Reflections on 'The End of Western Antiquity': 4. The supposed ‘Rupture’ of the Ancient Mediterranean, Part 4

Several problems are raised by the economic/political paradigm. As indicated last time, my aim here is not to replace them but to add a new level more concerned with ideas, attitudes or culture. To this end it’s important to note that the broad outlines of economic development sketched in Part 3 match, in general, those of the shifts in culture mapped out in Part 2, of the gradual turning away from each other of west and east (especially of east).

One difficulty is the lack of fit between the political change and the archaeologically-revealed patterns of exchange. The alleged end of the western ‘tax spine’, after the Vandal conquest of Africa, does not seem to me to fit the data very well. One issue is what exactly the Vandal conquest of Byzacena/Proconsularis and the 442 treaty with the imperial court actually meant. This is really for another time, but it seems to me that the treaty is generally reconstructed in terms of a ‘barbarian invaders/conquests’ paradigm that relies on a lot of assumptions that are not necessarily supported by the evidence itself. More importantly for current purposes, though, the patterns of African trade don’t really change after c.440. As we have seen, African traders if anything found new markets after that date and continued to trade with Italy and the south of Gaul as before, even if quantities might have declined. These issues also affect the argument that claims that the end of the western imperial command economy produced a dramatic shift in interregional connections. Logically, this ought to have happened but it does not seem to me to be readily visible in the archaeological data, in which pre-existing patterns continue, even if along (similarly pre-existing) trajectories of reduction in scale. You might not find much ARS or many African amphorae in northern Gaul in the fifth century but then you wouldn’t in the fourth either. Most of the northern Gaulish landscape was harnessed to the provisioning and remuneration of the Rhine army and it seems likely to me that, as James Harland has suggested, Britain might have also played a major role in the supply of the frontier garrisons. Consequently, the breakdown of regular government and the end of the imperial command economy is seen in the well-attested crisis in those areas, not in the patterns of Mediterranean trade.

We might also ask whether the reimposition of imperial rule is in itself sufficient to explain the startling shift in the direction of African trade in the sixth century. This seems superficially attractive as an explanation but closer reflection raises some important problems. One might, first of all, ask why the government would redirect the African annonae to Constantinople, which was amply supplied from Egypt and elsewhere already. Would/should we not see a decline in the market share of Egyptian exports if that were the case? More importantly, why would the imperial government not have reestablished the supposedly-ended (and supposedly crucial) ‘tax-spine’ to the newly reconquered city of Rome, and Byzantine Italian territories? African exports continue to reach Italy, albeit mostly (and increasingly to the detriment of other areas) Rome and in gradually decreasing numbers, until the end of the seventh century.

We might also think more closely about the ways in which wars affect long-distance exchange. Pirenne and others ascribed the breaking of long-distance Mediterranean trade to seaborne piracy, whether Arab or Vandal, but this is an implausible mechanism. Even if one were to assume that no one ever thought to provide merchant vessels with armed escorts, the relationship between piracy and seaborne commerce resembles that – in that early computer programming exercise – between foxes and chickens. If the chicken population [or seaborne merchant traffic] grows, the fox population [or profitable pirate activity] grows with it, because of the increased availability of food [loot]; there comes a point though where the fox population is so great that it is killing chickens faster than the chicken population can reproduce itself; at that point the lack of food leads to a decline, through starvation, in the fox population; eventually, however, the low numbers of predatory foxes allows the chicken population to grow again; and so on. Put more simply, you can’t have pirates without merchant ships for them to prey on. Pirenne’s thesis creates an image of a period during which Arab pirates wearily put to sea in spite of there being no shipping to attack. ‘Well, me hearties, none of us has seen a merchantman for ten years but here we go again; another day another dollar.’ The other strange point about Pirenne’s thesis is that although he thought – correctly – that long-distance trade flowed mostly from east to west, and although he thought this on the basis of texts describing imports from Palestine and Egypt, he still thought that the decisive blow to Mediterranean trade was dealt by the Arab conquests and/or by Arab fleets – creating the image of Arab pirates attacking ships that had sailed from their own ports [‘pirates on the starboard bow, cap’n!’ ‘Don’t worry lad, their ours.’]…

