Fouracre P. The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 1: c. 500-c. 700
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The Mediterranean economy 613
KEAY LXI KEAY LXII KEAY XXVI
LRA 1 LRA 2 LRA 3
LRA 4 LRA 5/6 LRA 7
Figure 8.Some of the principal classifications of African and eastern Mediterranean
amphorae in interregional circulation in the sixth and seventh centuries (African:
Keay xxvi (spatheion); Keay lxi;Keay lxii. Eastern Mediterranean: LRA 1–7)
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dishes manufacturedin workshops in what is now Tunisia; this is the ubiquitous
African Red Slip ware (ARS), the dominant international pottery of the period,
and the most closely studied of all late antique ceramic types. But although
we can classify and date some of the material found on sites like St Blaise with
increasing precision, this does not help us to understand how it got there. It
seems reasonable to assume that its presence involves trade, but the nature and
number of the exchanges requiredto transport wine from producers in Palestine
to eventual consumers on a Provenc¸al hilltop is a matter of speculation. A
distinction between ceramics of ‘African’ and ‘eastern Mediterranean’ origin is
conventionally drawn in discussions of archaeological deposits of this period,
and it will be used faute de mieux as a heuristic device in what follows. But
the relative proportions of such material at any given site cannot confidently
be used as a reflection of the scale of direct exchange between producing and
consuming regions; much eastern material may, for example, have found its
way onto western markets via intermediate ports such as Carthage. The few
Mediterranean shipwrecks of this period to have been recovered also generally
carry heterogeneous cargoes, emphasising the diversity and complexity of the
exchanges underlying the ultimate distribution of finds.
13
These and other
similar problems ensure that the information provided by a ceramic assemblage
such as the one recovered from St Blaise is, like the story of Jacob the merchant,
evocative but incomplete. The archaeological material does, nevertheless, have
some advantages. Since it offers a picture of diachronic change, it is more like a
film than a snapshot. And although excavated finds can say little in themselves
about the social and economic bases of their production and distribution, they
can be much more readily compared with other contemporary assemblages to
reveal outcomes of exchange. At present, every major new excavation around
the Mediterranean which produces substantial stratified deposits from our
period – such as the various UNESCO projects in Carthage, Sarac¸hane in
Constantinople or the Crypta Balbi in Rome – involves a sharp twist of the
archaeological kaleidoscope, and the rearrangement of its slivers of material
into a slightly different pattern. But while the overall picture remains fluid
and its details sketchy, some broad outlines can be established with increasing
confidence; they can also be usefully compared with the variant perspectives
afforded by the texts.
One consequence of the increased availability of archaeological evidence has
been to transform perceptions of the workings of the ancient economy. Influ-
ential historians had been inclined to take a dim view of trade, emphasising
the primitivism of an economic system where the subsistence sector reigned
supreme over the commercial.
14
Any role for the market economy within
13
Parker (1992).
14
See esp. Jones (1964), pp. 824–58 and (1974); Finley (1985).
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The Mediterranean economy 615
this minimalist perspective was strictly local. Widespread poverty restricted
demand, while on the supply-side a lack of specialisation, investment and
innovation, prohibitive transport-costs, and the attitudes of an elite who prized
landownership and conspicuous consumption over the maximising of produc-
tion and profit, were all deemed to have conspired to stifle trade. Only the
state, faced with the necessity of supplying its vast personnel and the inflated
populations of its capitals, engaged in the circulation of foodstuffs over long
distances, but as far as possible this was achieved via the annona,inessence a
compulsory purchase and distribution system.
15
Much of the exchange which
did take place within the ancient world and on into our period was therefore
seen not in commercial terms, but as the redistribution of resources by the
state, elites, and latterly other wealthy institutions such as the church, without
recourse to a market economy.
16
This interpretation is text-based, but the archaeological evidence, by reveal-
ing the myriad outcomes of exchange, exposes both the limitations of our
sources and the excessively bleak assumptions of the minimalist viewpoint.
