints of Antiochia and Edessa, the Crusader states of northern Syria; Frankish-type dinars, under European influences, were minted in Tripoli in Lebanon. The following Crusader period, coins from the East could be divided into Byzantine, Islamic, and West European imitations, corespondingly with whomever the Crusaders wished to trade or to be identified.
With the fall of Jerusalem in 1099 and the establishment of Latin Kingdom, coins bore Christograms and other Christian motifs. Nor did the Christian Kings of Jerusalem neglect to strike their own coins, on which they placed as emblems such as edifices as the Tower of David, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and sometimes even the Mosque