Be all that as it may, we might wonder how warfare affects trade. The key point I want to make is that for it to have seriously detrimental effects it needs to be ongoing for a long time. Even heavy fighting for a year or two, or a few years, is unlikely to bring about any serious shifts in trading patterns. Such events can be factored in to the usual response strategies. Campaigning by even small armies (as were the norm in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages) could produce famine but such could be responded to within the normal patterns of redistribution and relief, where they functioned. They might even produce windfalls for merchants able to sell at famine prices. More serious contenders as causal factors in long-term change are long periods of warfare such as the Gothic wars in Italy, or the wars with the Moors after the reconquest of Africa from the Vandals, or, especially, the long war between the Empire and Persia, and then with the Arabs. Such warfare is important not (or not just, or principally) for disrupting commerce, though it probably did so (though we might also remember that armies need provisioning and can act as markets) but through the disruption of production/supply and demand. Displacement of population or disruption of seasonal agricultural activities through the movement (year in, year out) of armies, associated famine and disease (plague especially from the mid-sixth century) dislocates or prevents the production of the surplus that in some way or other acts as the basis for commerce, as well as (partly in consequence) the ability for craftsmen to make the products that are traded, or the ability for markets to be held regularly with the usual security. It might be that twenty years of insecurity after Belisarius’ conquest had serious effects on some African production, but clearly it didn’t kill it off entirely. Similarly, the Gothic wars didn’t entirely end the market for African products in Italy. The wars in the east from 610 to mid-century do seem to have been fatal for the old eastern Mediterranean complex of commercial networks, production, and distribution, etc. Once again, though, we’re entitled to ask why, when the dust settled, they didn’t reemerge even if the materials being produced took different forms. Certainly, the creation of the Caliphate led to a profound rearrangement of trading networks – greater links between North Africa and the sub-Saharan world being one of the most important developments – but again, one would have to ask whether there was anything economically more logical or natural about those networks than the previously existing ones. Any investigation of that issue will lead you quite quickly to the role of attitudes, ideas, mentalité in shaping networks and connections, commercial and otherwise.

Some of the economic explanations adduced (concerning supply and demand, production costs, etc), while plausible and sophisticated, function mainly as descriptive extrapolations from data. They don’t necessarily emerge from the data themselves. Clearly, too, they are teleological extrapolations backwards from the eventual outcomes. All of this is fair enough, but the issue does need to be flagged up. And again there are some problems that arise, in my opinion anyway. One concerns the demise of the Mediterranean commercial links with the north-west. Some things from the Mediterranean were simply not available locally – olive oil is the obvious commodity here. Given the dominance of African oil production in the late imperial west, this ought to have been an important basis for commerce (and surely was). But what markets were there for this? Western towns generally contracted in size from the third century onwards but Mediterranean wares continue to be found in some north-western regions. The church’s need for oil for lighting and also for anointing, and the growth of Christianity may have provided new markets as, in the fifth century, might the new elite in western Britain wanting to show its prestige and Roman-ness. Alongside the seeming demise of the old Roman elite further to the east, this might explain the shift in the routes via which African exports entered Britain. What seems odd to me, though, is that when the economy in the north-west recovered in the late sixth century (with the revival of towns, greater aristocratic control of surplus, related increase in church foundation, increased monetisation of the economy, growing craft-specialisation, newly established markets, etc) the market share of Mediterranean products, having managed to persist through over 200 years of economic change and (especially) decline, suddenly disappeared. Imports found on sites all around the Irish Sea (east and west, north and south, rather than principally on its southern and western shores, as hitherto) seem to come almost entirely from various parts of Gaul. Descriptively one can say that more local products squeezed out the African imports but one would still need to ask why. Costs, etc, don’t seem to me to present the whole story. The whole point of my discussion thus far is, on the one hand, that normative, supposedly natural, logical, or eternal economic laws of supply and demand are in themselves inadequate to the task of explaining the changes of the fifth to seventh centuries. But so too is the notion that trade can just be ‘turned off’, like a tap, by high-level political events.

