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

by Chris Wickham

  The Byzantine empire at its low point thus never entirely lost a network of exchange that covered its heartland, the Aegean and Marmara seas and the coasts around them. This was so even if most local production had simplified, sometimes radically. This seems to reflect what else we know about the empire: that the state had localized its own structures, but that it was still dominated by a powerful capital. Arguably, the local differences in productive professionalism around 700 reflect areas of greater or lesser aristocratic power on the ground, although the evidence is not yet good enough for this to be developed further. The Aegean-wide exchange we do see was not run by the state; our written sources stress independent merchants in the period before 800, just as the Book of the Eparch, for all its regulatory interest, does in 900. But state-fuelled demand was the most solid agent of buying power all the same; and this commerce focused on the capital first, although secondarily, in other surviving centres as well, Thessaloniki, Ephesos or Smyrna.

  As we move into the ninth century, one visible change is an increase in the numbers of coins found on sites. It is normal in excavations to find coins up to Constans II in around 660, and then nothing, or almost nothing, for a hundred and fifty years; even though every emperor still minted coins, they vanished from circulation, and we could not conclude that they were at all commonly available outside the capital. This changed from the 820s onwards. At Corinth, nearly four times as many coins are known for Theophilos (829-42) as for all his predecessors put together after Constans; those for Leo VI (886-912) are six times as numerous as for Theophilos, those for Leo’s son Constantine VII double again, and the figures go on up from there. This can most plausibly be linked to a revival in taxation and army pay in money, which is most often ascribed to Nikephoros I (802-11: above, Chapter 11); such a shift depended on a more reliable supply of metals, but also presumed (and furthered) market exchange, sufficient to move the coins around. In the ninth century, too, we come upon larger-scale finds of GWW outside the capital, for example at Mesembria, a Byzantine port in modern Bulgaria, and even in field survey, in the countryside outside Sparta; in the tenth, this extends to Thebes. Local imitations of Constantinople pottery begin to be found at Athens, and, significantly, at Preslav in independent Bulgaria. Large-scale ceramic production at Corinth also began by the tenth century, and so did the amphorae of the Ganos area, in the Sea of Marmara, destined for the newly systematic export of local wine. The wine trade could already extend far afield, indeed, if the large consignment of wine-amphorae, marked with their shippers’ names, found in a wreck off south-west Turkey dating to around 880, really was from the Crimea, as the excavators think. Linen was exported from Bulgaria and the southern Black Sea (as also from Egypt) to the capital as well, and both Constantinople and Thessaloniki made glass. We are beginning to move into the complex Byzantine productions of the central Middle Ages.

  In the ninth century, and still more in the tenth, the state was getting stronger and richer in Byzantium. In the tenth, so was the aristocracy, in some areas - often away from the Aegean focus of the archaeology, but including in southern Greece, where already in the 880s the wealthy Danelis (see Chapter 13) had access to elaborate linens and silks, and the textile workers themselves, whom she gave to Basil I and Leo VI. A century later, Basil II, in his complaints about ‘the powerful’, was worried that they would monopolize rural markets, too. What we see in this whole list of examples is an increasingly elaborate and diversified set of agrarian and artisanal productions, with an increasingly wide and complex distribution, to and from the capital, certainly, but between provinces as well: Thessaloniki was a particularly important entrepôt. This was made possible by élite demand, which was clearly increasing again, and was also furthered by direct élite involvement in artisanal production and exchange. If there was ever a natural location for medium-distance exchange, of course, it was the Aegean, largely land-locked and protected, and studded with islands, as it is. The years around 900 merely saw a return to normality in this respect; they point up the abnormality, the crisis, of the two centuries after the Persian and Arab invasions. But the growing power of the Byzantine state would push that exchange still further in the two centuries to come. After 1000, a demographic expansion, which is quite likely to have already started in our period, begins to be more visible in our documentation, as does a trend to reclaim uncultivated land; the agrarian base of the empire was clearly expanding. The eleventh century shows some agricultural specializations as well, not least in mulberry trees for silk in various parts of the empire: these too must have existed already before 1000, for Byzantium was certainly producing its own silk in our period. The old view that the empire saw economic stagnation in the eleventh and twelfth centuries is now decisively rejected; the roots of the generalized economic expansion of that period lay in ours, even though we can as yet only see occasional signs of it. And that expansion affected areas outside the empire as well: by the early eleventh century the Byzantines were exporting silk to Egypt. This is a point we shall come back to.