The vast quantities of ARS found on sites all around the Mediterranean in late
antiquity, even in relatively humble rural contexts, are indicative of the large-
scale manufacture of a high-quality product which was sufficiently affordable
to make its overseas distribution viable even where it had to compete with local
fine-ware production. The circulation of commodities such as ARS was almost
certainly influenced by the currents of exchange generated by the state, but it
can hardly have been dictated by them. Similarly, although the state sector was
directly responsible for a significant proportion of interregional traffic in food-
stuffs, the range of amphora manufactures and the fiendish complexity of their
distributions suggests that at least some of this traffic was responding to com-
mercial imperatives. Since the activities of these pottery industries have largely
escaped the notice of the written sources, it follows that the exchange of other
manufactured goods on a substantial scale, such as textiles, is equally possible,
even if it cannot be so readily confirmed archaeologically.
17
Some archaeolo-
gists have explicitly offered more commercially driven interpretations of the
ancient economy; others have been content to do so implicitly by routinely
describing the distributions of excavated material in terms of trade.
18
None of this is to deny, of course, that imperial interests were crucial to
the evolution and nature of interregional exchange within the ancient econ-
omy. Even if the archaeological evidence strongly suggests that the importance
15
Durliat (1990).
16
Whittaker (1983).
17
The surviving documentary evidence from Egypt is the exception: see e.g. Johnson and West (1949),
and Wipszycka (1965) and van Minnen (1986) for textiles.
18
Carandini (1981) and (1986), with the helpful historiographical commentary in Wickham (1988);
Panella (1993), the finest analysis of the archaeological evidence; Reynolds (1995).
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of the commercial sector has been underestimated, the requirements of the
Roman state did significantly distort the currents of such traffic. The founda-
tion of a new imperial capital at Constantinople in the fourth century had, for
example, generated new flows of exchange that bear some responsibility for
the unprecedented intensity of rural settlement and agricultural production in
several regions of the eastern Mediterranean in late antiquity.
19
In the West,
meanwhile, it has been plausibly argued that a crucial factor which under-
pinned the international distribution of ARS was the dominance of Africa
within the state sector of the economy. More generally, the Roman state had
indirectly stimulated commercial exchange in various ways. The taxes, which it
demanded from the peasantry, required them to commoditise their surplus to
turn it into coin. Those coins, minted primarily for fiscal purposes, offered an
empire-wide medium of exchange in the form of a single currency. The infra-
structural and financial underpinning of the annona system may have been in
the public interest, but, as we shall see, it also greased the wheels of the private
enterprise carried on alongside it.
20
In the eastern basin of the Mediterranean, the intertwining of the state and
commercial sectors of the economy created complex networks of interregional
exchange, which would persist for much of our period, until they were even-
tually dislocated by the near-collapse of the Byzantine Empire.
21
In the West,
however, the disintegration of the imperial fiscal and military machine in the
fifth century perpetuated an existing pattern of decline which the reincorpo-
ration of some regions of the western Mediterranean – notably Africa – into
the eastern system as a result of Justinian’s reconquests would do little to arrest.
Here the sixth and seventh centuries are marked not by any radical break with
the past, but by the relentless contraction of the economic networks inherited
from antiquity. On the one hand, this supports the view that the commercial
sector of the Mediterranean economy had always been important, and, as such,
could continue with or without an empire; the hegemony of African ceramics
on overseas markets, for example, survived both the supposed disruption of
the Vandal conquest and the restoration of imperial authority from the east.
22
On the other hand, it is striking that no wholly new networks of interregional
exchange emerge from the wreckage of the Western Empire. As a result, the
grand narrative of the sixth- and seventh-century Mediterranean economy, in
so far as such a thing exists, is about the impact which the disintegration of
19
Abadie-Reynal (1989).
20
Hopkins (1980) and (1983); Mattingly (1988); Wickham (1988); McCormick (1998).
21
Kingsley and Decker (2001).
22
Panella (1993), esp. pp. 641–54.Various efforts have been made to interpret the ceramic evidence
in the specific light of these political changes (e.g. Fulford (1980) and (1983)), but these are not
compelling (Tortorella 1986).
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The Mediterranean economy 617
the military, political and (not least) cultural authority of the Roman Empire,
gradual in the West and more dramatic in the East, had upon the contin-
ued functioning of the ancient exchange-system. But the Mediterranean is a
complex of seas, and as such has always nurtured a complex of economies.