It's time, I think, to try to add some elements of ideas and worldviews to the picture to round it out (rather than replace other explanations with them). I have already said that the development of western economic systems runs to some extent parallel to some changes in outlooks and attitudes (though not necessarily to high politics or governmental shifts). This is not in itself news. Long ago it was pointed out (maybe by R.S. Lopez – I will check and correct if necessary when I have my books) that the papacy was quite happy to import Egyptian papyrus until the rulers of Egypt started stamping papyri with (to Christians) unacceptable quotations from the Qur’an. The shifts in trading routes and networks after the creation of the Caliphate are also clearly about something other than laws of economics. The demand for Mediterranean goods in western Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries was surely in large part because of the cultural cachet of commodities produced in, or somehow associated with, the Christian, Imperial, Roman World. As has been mentioned this period represents the high point of Romanitas in the region. Were easterners simply no longer interested in western trade and markets? It’s not as if there were no important commodities to be had there, and – as noted – the market opportunities ought, if anything, to have been improving. Three letters of Gregory the Great (and I am grateful to Helen Foxhall Forbes for drawing my attention to them) are significant here. Gregory is writing to the Patriarch of Alexandria who, he has heard, needs large timbers for Alexandrian vessels. Gregory could, and did, get his hands on just the sort of timber that’s wanted (in Calabria if memory serves), and get it transported up to Rome, but the Egyptians didn’t send ships that were big enough to take them, and cutting them to fit would, obviously, rather defeat the object. Gregory, it seems, is quite keen to help and to provide this timber, which obviously isn’t available in Egypt, but the Patriarch, it appears, can’t even be bothered to write back.

Thus, I would propose that an important reason (not, for clarity the reason, or the most important) for the end of any significant market share for Mediterranean commodities is that final cultural turning away of east and west after the mid-sixth century. This is a conclusion that has some important bearings on the debate upon pre-modern economies, between ‘formalist’ and ‘substantivist’ positions.

Reflections on 'The End of Western Antiquity': 3. The supposed ‘Rupture’ of the Ancient Mediterranean, Part 3

In the third part of these reflections we finally enter the territory of the Pirenne Thesis, and indeed of my project: the changes of the late sixth and early seventh centuries.

Let’s recap. Around 530, in spite of all the developments discussed last time, in spite of the socio-cultural dislocation that had been going on since the third century, and in spite of the dramatic events of the fifth, western Europe still thought of itself as part of the Roman Empire. Trade and exchange still united the Mediterranean and some areas beyond. Commercial networks reached round the western coasts of the Iberian Peninsula, and Gaul, as far as the eastern shores (mainly) of the Irish Sea. These contacts made the fifth and sixth centuries the period when the Romanitas of the western highlands of Britain was most strongly asserted. An inscribed stone in North Wales shows that those inhabitants of the region who were interested or cared were still aware of who the current consul was.

Obviously, there had been cultural changes. By this date, in most regions of the western Empire, villas had ceased to exist as such. Did this mean an end of Romanitas? Clearly not. The idea that the end of the villas reflected a conscious decision to reject Rome was one of the sillier and most insular ideas (of many) to permeate British archaeology in the ‘90s and ‘00s. Only a few areas still had any significant number of villas (occupied recognisably as villas) by the second quarter of the sixth century (notably the south-west of Gaul, though a revival might have been under way in Italy) but there was heavy investment (including on the site of former villas) in Christianity and in other, new expressions of Roman-ness. As noted, westerners still thought they were living in the Roman Empire. Further, a martial model of masculinity had emerged in the late imperial period which, although ostentatiously setting itself up as rejecting traditional aspects of civic masculinity, was still very much a manifestation of a Roman identity and relied on the existence of traditional ideas for its socio-political cachet. At the start of the sixth century, both Theoderic the Ostrogoth and Clovis the Frank allowed themselves to be addressed as augustus. This turned out to be crucial, as we’ll see.

