The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization
Page 13
In the western Mediterranean, the decline of coinage, as with other items, is less total and less sudden. Many of the new Germanic rulers of the West issued their own gold coins, and some minted also in silver, often closely imitating the currency of the contemporary east-Roman empire (e.g. Fig. 4.1, at p. 69). In Vandal Africa and Ostrogothic Italy, the new regimes also produced coins in copper (e.g. Fig. 4.3, at p. 74). These issues, although very much rarer amongst excavated finds than fourth-century Roman imperial coins, were not insignificant—for instance, it is thought that the large copper coins of late fifth-century Italy were the inspiration for a major reform of the east-Roman coinage some years later. Elsewhere in the West, however, the regular issuing of copper coins had already ceased during the fifth century. The only exceptions known at present are two local copper coinages, both probably of the sixth century: one minted in the area around Seville in Visigothic Spain; the other in the main entrepôt for Frankish trade with the Mediterranean, Marseille.38
Even these coinages disappeared during the sixth century. During the seventh century, new copper coins in the West were minted only in areas ruled by the East Romans (such as Ravenna, Rome, and Sicily). But even these coins must have had only a limited production and circulation, since they are rarely found in excavation (Fig. 5.9A). Evidence of an abundant copper coinage of the seventh and early eighth centuries has so far been found only in one city, Rome, much of it in the form of local ‘unofficial’ issues—though there are hints that Sicily too may have had substantial numbers of coins in circulation.39 The overall picture from the West, therefore, is of the use of copper coins becoming scarcer through the fifth and sixth centuries, and minimal by the seventh, though this trend is more gradual and less dramatic in Italy, at least from Rome southwards.
As with pottery, the history of coinage in the eastern Mediterranean is very different. Here new copper coins are common throughout the sixth century, and well into the seventh (Fig. 5.9B–E). In the Aegean region, however, during the seventh century new coins became very scarce, except in Constantinople itself (Fig. 5.9B, C, D). Only further south, in the Levantine provinces, did copper coins continue to be common (Fig. 5.9E).40 Again these differences call out for explanation, and will be explored in the next chapter.
There is admittedly no straightforward correlation between the presence or absence of new coins, and levels of economic sophistication. There is, as we have seen, always the possibility that large numbers of older coins continued in circulation, even when new ones were not available; and in the Mediterranean region, unlike in Britain, the presence of Roman coins in later hoards proves beyond doubt that old money could remain in use for centuries. Furthermore, because rulers were under no obligation to mint coins as a service to their subjects, the stimulus behind a new issue may often have been political ambition, and not commercial need. For instance, after his conquest of Ravenna in 751, the Lombard king Aistulf issued a copper coinage of the size and design of the previous Byzantine coins of the city, substituting his own name and bust for that of the emperor.41 Nowhere else in Italy did the Lombards ever mint in copper. The Ravenna issue by Aistulf was a one off, and almost certainly an act of ideological bravado, rather than an attempt to meet any real economic need.
5.9 The availability of small change. Finds of newly minted copper coins (shown as numbers of coins per year) from different sites in the western and eastern Mediterranean: A—the town of Luna (in Liguria, Italy); B—Athens in Greece; C—Ephesus on the Aegean coast of modern Turkey;
D—Constantinople (specifically, from the excavation of the church of St Polyeuktos); E—Antioch in Syria. (Note that the vertical axis for each histogram is different.) Coins disappear early in the West (A), and in the later seventh century in the Aegean region (B & C). Only in the Levant (E) and the Byzantine capital (D) do they persist.
However, for a number of reasons, it would be a serious mistake to ignore the information that coin finds can give. Coins offer some considerable advantages as evidence. First, they can usually be closely dated. Secondly, unlike most other artefacts (including pottery), coins have attracted the attention of archaeologists for a very long time; and, as a result, the coin finds from a large number of excavations have been published accurately and in full. With coins, we have available some substantial and reliable databases of evidence, which, with due caution, can readily be compared across the whole area of the former Roman world (as in Fig. 5.9).
