Michael Hendy was a precocious scholar who reshaped our entire understanding of the economy of medieval Byzantium and made a lasting contribution to the history of coinage and monetary studies.

Born in Newhaven, East Sussex, in 1942, the son of a merchant sea captain, Michael Hendy graduated from Oxford in 1964. As an undergraduate at The Queen’s College, he once went to Cambridge to look at Byzantine coins in the Fitzwilliam Museum and expressed such an unusual interest in those minted by the Comnenian and Palaeologan emperors that the great numismatist and historian Philip Grierson (1910-1995) kept in touch with him, even inviting him to a feast at his college, a privilege generally reserved for distinguished academics.

More importantly, Grierson also recommended him for a two-year fellowship at the Dumbarton Oaks Centre for Byzantine Studies, Washington, and a five-year assistant curatorship at the Fitzwilliam Museum, 1967-72.

In 1964-65 a British Council scholarship had enabled Hendy to study coin finds in Bulgaria, which proved to be the starting point for the large volume, Coinage and Money in the Byzantine Empire (1081-1261), published by Dumbarton Oaks in 1969, when he was 27.

This pathbreaking and revolutionary study brought order to the previously misunderstood coinage of this period. Where the British Museum catalogue saw a chaotic series of debased coins of varying intrinsic value, Hendy identified a decisive monetary reform that replaced the debased issues of the late 11th century with a new system of denominations, including a restored pure gold coin, the hyperpyron, at the top. He solved the mystery of the elusive coinage of the Latin Empire of Constantinople (1204-1261) by identifying and dating, on the basis of coin finds, small bronze pieces that imitated, more or less faithfully, 12th-century Byzantine types that had previously been confused with Comnenian issues.

Such discoveries went far beyond the “internalities” for which Hendy later blamed numismatists; they allowed a reassessment of the economy of Byzantium in the first stages of the so-called “commercial revolution” that opened up the Mediterranean market. Hendy argued rightly that the economy was expanding and not in decline. This proved a turning point in Byzantine historiography.

In 1972 he moved to Birmingham where he became curator of the important Byzantine coin collection in the Barber Institute. From 1978 until 1987 he was lecturer in Numismatics in the University’s Department of Medieval History. During that period he often travelled to and from Dumbarton Oaks, as visiting Fellow in 1976 and as associate adviser for Byzantine Numismatics in 1980-1981 and 1982-1984; his second great book was researched on both sides of the Atlantic.

This other magnum opus, Studies in the Byzantine Monetary Economy c.300-1450 (Cambridge University Press, 1985), was not only a detailed history of Byzantine money, its production, circulation and the administration of mints but also an economic assessment of the role of money in the economy. Twenty-five years later it remains an often-cited reference work. Under the influence of the “Cambridge school”, notably of Hugo Jones, Moses Finley and Philip Grierson, to all of whom he acknowledged his scholarly and intellectual debt, Hendy systematically downgraded the role of cash and exchanges and the level of monetisation of Byzantium, although that is now believed to have been relatively high for the period and one of the great strengths of the empire.

With these credentials, enhanced by the publication of a volume of collected studies that included several unpublished chapters (The Economy, Fiscal Administration and Coinage of Byzantium, Ashgate, 1989) and his important fieldwork on the coin finds from the excavations at Aphrodisias, Saraçhane (Saint Polyeuktos) and Kalenderhane in Istanbul, and Kourion in Cyprus, he might have been expected to start a new career after his voluntary severance from Birmingham. In 1987 he moved to Princeton and then joined his partner and future wife, Professor Meg Alexiou, in Harvard in 1989.

But perhaps as the unhappy consequence of an unusual personality, his aversion to the demands of daily professional responsibilities and general contrariness, which contrasted with his culinary skills and generous hospitality, he never received the high academic recognition he deserved. He felt unappreciated. The scientific loss that his death brings to the field of Byzantine studies is irreparable.

His wife survives him.

Michael Hendy, economic historian, was born on April 16, 1942. He died of a heart attack on May 13, 2008, at 66