23
So before embarking upon that grand narrative, some attention must first be
paid to the local and regional orbits of exchange which lurk beneath the sur-
face of the pan-Mediterranean economy, and to the commodities which were
circulating within these subsidiary systems.
contents: orbits and objects
Oneofthe defining characteristics of pre-industrial economics is the consider-
able differential in the respective costs of land- and water-transport. Although
precise information from the Roman period is in short supply, it is compati-
ble with the better data which survive from later centuries in suggesting that
transport overland was about five times more expensive than by river, and
well over twenty times more expensive than by sea. Jones put this briskly
into perspective by using the authorised carriage-tariffs in Diocletian’s price
edict to show how it was cheaper to ship grain from Syria to Spain than to
cart it just 120 kilometres.
24
In normal circumstances it made no commercial
sense to transport overland low-value or bulk items such as grain; the state
would do so to secure essential supplies, but here the inflated expense was not
the main concern. Moreover, transport by sea was much quicker, given a fair
wind, although the Mediterranean was considered too hazardous for sailing
for almost half the year, and the dangers involved are frequently highlighted
by the written sources.
25
During the patriarchate of John the Almsgiver, for
example, at least thirteen vessels belonging to the church of Alexandria were
hit by a storm in the Adriatic and forced to jettison their entire cargoes; the
Alexandrine sea-captains who were in the habit of sprinkling their ships with
holy water from the River Jordan before setting out were taking a reasonable
precaution.
26
The risks, however, were well worthwhile, since the Mediter-
ranean opened up commercial possibilities for coastal centres, or those with
access to a navigable waterway, which were denied to communities inland. In
recounting the problems in times of famine of a landlocked city like Caesarea
in Cappadocia, set amid the mountains some 200 kilometres from the coast,
Gregory of Nazianzus offered a succinct summary of the structural constraints
23
Braudel (1972), p. 17.
24
Jones (1964), pp. 841–2;cf. Durliat (1998), pp. 92–3.For a not altogether convincing attempt to play
down this differential, see Horden and Purcell (2000), p. 377.
25
Claude (1985), pp. 31–2.
26
Leontius, Life of St John the Almsgiver c.28; Antonini Placentini Itinerarium 11.
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which continued to apply throughout our period: ‘coastal cities support such
shortages without difficulty, as they can dispose of their own products and
receive supplies by sea; but for us inland our surpluses are unprofitable and
our scarcities irresolvable, because we have no means of disposing of what we
have nor of importing what we lack’.
27
The relative ease of water-transport was
not only vital in a crisis; potentially, it also afforded regular access to a wider
market for the disposal of surplus production.
This ready maritime ‘connectivity’ was the essential precondition for the
existence of a Mediterranean economy.
28
In practice, however, the similar eco-
logical resources of its shores, where differences tend to exist within rather
than between regions, might have been expected to reduce the commercial
possibilities. Most importantly, all of them are capable of sustaining the pro-
duction of the trinity of sixth-century Mediterranean staples: grain, oil and
wine.
29
The interregional shipment of foodstuffs was not generally necessary
for subsistence purposes, except to supply the imperial capitals. When poor
harvests and crop failures inevitably did occur, neither the bad news nor the
necessary relief could usually arrive fast enough to permit the opportunistic
exploitation of short-term crises by distant producers and suppliers.
30
In nor-
mal circumstances, meanwhile, goods transported hundreds of kilometres by
ship could perhaps compete in price with equivalent items conveyed relatively
short distances overland, but scarcely with the local grape harvest or pressing
of olive oil. John the Almsgiver admired the heady bouquet of the expensive
Palestinian wine he was offered in the church of St Menas in Alexandria, but,
with characteristic abstemiousness, he spurned it in favour of the local vintage
from Lake Mareotis; its taste was nothing special, but the price was low.
31
In the sixth and seventh centuries, as throughout the Roman and medieval
periods, transport costs combined with the relative poverty of the population
to ensure that the most significant tier of the exchange-network for producers
and consumers alike was the local one. The vast majority of people were directly
engaged in labour-intensive agricultural production. Their primary aim was to
grow enough food for their dependants and themselves to survive the year (and
the risk of starvation was real), whilst meeting the demands for tax or rent from
the state and from landlords; when these demands were expressed in cash rather
27
Gregory of Nazianzus, Orations xliii.34.
