The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000

by Chris Wickham

  It was argued by Philip Grierson in 1959 and Georges Duby in 1973 that, in an early medieval economy relatively weak in commerce, much of the movement of goods visible in narrative sources and particularly archaeology could best be described in terms of gift exchange. The large Byzantine silver dish found in the Sutton Hoo burial of around 625, for example, was far more likely to have reached Suffolk as a result of diplomatic gifts, or of a chain of such gifts, than any sort of long-distance commerce. More generally, much luxury exchange could well have been in the form of gifts. But not all of it was - or else the West would not have needed merchants, or the Paris jewel shops; and, above all, none or almost none of the bulk exchange described here could have been restricted to the ‘gift economy’. Some of the village-level exchange in places like England could well have been on the level of gift-giving, between people who, inevitably, knew each other very well. (By contrast, merchants were the object of suspicion, and laws survive from both England and Italy which aim to safeguard buyers from the accusation of buying stolen goods from merchants, as long as they bought in public.) But gifts, like luxuries, however central to social relationships, were marginal to economic systems taken as a whole, even in the early Middle Ages.

  Production of artisanal goods simplified considerably almost everywhere in the post-Roman West, because large-scale demand dropped, as aristocrats became less rich and as states no longer bought goods on a huge scale for armies (or else took them in tax). It would follow that this was likely to be the case for agricultural production, too. The fragmentary signs that we have for the organization of estates in the earliest Middle Ages support that statement. Roman estate-management was very complex and variable, and at least some of it was visibly for profit, like the slave plantations of first-century Italy or the demesnes worked by wage labour in third- to seventh-century Egypt. Post-Roman estates seem, in all the documents we have, to have been worked essentially by tenants who, whether free or unfree, owed stable, customary, rents: the simplest and least flexible way of extracting surplus from cultivators, and the one which left most autonomy to the peasants themselves. This sort of management, which can be found in Francia and Italy, and also in central Spain (in the fragmentary accounts written on slate found in the provinces of Salamanca and Ávila), does not show any particular focus on profit, or sale. The only specializations we see are along the northern edge of wine production, from Paris to the middle Rhine, where in the seventh century there are casual documentary references to vineyards, sometimes run directly by the landowner with an unfree vinedresser: these could well have been for sale, to merchants from further north coming to fairs such as Saint-Denis. The rapid expansion of a more complicated - and exploitative - ‘manorial’ estate management would come later, in the Carolingian period essentially, in a period in which exchange became more generalized and intense, whether in regions like northern Francia where it was already relatively large-scale, or in northern Italy where it was more localized. We shall look at those forms of management in more detail in Chapter 22.

  The earliest sign of that change in the North, at least, was however a little earlier, around 700, and I will end this chapter with it. In the seventh century, at least two Frankish channel ports appeared, Quentovic south of Boulogne and Dorestad in the Rhine delta. Both, particularly Dorestad (which has been excavated), expanded considerably in the eighth century, and they began in the decades around 700 to have equivalents on the other side of the channel, at Hamwic (now Southampton) in Wessex, London in Mercia, Ipswich in East Anglia, York in Northumbria - as well as Ribe in Denmark and Birka in Sweden. These emporia, as archaeologists call them (the word is sometimes used in early medieval sources too), were interconnected, and buying and selling across the English Channel and North Sea developed consistently in the eighth century and early ninth, when other such ports came onstream as well, such as Domburg in the Rhine delta and Hedeby on the Baltic coast of Denmark. Actually, in England at least, the greater part of the economic activity of such ports was the work of local artisans, the metalwork and glass of Hamwic or the pottery of Ipswich (the first kiln-fired and wheel-turned pottery of the Anglo-Saxon period); regional and local exchange mattered more than the traffic across the sea even here. But it is nonetheless significant that these emporia were on the coast, or on rivers with easy coastal access; whatever their origins (which were diverse), they were developed, almost certainly by kings, in order to funnel whatever maritime exchange there was. We have a letter from Charlemagne to Offa in 796 which makes reference to the size of the cloaks that the Anglo-Saxons were exporting to Francia; there are almost no other diplomatic letters mentioning commerce in this period, and it must have been significant (at least as a political initiative; we cannot say on what scale it was operating). Kings valued maritime trade, and helped it on. And as the Carolingians took power in the eighth century and recentralized Frankish politics, they could give a powerful impulse to trading emporia.

