Among the banking laws enacted while By zantium was under the control of Athens were the following: 1. No banker shall demand (or receive) more interest money than that agreed upon at first. See ANCIENT AND MEDLEVALP for a similar provision in ancient India.
2. Nobody who had put in surety for any thing may sue for it, he or his heirs. (*Put in' is here probably meant for "pledged*).
3. Pledges and securities shall not stand but for one year.
4. Counterfeiters and debasers and diminish ers of the current coin shall forfeit their lives.
5. No Athenian or sojourner shall lend money to be exported, unless for corn or some such commodity allowable by law. He who sends away money (out of the country), for other uses, shall be brought before the master of the custom house and prosecuted criminally, after the manner of those transporting corn un lawfully. He shall have no writ or warrant against his correspondent, nor shall the archons permit him to have a civil trial.
6. Corporations may make their own by laws, provided that they are not inconsistent with the public laws (Potter, (Antiq. II, 198-200).
The numismatic collections of Europe are so full of Byzantine coins of almost every period that they have given rise to numerous works and still more numerous contentions.
Briefly, it may be stated that before the plunder of Persia and India by Alexander the Great, gold was valued in the coinages of the Greek states at 10 times that of the same weight of silver. After his soldiers were so laden with gold spoil that they rejected silver vessels and all other plunder less valuable than gold, and demanded to be led back to Greece because they could carry no more, their leader, in his capac ity of King and Basileus, raised by decree the value of gold in his coinages to 12 times that of silver; and so it remained until Byzantium fell to the arms of Rome, and practically throughout the entire Roman domination down to the capture of Constantinople by the Latin forces in 1204, when the various kingdoms and principalities which arose upon the ruin of the empire struck their own coins and fixed their own valuation upon them.
The so-called *leather moneys' of Byzantium and of the various nations which throughout the Dark and Middle Ages issued fiduciary moneys were obligations written on parchment and attested by the proper authorities; of which moneys but a single specimen is known to exist at the present time, preserved in one of the great national cabinets of Europe. For the history of other ancient banks see BARCELONA,