Let’s pause here, though to look again at the turning away of the east from the west. Jeroen Wijnendaele recently reminded me of the point made by R. Blockley that even in the fifth century, Eastern Roman writers had started to refer to the inhabitants of the Pars Occidentalis as ‘Italians’ or ‘westerners’, while referring to themselves as Romans. Around the middle of the sixth century, Cosmas Indicopleustes wrote his Christian Topography. This, mostly, is concerned with his voyages, early in the century, around the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, with famously valuable accounts of various regions in and around that sea (whether or not he had actually visited them). What I find interesting, though, is that, although resident in Alexandria and writing about the nature of the world, Cosmas shows pretty much no interest in the western Mediterranean. He knows it exists and goes as far as Cádiz (not actually on the Mediterranean…) but that is about it. One might of course argue that Cosmas’ own experience simply hadn’t taken him that way, and that he was writing a Christian topography based, obviously on the holy land, but that wouldn’t entirely negate my point. After all the Holy Apostles (Peter and Paul) had headed westwards. At around the same time, Procopius wrote his history of Justinian’s wars, the bulk of which concerns the western Mediterranean. What strikes me about Procopius’ work is just how remarkably badly informed about and/or interested in the west he is. His ignorance about the geography of Gaul makes this abundantly clear. Even educated easterners who had been in Italy knew or cared very little about regions to the west. One might argue that Procopius, unlike, say, Ammianus, never went further than Italy but my point is hardly altered by that fact. I don’t think Ammianus ever went to Britain but the information he acquired enabled him to write fairly reliable accounts of what happened there. Procopius’ comments about Brittia (History of the Wars 8.20), by contrast, resemble traditional Graeco-Roman ethnography about the outermost regions of the world rather than things that relate to a former imperial province. Even he thought it sounded more like the sort of thing that you might dream and, for this reason, he seems to have decided that they must relate to a different island completely (Brittia, rather than Britannia[[i]]). Procopius’ ignorance or lack of interest is part of a trend that is only amplified in the Byzantine historians that follow him. While western writers (like Fredegar for example) show an interest in news from the east, however garbled it had become, there seems to be no reciprocation in historical works written in the eastern empire.

Unsurprisingly, if you have been following my thoughts on this stuff over the years, the crucial change seems to have been the new ideology that emerged in Constantinople in around the 520s, usually associated with Justinian (even if it appears earliest under his uncle and predecessor Justin I). Possibly building – to a greater extent than I had realised (see Blockley’s point about fifth-century vocabulary, above) – on attitudes that had developed during the fifth-century, Justin or Justinian added the new – and significantly different – point that the west was no longer even a part of the western Empire, and (by the 530s) needed to be ‘reconquered’ by the Roman Empire. As I have repeatedly argued, this cut away the bases of almost every traditional idea about legitimate power or authority and caused people in the west to try to find new bases of authority. As I see it, this put the cap on over a century of shifting attitudes. Especially from Justinian’s reign, the West became lands of barbarism and heresy, or at least of insufficiently rigorous orthodox religious thinking. It’s a common mistake, however, to think that the West somehow looked up to the eastern Empire in imitatio imperii.[ii] After Justinian, in the late sixth to eighth centuries at least, this seems fundamentally mistaken. The west certainly reciprocated the east’s view of the other as sullied by heresy. In Spain, Visigothic writers seem, if anything, to have adopted an attitude of translatio [rather than imitatio] imperii (see Jamie Wood’s work on this, in particular): a diametrically different attitude. Chilperic of Neustria seems to have had a similar idea (Gregory, Histories 6.1). Otherwise, and probably most commonly, the touchstones used to justify various aspects of social organisation unsurprisingly moved away from Rome, especially towards the Old Testament, even if some of the general virtues etc remained the same. By the early seventh century the old trading patterns between the Mediterranean and the Irish Sea had died out, to be replaced by new ones connecting the European Mainland, whether the Rhineland or the Bay of Biscay, with lowland Britain as well as the western highlands, now both shores of the Irish Sea, and the Scottish/Pictish north. Major changes were also under way in the Mediterranean itself. We’ll return to this.