  The North Sea in the eighth century almost certainly had more shipping than the Mediterranean. Comacchio in the Po delta was a focus of Adriatic-wide exchange in this period, as well as some exchange up the Po, as we have seen; but there are no equivalents to the nodal ports of the North in the Mediterranean between the decline of Marseille around 700 and the rise of Venice after around 780. As we shall see in Chapter 22, Venice was a centre for the slave trade, channelling slaves, created by the Carolingian wars, to the Arabs for domestic service, and getting spices and other eastern luxuries in return. Venice was, that is to say, a gateway port which based its wealth on luxuries directed to Frankish and other buyers, and was probably as yet even more marginal to the economy of northern Italy than Dorestad was for northern Francia and Hamwic was for Wessex. But things were changing here; more ports would appear in Italy in the ninth century, and Venice would eventually, after 950 or so, develop more of a relationship with its hinterland, too. There was, in the end, more scope for the development of commerce in the Mediterranean than in the North Sea after 800 (see Chapter 15). The Mediterranean connected several complex economies, which after the pause of the eighth century would rediscover the advantages of at least limited levels of exchange. The problem of the North Sea was that, even though the Frankish economy was so active, those of its neighbours were not. It was important for the Anglo-Saxons or Danes to get Frankish goods, as luxuries for the most part, but their élites were not yet rich enough to be able to buy all that many of them. Nor were the economies of the North very diversified; Hamwic’s artisanal products resemble those of Maastricht and Dorestad in their range, and could not easily have been intended for sale outside Wessex. Economic specialization and diversification would slowly develop in later centuries; but the North Sea trade of the eighth century was more a spin-off of Carolingian wealth and political influence than a sign of the future economic dominance of north-west Europe.

  10

  The Power of the Visual: Material Culture and Display from Imperial Rome to the Carolingians

  Easily the largest single roofed building of the Roman empire, and larger than any subsequent building in Europe until Seville and Cologne cathedrals in the thirteenth century, was Justinian’s Great Church in Constantinople, dedicated to the Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia). It was built in under six years after a fire damaged the city’s earlier cathedral during the Nika riots of 532, and was dedicated in December 537: an unheard-of speed, then or later, for such an ambitious building. It was, all the same, built with considerable care, from the best materials, and has lasted little changed until the present day; the most significant modification was early, for the dome partly collapsed after an earthquake in 557 and was rebuilt, slightly higher, in the next years, allowing a rededication in 562, when Justinian was still alive. Subsequent emperors only tinkered with the building, for example adding a ceremonial door on the south-west porch (the work of Theophilos around 840), or else, later, adding external buttresses (Andronikos II in the 1310s and Sinan in the 1570s for the Ottomans; the Ottomans als
o added minarets for the Aya Sofya mosque that the church had become). The interior space remained the same, however; the only major Byzantine change here was the addition of figural decoration in the mosaics covering roof and upper walls, from the ninth century onwards, for Justinian’s decorative programme had above all been gold mosaic, sometimes interrupted by crosses or floral motifs, and coloured marble.

  Hagia Sophia from the outside looks like a giant brooding spider, thanks to the Ottoman minarets. Inside, its central space shows itself at once as the major architectural innovation it was, with its great dome, 100 Roman/Byzantine feet (31 metres) across, balanced on four arches each 120 feet (37 metres) high, creating an unparalleled single volume, unbroken by pillars, which was further extended to the east and west by half-domes and then, to the east, a smaller half-domed apse. The whole is stamped with Justinian’s identity, for very many of the capitals have his monogram on, or else that of his wife Theodora. Most of the columns and all the capitals were cut especially for the building, unusually for the late Roman empire, where the reuse of building material was normal even for major monuments. Justinian intended the building to be innovative; he employed academic geometricians, Anthemios of Tralles and Isidore of Miletos, to build it, not, as was normal, master-builders. And people were duly amazed. In the context of the second dedication of the church, Paul the Silentiary wrote a verse description of it, which as a work dedicated to a single construction is unusual in our period, and a decade earlier, Prokopios’ On Buildings, written to praise all of Justinian’s building projects, starts off with an eleven-page eulogy to Hagia Sophia. Both writers stress its size, of course, and the effect of the gold and marble (the green marble was a meadow with flowers to Prokopios, fresh green hills and vines to Paul), particularly given the relationship between the gold of the roof and the light from the windows. ‘Whoever lifts his eyes to the beautiful firmament of the roof can scarcely keep them on its rounded expanse, sprinkled with dancing stars . . . whoever puts foot inside the sacred temple would never wish to leave, but would lift up his head and, with his eyes drawn first this way and then that way, would gaze around’ (Paul). And Prokopios was also well aware of the building’s architectural originality, for he spends two pages describing the dome-work with considerable technical detail, ending up by pre-echoing Paul with the observation - a cliché, but still true today - that it is hard to concentrate on one detail, given the arresting complexity of the whole. These descriptive works had their own literary tradition (artistic and architectural descriptions are called ekphraseis in Greek), and they were, furthermore, commissioned by or at least written for Justinian himself, but they at least tell us how the building was intended to be seen, the impact it was intended to have. It was an impact that lasted; Hagia Sophia was almost the first rectangular church focused on a central dome, but almost all later Byzantine churches used this model, in a simpler version at least, and so did Sinan’s mosques for sixteenth-century Istanbul.