  Syria did not for the most part see the seventh-century crisis of the Byzantine empire. After 661 it was the political centre of the Umayyad caliphate, and that period saw major monumental building in the capital, Damascus, as also in the regional religious centre, Jerusalem. Damascus was never a huge city, which partly reflects problems of water supply, but is partly also due to the fact that the Umayyads had difficulties getting taxes from the provinces of the caliphate. But enough came into Syria to ensure the wealth of the caliphs themselves, and their urban and rural palaces still survive in the landscape of Syria and Palestine. The Arab conquest was anyway quick enough for Syria not to suffer in its basic infrastructures. Most of the numerous excavations in both Syria and Palestine, both urban and rural, show continuities that extend to 750 at least, particularly in inland areas. In and around the city of Madaba, for example, in what is now northern Jordan, Christian churches were founded into the late eighth century, with impressively decorated mosaic floors which show both wealthy patrons and skilled artisans: in the city, in rural monasteries, and in villages around.

  Cities changed in structure. Their Roman monumental centres tended to fall out of use, as the Arabs had a different ceremonial style, with fewer religious or political processions and a focus on the enclosed public space of mosque courtyards. But they continued to be active demographic and productive centres; Roman public buildings were replaced by artisan workshops, colonnaded streets were replaced by rows of shops, often monumentally built (particularly, as we saw in Chapter 12, by Caliph Hisham, 724-43). So at Gerasa (modern Jerash) north of Madaba kiln complexes were built in a Roman theatre and a temple, part of a network which made Gerasa ceramics a major feature of the economy of the Galilee area until 800 or so; at nearby Scythopolis (modern Bet She’an) there were by 700 or so kilns in the theatre and amphitheatre, linen workshops in a bath complex (Scythopolis linen was well known already in the Roman empire), and one of Hisham’s shop complexes on the site of a sixth-century hall. These patterns are repeated, in greater and lesser detail, in twenty other cities; the production of glass, dyeing (and thus textiles), iron, copper are all attested in recent archaeological work. Substantial élite town houses have been found in some cities, too; and of course the Arab period had its own monumental buildings, mosques and governors’ palaces.

  This picture was clearly very different from that in the Byzantine heartland, although the sources - almost all archaeological - are the same. There are almost no usable written sources on these issues for Syria and Palestine, in fact, although the Syriac chronicles for Edessa also paint a glowing picture of the commercial activity of that city and of the wealth of its Christian élites: Athanasios bar Gumoye, a great landowner and a tax official for ‘Abd al-Malik in Egypt around 700, reputedly owned 300 shops and nine inns in Edessa. Two changes nuance this picture of continuing élite and rural prosperity, however. The first is that the coast of Syria and Palestine, a major oil and wine export area und
er the Roman empire, saw stagnation under the Umayyads, the weakening of major coastal cities such as Antioch, and the abandonment of marginal lands. Umayyad Syria was not closely linked to the Mediterranean; it hardly even had any economic links with Egypt, although some Egyptian products still came in through the major surviving coastal entrepôt, Caesarea in what is now Israel. But actually - this is the second change - Syria and Palestine were no longer a single economic unit. The productions that can be best traced by archaeologists, once again mostly ceramics, remain of very high quality in the Umayyad period, and show industries that were large-scale and many-levelled, aimed at elites and non-élites alike; but they were much more localized than in the Roman period. Gerasa pottery rarely reached the Mediterranean coast, or ‘Aqaba on the Red Sea, or northern Syria, for example; even Jerusalem, only 100 kilometres away, largely had its own - again, high-quality - ceramic tradition. So the Syro-Palestinian economy remained prosperous and complex under the Umayyads, but it was much more internally fragmented, and cut off from its neighbours. It was, in fact, even more internally fragmented than the crisis-bound Byzantine empire, as it seems on the basis of the archaeology of the moment.