Thirdly, coinage is undoubtedly a great facilitator of commercial exchange—copper coins, in particular, for small transactions. In the absence of coinage, raw bullion for major purchases, and barter for minor ones, can admittedly be much more sophisticated than we might initially suppose.42 But barter requires two things that coinage can circumvent: the need for both sides to know, at the moment of agreement, exactly what they want from the other party; and, particularly in the case of an exchange that involves one party being ‘paid back’ in the future, a strong degree of trust between those who are doing the exchanging. If I want to exchange one of my cows for a regular supply of eggs over the next five years, I can do this, but only if I trust the chicken-farmer. Barter suits small face-to-face communities, in which trust either already exists between parties, or can be readily enforced through community pressure. But it does not encourage the development of complex economies, where goods and money need to circulate impersonally. In a monied economy, I can exchange my cow for coins, and only later, and perhaps in a distant place, decide when and how to spend them. I need only trust the coins that I receive.
The pattern of availability or absence of copper coins does coincide closely with the picture of receding economic complexity provided by other data: of a decline that hit the northern provinces of the empire around AD 400; but which did not touch the eastern Mediterranean until some 200 years later; and which even then did not affect the Arab Levant and Egypt. It is striking that, within this broad pattern, there are three local issues of copper coins in the West, all of them in areas where we have reasons to suppose that a somewhat more sophisticated economy survived: sixth-century south-western Spain, at the heart of the Visigothic kingdom; sixth-century Marseille, the gateway port for the Frankish kingdoms; and seventh- and early eighth-century papal Rome. The few regions that still needed copper coins produced them; their absence elsewhere must be symptomatic of a western economy that had changed dramatically from Roman times.
A Return to Prehistory?
The economic change that I have outlined was an extraordinary one. What we observe at the end of the Roman world is not a ‘recession’ or—to use a term that has recently been suggested—an ‘abatement’, with an essentially similar economy continuing to work at a reduced pace. Instead what we see is a remarkable qualitative change, with the disappearance of entire industries and commercial networks. The economy of the post-Roman West is not that of the fourth century reduced in scale, but a very different and far less sophisticated entity.43
This is at its starkest and most obvious in Britain. A number of basic skills disappeared entirely during the fifth century, to be reintroduced only centuries later. Some of these, such as the technique of building in mortared stone or brick, can perhaps be seen as products of specifically Roman styles of display, and therefore peculiarly susceptible to political and cultural change. But for other crafts, explanations in terms of cultural change, rather than economic decline, are impossible to uphold. All over Britain the art of making pottery on a wheel disappeared in the early fifth century, and was not reintroduced for almost 300 years. The potter’s wheel is not an instrument of cultural identity. Rather, it is a functional innovation that facilitates the rapid production of thin-walled ceramics; and yet it disappeared from Britain. Presumably, though I would be the first to admit that it is hard to credit, this was because there were no longer enough consumers around with sufficient wealth to sustain any specialized potting.