  Hagia Sophia was not just a huge, expensive and innovative building, one of many which Justinian erected, as Prokopios tells us at length. It also sat at the apex of the ceremonial life of the east Roman empire. In Rome itself, the new churches of the Christian empire were built outside the walls or on the edge of town for a long time, decentring the old public focus of the forum complexes, the imperial palace on the Palatine hill above them, and the great racecourse, the Circus Maximus, to the latter’s south. In Constantinople, Constantine’s new foundation, these public spaces could be and were put together, with the forums leading in a line along wide colonnaded streets to the Great Church, and the palace and the Hippodrome just to its south. The people of the city regularly met in the Hippodrome, and, although access to the church was often more restricted, many thousands could get into Hagia Sophia. The ceremonial of imperial life had as its centre movements between the palace and the church, which were watched by an audience, and public processions regularly proceeded through the forums to the church- palace, attended by even more spectators. The church that was there before 532 was already large for these same reasons, but the size and ambition of Justinian’s church set his own mark on the entire public and ceremonial space of the largest city in Europe, for close on a millennium. Justinian’s church was remembered by later generations in the same breath as his legal codifications and his conquests, and if there is one act which sums up his desire to be recognized as the ideal or archetypal Roman emperor, Hagia Sophia could be seen as that.

  This might seem a lot of weight to put on a single building, but the Romans intended their constructions to be seen as representative of their power and wealth, and, judging by the numerous reactions we have in written texts, they indeed were so. People could build buildings with quite complex inter-textual references, too; in Hagia Sophia’s case, the rotunda of the Pantheon in Rome, or that of Galerius’ palace at Thessaloniki, were models to be surpassed, as also was the private church of Hagios Polyeuktos, built on a huge scale in Constantinople only a decade before by the imperial heiress Anicia Juliana, this time in a more conventional basilica form, which Hagia Sophia could displace simply by being so different. The force of the politics of building was not restricted to the Roman empire, either. All the societies described in this book recognized it and respected it, in fact; and the differences between the buildings which powerful people erected in those different societies is one quick way to understand the variation in their aspirations, both in their scale and in their aesthetics.

  This central chapter, accordingly, is intended to be comparative. It sets societies against each other through their different uses of material culture, particularly architecture, for the purpose of display. We seldom have as clear an idea of the intentions of the patrons of a building as we have for Hagia Sophia, thanks to Prokopios and Paul the Silentiary; but we do have many of the buildings themselves, or at least their archaeological vestiges, and we can reconstruct some of these intentions. I cannot do justice to all the societies in this book in a single chapter, of course, but I can at least give a sample of the sort of comparative analysis of display that can be achieved. We shall look in turn at four buildings: Hagia Sophia, already discussed; the Great Mosque of Damascus; the Northumbrian palace complex of Yeavering; and the church of S. Prassede in ninth-century Rome. These buildings are mostly religious, for the survival of secular buildings is much more patchy (Yeavering, indeed, only survives as a set of post-holes), but at the end of the chapter we shall look briefly at the varying structures of royal palaces, and also - outside the restricted world of kings, emperors and bishops - at the changing spatial patterns of villages, for these too are a guide to power, on a smaller scale.

  Caliph al-Walid I (705-15) had the Great Mosque built in his capital at Damascus in 705-16, finished after his death. It was not the first mosque in the territory of the caliphate, most of which had been conquered by the Arabs sixty to seventy years before, between 636 and 651; but, together with contemporary constructions in Medina and Jerusalem, it was the first large-scale monumental mosque, and it set a pattern which would be largely repeated in subsequent building projects, in Fustat (Old Cairo), Kairouan, Córdoba and many other cities. Mosque architecture used many elements of Roman (and also, in Iraq and Iran, Sassanian) architectural style, including colonnades; indeed, the columns were for a long time characteristically spolia, taken from Roman buildings and reused. The Damascus mosque also had a marble vine-frieze, much praised by medieval writers, which has clear Constantinopolitan antecedents. But the overall effect of an early medieval mosque was quite different from that of any Roman building. It consisted of a walled rectangular courtyard, part of which was open to the sky and part roofed, the latter making up a deep space held up by lines of columns. Sometimes the roofed space was quite small by comparison with the courtyard; sometimes (as at Damascus) it was around the same size, with three lines of columns in that case. (The famous forest of columns in the later Córdoba mosque, with thirty-four lines of eighteen columns in its last ph
ase, is atypical.) The effect was, however, of a relatively unhierarchical space, the open courtyard running into the roofed area without a complete break, with only the mihrab, a niche pointing towards Mecca, operating as a focus. Islam is not a religion with an organized priesthood, and it puts great emphasis on a community of believers. Inside the courtyard, opened and roofed alike, the community could meet in prayer.