  This economic fragmentation further underscores the difficulty the Umayyads had in centralizing the fiscal system of the state, even in their own political heartland, although they were certainly more successful here than elsewhere. But the complexity of (almost all) the different sections of Syria and Palestine also points at the continuing force of local demand, and thus of the continuing wealth of urban élites, that is to say the local landed aristocracy. It is often said that the Arabs gave more respect to merchants than the Romans had, which is true; Muhammad had been a merchant, and there was never in the Islamic world any stigma attached to wealth ‘from trade’, unlike in much of the West, or even Byzantium. It is often also said that this ideological shift is already visible in the changing forms of cities, with more artisanal and commercial activity in old public centres; this seems less likely, however. These changes are better explained as the normal result of shifts in the focus of monumental building, from colonnaded streets and theatres, etc., to mosques (above, Chapter 10); if a city remains economically active, unused buildings will get taken over for private uses, and so it was here. But we should also not overstate the mercantile element in élite activity. Athanasios bar Gumoye, notwithstanding all his shops, was a great landowner first and foremost; it is likely indeed that most urban patricians in this period (who were anyway mostly still Christians) were above all landowners, and at most used landed capital to get into commerce, if they wanted. This would be so later, too, in ‘Abbasid Iraq, where such élites would usually be Muslims, and in post-‘Abbasid Iran, where ‘ulam’ biographies show land as much as mercantile activity as the basis for elite wealth. Even the Jewish mercantile elites of Fustat in Egypt, who may well have gained their initial wealth entirely in the commercial sector, bought land or tax-farming concessions with their profits, for land remained overwhelmingly the chief source of wealth overall. Exchange was, and remained, only a spin-off of agricultural wealth, even around the great cities of the second half of our period, and still more in Umayyad Syria.

  The year 750 marks a change in the economy of Syria and Palestine. The ‘Abbasid takeover marginalized the region politically, and, with the fiscal centralization of the caliphate from the 780s onwards, Syrian taxes were firmly directed to Iraq. Cities which stayed as prosperous as before into the ninth and tenth centuries were rather fewer, Ramla near Jerusalem, Tiberias on Lake Galilee, Caesarea, ‘Aqaba, Aleppo, Damascus, entrepôts or major local governmental centres. The devastating earth- quake which hit the Galilee area in 749 left cities in ruins, which, significantly, were often not rebuilt and can thus be excavated; Bet She’an is a particularly impressive sight, with white limestone columns (including those of Hisham’s shops) even now lying across black basalt roads. Syria would henceforth be mostly governed from elsewhere, from Baghdad, Cairo, or (for the North in the late tenth century) Constantinople; only Aleppo was sometimes independent at the end of our period. This, plus the wars fought over it in the tenth century, sapped its prosperity. But it was by no means in economic crisis even then, and ‘Abbasid centralization brought with it a widening of economic horizons, with more evidence of exchange with Iraq: new polychrome glazed ware spread from Iraq into Syria/Palestine from 800 onwards, the beginning of a new international taste in fine pottery which would by 1100 dominate the whole Mediterranean, Muslim and Christian regions alike. It is for this reason that entrepôts flourished under the ‘Abbasids; inter- regional networks were beginning to develop again, west to Egypt (via Caesarea), south down the Red Sea (via ‘Aqaba), east to Iraq (via Aleppo). This network would continue even after the ‘Abbasid caliphate collapsed, as we shall see in a moment.

  The ‘Abbasids, of course, invested in Iraq. Iraq had been a major political and economic centre for millennia; the Tigris and Euphrates created a fertile and irrigable basin matched only by the Nile for its agricultural wealth. The Sassanians were only the most recent rulers to develop its irrigation, with the great Nahrawan canal, probably built in the sixth century, which brought Tigris water to a network of smaller canals north and east of the capital, Ctesiphon, situated just south of what would become Baghdad. An early and influential 1950s field survey of the Nahrawan area by Robert Adams indeed saw the Sassanian period as the economic height for Iraq, with the pre-tenth-century caliphate, however prosperous, failing to match Sassanian levels after the political crises of the 620s-630s, in which canal dykes were not maintained. The dating of sites in Adams’s work, and thus his assumptions about the number of settlements that were actually occupied in each period, were however more influenced by his over-literal readings of narrative sources than a field survey would be today (if one were possible in Iraq in 2007). The land north of Raqqa in modern eastern Syria, a more short-lived ‘Abbasid capital on the Euphrates, showed a clear ‘Abbasid-period settlement peak in a more recent field survey. The Umayyads, anyway, and even more the ‘Abbasids, were committed canal-builders and land reclaimers, and the ‘Abbasids were particularly active in southern Iraq, as we saw in Chapter 14; it was to build dykes and to desalinate land in the marsh areas of the south that they imported the large-scale African slave gangs of the Zanj. The ‘Abbasid construction of the huge metropolis of Baghdad after 762 required systematic provisioning, and it was in the interests of every public official who bought Iraqi land with his tax profits to develop that land with an eye to the urban market. Samarra, at the northern end of the Nahrawan canal, only added to that market in the mid-ninth century. The sharecropping contracts discussed in legal sources from ‘Abbasid Baghdad, which presumably best reflect the Iraq the legists lived in, show landlordly investment; state investment in the irrigation network is assumed as well, largely through wage-labour; the legists say less about the Zanj. Wage-labourers were also used in agriculture, which shows that some landowners were cultivating estates directly, a sure sign of a market-orientated approach. One result was the expansion of Iraqi rice cultivation, which was a ninth-century phenomenon.