28
‘Connectivity’: Horden and Purcell (2000), ch. 5.
29
Cassiodorus, Variae xii.22.1 for wine, grain and oil as the three ‘excellent fruits’ of agriculture.
Justinian, Institutiones iv.6.33 cites the same trilogy of goods as selling at different prices in different
places.
30
Cassiodorus, Variae iv.5, with Ruggini (1961), pp. 262–76, and Miracula Sancti Demetrii i.9.76, for
King Theoderic’s and St Demetrius’ exceptional attempts to use their respective powers to get round
this problem.
31
Anon., Life of John the Almsgiver, c.10.
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The Mediterranean economy 619
than in kind, their participation in the market economy was essential to convert
their produce into coin. If they managed to produce a surplus after this, they are
most likely to have exchanged it locally for other foodstuffs or manufactured
goods. This level of exchange usually takes place beneath the notice of the
written sources, although the occasional anecdote confirms its existence. After
invading Vandal Africa, for example, the Byzantines gained entry to Sullectum
by the simple expedient of attaching themselves to the peasants entering the city
at first light with their carts, clearly an everyday occurrence.
32
A fragmentary
inscription from Cagliari in Sardinia sets out the customs dues levied in kind by
the civic administration in the reign of Maurice (582–602)ongoods entering
the territory of the city on pack-animals, small boats or, easiest of all, on the
hoof. In describing the convergence of a range of basic commodities upon a
local market by land and sea, it offers an unusual glimpse of what must have
been the normal relationship between peasant producers and neighbouring
communities.
33
In return, of course, these communities afforded access to
expertise as well as agricultural produce. In the time of Justinian, the vibrant
Egyptian village of Aphrodito supported at least sixty shopkeepers, artisans and
professional men divided between nineteen specified occupations, including
a potter of some substance.
34
Exchange at this local level is now becoming
more perceptible through patterns of pottery production and distribution.
Even so, the study of the common wares of this period is in its infancy, and
the unchanging nature and household manufacture of many of these items
means that progress is slow. Although archaeology can also tell us a great deal
about the provisioning of specific sites through, for example, analysis of pollen
grains and, perhaps most promisingly, animal bones, at present it remains
easier to assert the fundamental importance of exchange at the local level –
and of myriad micro-economies within the Mediterranean economy – than
it is to subject the operation of these networks to meaningful comparative
analysis.
35
The same is no longer true of the regional networks, which make up the
intermediate tier of Mediterranean exchange. The ever-expanding number of
sixth- and seventh-century pottery assemblages and the growing sophistica-
tion with which these can be analysed make these systems increasingly dis-
tinguishable as specific entities. Many regions of the Mediterranean sustained
32
Procopius, Wars iii.16.10.
33
Durliat (1982). Cf. the fifth/sixth-century customs tariff from Anazarbe in Cilicia: Dagron and Feissel
(1987), pp. 170–85 (no. 108).
34
Catalogue g
´
en
´
eral d’antiquit
´
es
´
egyptiennes, ed. Maspero, iii.67283, 67288;Jones (1964), pp. 847–8;
Keenan (1984). The exceptional survival of data from Aphrodito should not blind us to the fact that,
as a demoted metropolis beside the Nile, it was not an average village.
35
Forvarious studies of common wares, especially in Italy, see Sagu
`
ı(1998).
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fine-ware pottery production in late antiquity; these industries often oper-
ated from a number of regional centres and sometimes exported beyond their
immediate localities, but without ever achieving the Mediterranean-wide dis-
tribution of the ARS ware which in some cases they consciously strove to
imitate. In southern Gaul, for example, widespread production of a category
of fine-ware pottery known by a variety of unprepossessing names, including
d
´
eriv
´
ees des sigill
´
ees pal
´
eochr
´
etiennes (DSP) or orange/grey stamped ware, began
late in the fourth century and, in places, continued on into the seventh. These
wares were not greatly exported overseas, unless to the adjacent Mediterranean
coasts of Catalonia and Liguria; even within Gaul their distribution falls into
distinct sub-groups, such that the orange DSP manufactured in Languedoc is
rare in Provence, and vice versa for the grey Provenc¸alvariety.