What conclusions can we draw about the end of Mediterranean unity by about 600? (Here there will be a little repetition from the last article.) It seems to me to be important to note that, viewed from c.600, it looks like the culmination of a process that, in social, political, and economic terms, had begun as early as the 3^rd century, had picked up pace in the 4^th, and taken on new cultural aspects in the 5^th. Justinian’s ideology and – especially – his wars can be said to have brought this process to an end. As I said last time, however, it’s important to tread carefully here. On the one hand, I think it’s probably a mistake to see this development as ‘natural’ or ‘inevitable’ and to cite the point that, in long-term perspective, the period of Mediterranean unity is rather more unusual than periods when the east and west form generally separate spheres. Similarly, Chris Wickham made the very good point that long-distance trade round the Mediterranean shouldn’t be assumed to be natural, especially given that most regions around the Mediterranean produce the same principal tradable commodities (grain, oil, wine: the ‘Mediterranean trilogy’). While the difficulties posed to communications or travel by physical geography shouldn’t be underestimated, the idea that, somehow inevitably, they would eventually undermine the features that had brought about unity seems to me to be too crude. After all, the aspects of physical geography that facilitated ‘natural’ connectivity and communication (the sea, rivers, etc) remained just as much as the ones that presented ‘natural’ barriers to the same (mountains – or indeed rivers and the sea…).

Second, and again this is a point that will surprise no one who’s followed my thinking over the past 15 years or so, looking back from c.600 gives a misleading sense of unidirectionality and teleology to the series of events and their final outcome. All of the events I have talked about could have been reversed; none was the only possible response to the situation pertaining at the time; some of the political changes – as noted in the last part of these thoughts – had beneficial aspects as well as, at least with hindsight, negative ones in terms of Mediterranean unity; many had effects, negative or positive, that were not deliberately intended. The narrative arc mentioned at the start of the previous paragraph can be deconstructed (in the proper sense) at every turn.[iii]

The main point I want to stress, though this will really be discussed in Part 4, is the importance of ideas, attitudes, and political culture. With that in mind, I return to the core of the Pirenne Thesis: economics. He generally rated Mediterranean unity according to the continuity of the trading patterns that existed in the Roman period and so thought that when (as he thought) Arab conquests and seaborne raids and piracy killed off east-to-west trade that ruptured the unity of the Middle Sea.

Decades of sophisticated study of forms of evidence that weren’t available to Pirenne (principally archaeological evidence of various types) and of more refined study of the evidence that was available to him, has modified some important aspects of his ‘thesis’ while leaving others broadly in place. As we saw in Part 1 of these thoughts, the north-west of Europe formed an economic sphere largely separate from the Roman Mediterranean by the fourth century; on the other hand, the final demise of the eastern Mediterranean economic sphere appears to take place at about the time of the Arab conquests.

A brief summary of my understanding of recent/ish thinking on this might be helpful. There are very good discussions of the problems of this evidence in Simon Loseby’s chapter on the Mediterranean economy in The New Cambridge Medieval History Vol.2 (ed. Fouracre) and in the relevant chapter of Chris Wickham’s The Framing of the Early Middle Ages. One point I would emphasise though concerns the implications of distribution maps. We might find an African amphora in Cornwall, or some African tableware in Marseille. The implication of those places in networks is complex, however. Roman law envisaged that a ship might be away from its home port for at least two years (it enacted that it had to come home within two years), plying different routes perhaps in different ways with different forms of cargo. Material might move from A to B via several shorter hops involving different people rather than just via one long-haul voyage from a place close to the material’s production to one near its consumption. Commodities might be being moved in ships that have little connection to the place where those commodities were produced. It’s possible then that our distributions give misleading impressions of connectivity and mask the nature of the networks, and possibly conceal even more change than they reveal. For example, the general distribution of African finewares between modern Tunisia, Italy, and the south of France might look broadly similar between the fifth and seventh centuries, even if declining in absolute numbers. Theoretically, however, it’s possible that the fifth-century African pottery in Provence came more or less directly from Carthage, in ships that stopped off at various points on the way, whereas sixth-century African wares came via various entrepôts, ultimately being delivered, in short-haul hops, in the ships of Italian merchants. Or vice versa.