  Tax revenues only went to the capitals, but their resultant vast size itself created a stimulus to Iraqi agriculture, and the Iraqi commercial economy as a whole. Baghdad (and to a lesser degree other Iraqi cities) was also an artisanal hub which was for a century unmatched anywhere in the world. Silk, cottons, glass, paper (the Baghdad paper-mills were founded in 795, using technology brought from Samarkand and, before that, from China) were all made in the city. Baghdad was a focus for internal Iraqi exchange, and also an entrepôt for interregional commerce between the provinces of the caliphate, which was by now moving ceramics or cloth across the whole terrain from Iran to Egypt. Indeed, this commerce went further; the 1960s-1970s excavations of the Iranian port of Siraf (as yet only partly published) show that the caliphate had opened up to Indian Ocean and Chinese trade on a large scale by the late eighth century. The Seven Voyages of Sinbad in the Thou
sand and One Nights symbolizes this for most of us, but that is perhaps matched by the remarkable collection of plausible and implausible stories (some of them first-person experiences) made by the Iranian ship captain Buzurg ibn Shahriyar in the 950s, who discusses wonders, strange customs, storms and remarkable animals right across to the South China Sea. The trade thus established continued for the rest of the Middle Ages.

  Baghdad’s wealth, and also Iraq’s, faltered in the tenth century. The region had lost its political and fiscal dominance by now. The cutting of the Nahrawan canal in 937 for short-term military reasons was soon reversed, but the precedent was a bad one; the city and the canals were refurbished several times (most committedly by the Buyid ‘Adud al-Dawla in 981-3), but Iraq’s prosperity did not again match that of the ninth century. All the same, that prosperity had been so great that Baghdad remained one of the principal cities of Eurasia, larger than any western city, and a major entrepôt into the twelfth century at least.

  None of these regions matched the stability of Egypt. Egypt was the Roman empire’s richest province by far, with the most complex economy, and it remained so in the post-Roman world into the fourteenth century. In the caliphate, too, if it was surpassed by Iraq, that was only in the ‘Abbasid century, and it had regained its primacy by 950 or so. The power-house of the tenth- to fourteenth-century Mediterranean exchange system, which was not driven by fiscal factors as was that of Rome or the caliphs, was Egypt. The basic reason for this was the relative reliability of the Nile flood, which allowed continuous cropping of agricultural land and produced wheat yields of around ten to one (three or four to one, with fallow periods, being the best that dry farming could produce in the Middle Ages). Egypt’s canal system has also almost always been regularly maintained; the country has almost always been governed by a single political authority, which helps, and it certainly was so throughout our period and beyond. The large yields of Egypt’s agricultural land, not only in wheat, but also wine and flax, allowed a whole hierarchy of non-cultivators to be fed from the labour of the peasantry, including landowners, tax officials and soldiers, of course, but also complex networks of artisans, shopkeepers and merchants. It can be plausibly argued that in the later Roman empire a third of the population of Egypt lived in cities, a figure that is unparalleled in the ancient or early medieval world, and there is not much reason to think that it dropped later; if it had, the drop had certainly been reversed by 1000. Certainly the rather restricted archaeology in Arab-period cities shows dense private housing, in apartment buildings, from the seventh to the tenth century: in Alexandria, Fustat, nearby Saqqara, and Akhmim in Middle Egypt.