36
Similarly, in
the eastern Mediterranean, a growing number of fine wares can be identified
which tended to circulate within particular regions, such as the metallescent
ware from Pergamum in Asia Minor, Egyptian versions of Red Slip Ware, or
the Glazed White Ware which emerges at Constantinople and would continue
to dominate the market there for centuries.
37
These regional types were very
occasionally disseminated more widely, but in the East only the Red Slip Ware
produced at Phocaea on the west coast of Asia Minor achieved an international
distribution remotely comparable to that of ARS.
38
Although this tripartite ranking of pottery types – local, regional, interna-
tional – is somewhat crude, the ceramic evidence provides a useful illustration
of the enduring complexities of the economy at the intermediate level, espe-
cially since it is not easy to identify such networks of exchange in the written
sources. Here the distinction between local and regional markets is rarely drawn
as nicely as in Cassiodorus’ description of the commercial connotations of the
feast-day of St Cyprian at a sacred spring near Marcellianum, in Lucania in
southern Italy: ‘all the notable exports of industrious Campania, or opulent
Bruttium, or cattle-rich Calabria, or prosperous Apulia, with the products of
Lucania itself, are on display to the glory of most admirable commerce, such
that you would be right to think that such a mass of goods had been gathered
from many regions’.
39
Such fairs also presumably encouraged the circulation –
and celebratory consumption – of the wine carried in the amphora type known
as Keay lii,now known to have been produced in southern Italy and Sicily.
40
36
Reynolds (1995), pp. 36–7; Rigoir (1998). The distribution patterns of contemporary southern Italian
red-painted wares are similar: Arthur and Patterson (1994).
37
Hayes (1992), pp. 12–34;Panella (1993), pp. 657–61, 673–7;Sodini (1993), pp. 173–4.For Egypt see
Bailey (1998), esp. pp. 8–58.
38
Phocaean Red Slip: Martin (1998). In the East PRS is rare only in Egypt. It also reaches the West,
though never in quantities equivalent to those of ARS in the East: Reynolds (1995), pp. 34–6, 132–5.
39
Cassiodorus, Variae viii.33.
40
Arthur (1989); Pacetti (1998).
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The Mediterranean economy 621
Only reports of the muggings of visiting merchants by the rascally local peas-
antry spoil the festive scene. Another staple, which may well have circulated
commercially hereabouts, was grain. Pope Gregory I, for example, was peren-
nially anxious to secure grain-supplies for Rome from Sicily, usually through
imperial functionaries or from the extensive papal estates, but he also resorted
to purchasing it on the open market, in 591 spending fifty pounds of gold
on buying up additional supplies from the island for storage in response to a
poor Roman harvest.
41
Across the Apennines, meanwhile, the inhabitants of
Venetia and Istria at the head of the Adriatic were dealing in wine, fish-sauce,
oil and salt, as well as grain; some of these goods were intended for Ravenna,
but they were also traded on the open market.
42
Tw o centuries later the mer-
chants of Comacchio at the head of the Po would secure from the Lombards an
agreement granting them trading rights along the river in exchange for tolls in
kind, among which salt again figures prominently.
43
Salt is precisely the sort of
commodity that one might expect to circulate over some distance – everybody
needs salt, as Cassiodorus observed – but not too far. Its extraction is widely
possible around the Mediterranean, transporting it over long distances by sea
ran the risk of ruining it, and, unlike wine, specific types of salt are not known
to have carried any premium. Its presence in these texts is one indication that
the exchange they describe is regional in nature.
The early medieval Mediterranean thus sustained a series of regional
economies, some of which appear to have been more developed, or more
dynamic, than others. The variable experiences of Italy’s regions, in particular,
already suggest that generalised explanations of economic change, such as the
impact of warfare or of environmental crisis, are insufficient.