There had always been a difference between the eastern and western halves of the Mediterranean (going back to the Bronze Age at least). The Aegean is a sea of many islands facilitating a dense web of routes, while Crete and Cyprus make handy staging posts for sailors travelling in several directions. That said, in the late Roman period, the different regions formed fairly distinct economic regions in many regards. A ‘tax-spine’ connected Egypt and Constantinople. In the West, as intimated in Part 2, the west had also fragmented into a number of economic regions, often quite large. This fragmentation was related to the (generally cultural or socio-political) issues that had eroded the unusual unity of the Mediterranean world by the third century. The Carthage-to-Rome ‘tax spine’ mentioned earlier, certainly dominated exchange between Africa and Italy, the far south of Gaul and the west of the Iberian Peninsula, but it seems to have had rather less effect on other – quite large – regions like central Hispania or the north of Gaul. There were nevertheless general similarities between the two halves of the Mediterranean world. The fundamental dominance of regional over interregional networks is similar in both zones. The Egypt-to-Constantinople ‘tax spine’ shows some similarities to the western Carthage-to-Rome spine, though it has been suggested that it was less dominant (I think that this begs a number of questions). Nonetheless, long-distance commerce around the Mediterranean continued. African Red Slip (ARS) was found (in quantities that varied over time) in the east, and Phocaean Red Slip (PRS) in the west. Other, less archaeologically-visible commodities were also traded from east to west.

Differences seem to be more pronounced in the fifth and sixth centuries. The east continued to be prosperous and the various links between the regions remained. The connections between western regions decline further. The extent of African commerce declines, though it continues to be the most important axis of interregional commerce. On the other hand, as has repeatedly been pointed out, African wares continue to reach the west of Britain, possibly by more direct routes than before. These patterns continue into the sixth century, but after the Eastern Roman reconquest there is a revival of connections between Africa and the East. Trade nevertheless continues between Africa and Italy, Provence and the regions further afield. What at least seems to me to be under-appreciated is the preponderance, within the sphere of African exports, of the imperial territories (not just in the east but in Sicily, Rome, and other Italian regions). Stories suggest that in the late sixth century, the west of Britain was still known in the east as a source of tin. Some luxury products from the east continued to reach Gaul, via Marseille (whether via intermediaries in Carthage and elsewhere is unknown).

All this changes in the seventh century. Some of the change happens pretty quickly. The connections between the Mediterranean and the Irish Sea generally fizzled out between the late sixth and early seventh century. Analyses by Patrick Périn and Thomas Calligaro show that the supply of good quality Sri Lankan garnets to the west also ended around 600. The demise of the prosperous eastern Mediterranean regions and their interconnectivity collapsed in a couple of generations in the mid-seventh century. African commerce to the west struggled on to the end of the seventh century but not beyond. It cannot be claimed that east-west commerce ended in absolute terms by 700 but it was certainly only a shadow of its former self after that, reduced beyond recognition in terms of quantity and the range of goods traded.

Explanations for these changes have understandably concentrated upon issues such as production, supply and demand, and on political change (the Vandals allegedly ending the Carthage-Rome ‘tax spine’; the end of the imperial command economy; the Arab conquests). These have been the result of close analysis and I certainly don’t intend to dismiss them. What I want to ask, though, is whether they are the whole story. There are a number of problems that arise in only looking at this issue either in economic terms

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[i] I open EoWA vol.1 (The Fates of the Late Antique State) with a discussion of this.

[ii] I was once at a conference where a non-specialist asked a famous Byzantinist about the relationship between Byzantine culture and the west, and the response was that Byzantine culture was ‘a dominant culture’. This view seems widespread even among some specialists on western European history, but it really lacks any substantive empirical support, other than in the sense that that was indeed what Byzantines thought. In this case I think it was one of those instances where, in the same way that people say that people come to resemble their dogs, historians come to resemble their subjects.

[iii] In the last part I promised that I would speculate on whether the circumstances that had brought about Mediterranean unity in the later Republican period could have been reproduced. I am going to break that promise. Maybe at some point I will write some ideas about that but not now. It’s not quite, but it verges on, ‘what if’ history, which I think is mostly ahistorical and intellectually no more than an entertaining parlour game.