Basil II left 200,000 pounds of gold and no son; his successors spent it, and the gold coin was debased to almost nothing by the 1080s

Basil II ruled Byzantium for about fifty years. The Byzantine historian Michael Psellus says the treasury reached "200,000 talents" and that Basil had spiral galleries dug underground to hold it. Modern estimates put the reserve at 14.4 million gold coins, about 90 tonnes of gold. Basil had no heir. When he died on 15 December 1025, his brother Constantine VIII took the throne and a treasury "crammed with money." Psellus says he spent it on luxury, "heaping gold on them as though it were sand." Under the empress Zoe and later emperors the spending continued. Psellus says Zoe could "exhaust a sea teeming with gold-dust in one day," and that Constantine IX's aim was to leave not a single obol in the treasury. Basil's wealth, he writes, "became the plaything of these women" and "soon all was spent and exhausted." From the 1030s the gold coin was debased. By the 1080s its gold content was close to zero. In 1092 Alexios I replaced it with a new coin, the hyperpyron, at 20.5 carats. Basil had asked to be buried at the Hebdomon outside the walls. In 1260 soldiers besieging Constantinople found a body there with a shepherd's flute in its mouth. An inscription named it Basil, and the remains were moved to Selymbria.