44
The extension
of such studies offers our best hope of developing comparative perspectives and
achieving a deeper understanding of early medieval exchange in all its com-
plexity. But for the Mediterranean economy writ large, we must return to the
exchange which continued to unite those who lived around Rome’s Internal
Sea (and even some out in the Ocean) long after the political fragmentation
of its shores. The term ‘long-distance trade’ conventionally used to describe
this type of traffic is not entirely helpful, because, as we have seen, it is not
distance but access to the sea or to navigable waterways that really matters.
In this sense, the inhabitants of the Spanish coast were ‘closer’ to Carthage or
41
Gregory I, Reg. i.70; Arnaldi (1986). Gregory’s anticipation of crisis seems to have been exceptional:
cf. note 30 above.
42
Cassiodorus, Variae xii.22, 24, the latter showing how the inhabitants of Venetia directly exchanged
cylinders of salt for foodstuffs.
43
Hartmann (1904), pp. 123–4, for the text of the early eighth-century Comacchio ‘capitulary’, trans-
lated and discussed in Balzaretti (1996).
44
Wickham (1994), pp. 752–6,Marazzi (1998b), and for the ceramics Sagu
`
ı(1998).
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Rome than to the high plateaux of the adjacent Meseta; for the same reason, if
we venture out momentarily beyond the Straits of Gibraltar, scattered finds of
Mediterranean ceramics seem more common in sub-Roman western Britain
than in northern Francia. The famous story of how an Alexandrine sea-captain
sailed, however inadvertently, from Egypt to Britain may well be apocryphal,
but the sixth-century ARS and eastern amphorae which link the monastic site
of Kellia in Lower Egypt and Tintagel in Cornwall in a maritime community
of taste are not.
45
Nor should the notion of a voyage from Egypt to Britain
conceal the likelihood that most ‘long-distance’ exchange was carried out in
sundry short hops, either along the coast from port to port, or across the open
sea, exploiting the convenient island stepping-stones across the Mediterranean
pond.
46
The ‘long-distance’ tier of the exchange-system has often been dismissed
as epiphenomenal: luxury in nature, trivial in scale, marginal in importance.
One type of foodstuffs which may fall into this category are the exotic fruits,
nuts and especially spices shipped from the eastern Mediterranean, Arabia
and India to western consumers throughout our period, whether to meet the
enthusiasm of individual hermits for an authentic taste of Egyptian asceticism,
or to cater for the more substantial demands of institutions, most obviously
monastic communities.
47
The Frankish king Chlothar III (657–673) autho-
rised the agents of his newly founded monastery at Corbie to collect annu-
ally a cornucopia of imports – selon arrivage –fromaroyal warehouse in the
Provenc¸alport ofFos.
48
Alongside olive oil, fish-sauce, Spanishanimal skins and
Egyptian papyrus, their shopping-list featured more than a dozen different east-
ern fruits, herbs and spices, totalling 825 pounds in weight. This may appear
trivial when set alongside the 10,000 pounds of oil which heads the list, but it
is worth remembering that this supposedly represents the annual consumption
of a single community. And although the ultimate recipients of such ‘luxuries’
were often institutions, there is little doubt that much exchange of this type
was commercial; Isidore of Seville warned against unscrupulous merchants who
adulterated pepper with shavings of lead or silver to make it more valuable,
simply by weight alone, or because fresh pepper was known to be heavier.
49
45
Leontius, Life of John the Almsgiver c.8.Kellia: Egloff (1977); Ballet and Picon (1987). Tintagel:
Thomas (1981), with the papers in Dark (1995).
46
Documented routes: Roug
´
e(1966), pt 1; Claude (1985), pp. 131–66, with Reynolds (1995), pp. 126–36,
for a stimulating attempt to deduce them from ceramic assemblages, alleging more direct traffic.
Pond: Socrates, in Plato, Phaedo, 109b:‘we inhabit a small portion of the earth . . . living about the
sea like frogs and ants around a pond’.
47
Hermits: Gregory, Hist. vi.6.Monasteries: Lebecq (2000), and also chapter 23 below.
48
Levillain (1902), no. 15,pp.236–7.Recent discussions (with anterior references): Loseby (2000),
pp. 176–89 and (more optimistically) Horden and Purcell (2000), pp. 163–6.
49
Isidore, Etymologiae xvii.8.8.