Sophistication in production and exchange did survive in post-Roman Britain, but
only at the very highest levels of society and the highest level of artefacts. In the early seventh century an East Anglian ruler was buried at Sutton Hoo with an extraordinarily rich and exotic accompaniment of treasure: silver and copper dishes from the eastern Mediterranean; an enamelled bronze bowl, probably from West Britain; some splendid weaponry, some of it perhaps from Scandinavia; gold coins from the Frankish kingdoms; and some wonderful native gold jewellery, incorporating garnets and millefiore glasswork from the Continent (or, possibly, from even further afield). The jewellery, which was certainly made in Anglo-Saxon Britain, displays levels of craftsmanship and design that are extraordinarily accomplished and sophisticated (Fig. 5.10 above). But these are all rare elite items, made or imported for the highest levels of society. At this level, beautiful objects were still being made, and traded or gifted across long distances. What had totally disappeared, however, were the good-quality, low-value items, made in bulk, and available so widely in the Roman period. An object from the Sutton Hoo ship burial that attracts very little attention in its British Museum showcase speaks volumes: the pottery bottle (Fig. 5.10 below). In the context of seventh-century East Anglia, it was almost certainly a high-status item, imported from abroad (since it was shaped on a wheel, at a time when all pottery in Britain was hand-formed). But in any context of the Roman period, even a rural peasant context, it would be entirely unremarkable, or notable only for its porous fabric and rough finish. The economy that sustained and supplied a massive middle and lower market for low-value functional goods had disappeared, leaving sophisticated production and exchange only for a tiny number of high-status objects.44
It may initially be hard to believe, but post-Roman Britain in fact sank to a level of economic complexity well below that of the pre-Roman Iron Age. Southern Britain, in the years before the Roman conquest of AD 43, was importing quantities of Gaulish wine and Gaulish pottery; it had its own native pottery industries with regional distribution of their wares; it even had native silver coinages, which may well have been used to facilitate exchange, as well as for purposes of prestige and gift-giving.45 The settlement pattern of later iron-age Britain also reflects emerging economic complexity, with substantial coastal settlements, like Hengistbury in modern Hampshire, which were at least partly dependent on trade. None of these features can be found reliably in fifth- and sixth-century post-Roman Britain. It is really only in about AD 700, three centuries after the disintegration of the Romano-British economy, that southern Britain crawled back to the level of economic complexity found in the pre-Roman Iron Age, with evidence of pots imported from the Continent, the first substantial and wheel-turned Anglo-Saxon pottery industry (at Ipswich), the striking of silver coins, and the emergence of coastal trading towns, such as Hamwic (Saxon Southampton) and London.46 All these features were new, or only just beginning, in around AD 700; but all had existed in southern Britain during the pre-Roman Iron Age.
5.10 The decline of low-value products. Above, one of two gold shoulder-clasps, decorated with glass and garnets; and, below, a pottery bottle. Both were buried with an East Anglian king at Sutton Hoo in around AD 625.
In the western Mediterranean, the economic regression was by no means as total as it was in Britain. As we have seen, some trade, some trading towns, some coinage, and some local and regional industries persisted throughout the post-Roman centuries. But it must be remembered that in the Mediterranean world the level of economic complexity and sophistication reached in the Roman period was very considerably higher than anything ever attained in Britain. The fall in economic complexity may in fact have been as remarkable as that in Britain; but, since in the Mediterranean it started from a much higher point, it also bottomed out at a higher level. If, as we have done for Britain, we compare pre-Roman and post-Roman Mediterranean economies, in some areas at least a very similar picture can be found to that sketched out above—of a regression, taking the economy way below levels of complexity reached in the pre-Roman period. In southern and central Italy, for example, both the Greek colonies and the Etruscan territories have provided much more evidence of trade and sophisticated native industries than can be found in post-Roman Italy. The pre-Roman past, in the temples of Agrigento and Paestum, the tombs of Cerveteri and Tarquinia, and a mass of imported and native pottery and jewellery, has left enough material remains to serve as a major tourist attraction. The same cannot be said of the immediately post-Roman centuries.
The case of central and southern Italy raises a very important point. The complex system of production and distribution, whose disappearance we have been considering, was an older and more deeply rooted phenomenon than an exclusively ‘Roman’ economy. Rather, it was an ‘ancient’ economy that in the eastern and southern Mediterranean was flourishing long before Rome became at all significant, and that even in the north-western Mediterranean was developing steadily before the centuries of Roman domination. Cities such as Alexandria, Antioch, Naples and Marseille were ancient long before they fell under Roman control. It is true that in some distant northern provinces—the interior of the Balkans, northern Gaul, the Rhineland, and Britain—Roman power and economic complexity were more or less chronologically coterminous. But, even in these regions, as we have seen in looking at iron-age Britain, the result of the Roman conquest was perhaps more to intensify and encourage older developments than completely to change the direction of economic life. What was destroyed in the post-Roman centuries, and then only very slowly re-created, was a sophisticated world with very deep roots indeed. How could such a remarkable change have happened?
6.1 The ups and (dramatic) downs of complexity and prosperity, between AD 300 and AD 700, in five regions of the Roman world: Britain; northern and central Italy; the Roman provinces of central North Africa; the islands and coastal provinces of the Aegean; and the ‘Levant’ (the region between modern Turkey to the north, and Egypt to the south).
VI
WHY THE DEMISE OF COMFORT?
WE WILL NEVER know precisely why the sophisticated economy that had developed under the Romans unravelled. The archaeological evidence, which is all we really have, can tell us what happened, and when; but on its own cannot provide explanations as to why change occurred. A friable Anglo-Saxon hand-shaped pot is eloquent testimony to a dramatic fall in living standards, but it cannot tell us what had destroyed the industries that only a few decades earlier had spread high-quality wares throughout southern Britain. However, what we can do is chart the progress of decline against other known events and changes in the Roman world, to see whether there are any likely connections.
Patterns of Change
There was no single moment, nor even a single century of collapse. The ancient economy disappeared at different times and at varying speeds across the empire. If, for the sake of simple and ready comparison, we show this process in graph form for five separate regions of the empire—from Roman complexity in around AD 300, to the dramatically simpler world of around 700—we can immediately see substantial differences, but also some similarities, between what happened in different areas (Fig. 6.1). Inevitably, these graphs are a gross simplification of a mass of difficult, and sometimes disputed, archaeological evidence, but I hope the basic patterns that I have shown are reasonably close to the evidence currently available, and therefore more helpful than harmful.1
There is general agreement that Roman Britain’s sophisticated economy disappeared remarkably quickly and remarkably early. There may already have been considerable decline in the later fourth century, but, if so, this was a recession, rather than a complete collapse: new coins were still in widespread use and a number of sophisticated industries still active. In the early fifth century all this disappeared, and, as we have seen in the previous chapter, Britain reverted to a level of economic simplicity similar to that of the Bronze Age, with no coinage, and only hand-shaped pots and wooden buildings.2
Further south, in the provinces of the western Mediterranean, the change was much slower and more gradual, and is co
nsequently difficult to chart in detail. But it would be reasonable to summarize the change in both Italy and North Africa as a slow decline, starting in the fifth century (possibly earlier in Italy), and continuing on a steady downward path into the seventh. Whereas in Britain the low point had already been reached in the fifth century, in Italy and North Africa it probably did not occur until almost two centuries later, at the very end of the sixth century, or even, in the case of Africa, well into the seventh.3
Turning to the eastern Mediterranean, we find a very different story. The best that can be said of any western province after the early fifth century is that some regions continued to exhibit a measure of economic complexity, although always within a broad context of decline. By contrast, throughout almost the whole of the eastern empire, from central Greece to Egypt, the fifth and early sixth centuries were a period of remarkable expansion. We know that settlement not only increased in this period, but was also prosperous, because it left behind a mass of newly built rural houses, often in stone, as well as a rash of churches and monasteries across the landscape (Fig. 6.2). New coins were abundant and widely diffused (Fig. 5.9B-E, at pp. 114–15), and new potteries, supplying distant as well as local markets, developed on the west coast of modern Turkey, in Cyprus, and in Egypt. Furthermore, new types of amphora appeared, in which the wine and oil of the Levant and of the Aegean were transported both within the region, and outside it, even as far as Britain and the upper Danube. If we measure ‘Golden Ages’ in terms of material remains, the fifth and sixth centuries were certainly golden for most of the eastern Mediterranean, in many areas leaving archaeological traces that are more numerous and more impressive than those of the earlier Roman empire.4