The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000
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The largest-scale economy in the early medieval West was the Frankish heartland. Here the networks of late Roman ceramic productions, based on supplying the Rhine army but extending across the whole of northern Gaul, in the Argonne forest above Verdun for terra sigillata tableware, in the Mayen industrial kiln complex near Trier for coarse-ware containers and tableware, continued after the army vanished, a little reduced in scale but still available over wide areas. Argonne ware had gone by 600, and Merovingian carinated fine wares were generally made on a rather smaller scale, but the Badorf ware of the kiln sites near Cologne, which replaced them after 700, was a new centralized production which could be found throughout the middle and lower Rhine valley, and further afield, and Mayen ware continued to be available over similar areas without a break. We can add to this archaeological material a range of anecdotal documentation of what seems to be fairly large-scale exchange in letters, saints’ lives and narratives. Among others, we have a bishop of Reims who writes to the bishop of Verdun in the 540s to ask about the price of pigs; Gregory of Tours who tells us that the merchants of Verdun set themselves up again after a period of trouble in the 530s with a loan of 7,000 aurei with interest from King Theudebert - he did not ask for it back, and in the 580s, Gregory says, the merchants were doing pretty well; a king (probably Sigibert III) who tries to stop the citizens of Cahors in the 630s or 640s from going to the fair at Rodez, 110 kilometres away, for fear of plague; the annual fair of Saint-Denis, for wine and other products, set up in the 630s and transferred to Paris as a going concern in the years before 709. Cologne, whose centre has been excavated, was a major metal manufacturing centre throughout the early Middle Ages; Paris was not only a fair but also had shops selling jewellery opposite Notre Dame in the 580s and quite a number of resident merchants who appear in documentary sources of various kinds. Northern Francia even had new towns, such as Maastricht, a seventh-century development with pottery-making, metalwork, bonework, and glass-making. An interlinked network of production extended all across the Seine-Rhine region, some of it very widely available, throughout the pre-Carolingian period. This network was destined to expand even further after 800, but it had active roots.
The core of the evidence presented here is the production and distribution of pottery, always the best evidenced product in archaeological excavations. Metal and also glass seem to have had similar patterns, generally showing distribution networks a little wider than those of ceramics, though they are less clearly visible (one can often tell from petrological analysis of potsherds where they came from; metal and glass are too often melted down for this to be possible, and we are reliant on stylistic analysis, which can be misleading, as there was much local copying of successful styles in our period). Cloth, the most important of all, is the great unknown out of such artisanal productions, for it so seldom survives on sites, but it would be reasonable to argue that the scale of its production often matched that of ceramics, and this seems relatively clear in England at least. These were the major artisanal products of the early Middle Ages, and they are the essential markers of economic complexity, along with more occasional agricultural specializations for sale, like the vineyards of northern Francia and also of parts of the south Italian coast. It is reasonably clear from this evidence that northern Francia had a much more complex and active exchange system than anywhere else in the West before 800, that the Mediterranean lands were more fragmented, with pockets of greater complexity and greater simplicity; and that Britain and the rest of the North was as a whole far simpler in exchange terms than almost anywhere further south. The difference between the two sides of the English Channel was particularly acute, and certainly not overcome by imports into England, which were anyway not so very numerous.
So far, no assumptions have been made here about what sort of exchange these patterns represented. As we saw in Chapter 2, the movement of goods in the Roman period was often the work of the state, taking taxes in food and artisanal products from one province to another, to feed the capitals and to feed and clothe the army. But even in the Roman period this was only one part of exchange, and commerce took other goods further, to cities and rural settlements whose supply was in no sense a fiscal concern. The state was much weaker in the post-Roman world, and one would not expect much of a tax-based movement of goods; an equivalent might be the movement of rents from one estate-centre to another, to feed landowners and kings who were located elsewhere, but the evidence we have for exchange, even in the relatively localized early Middle Ages, seems more capillary than that for the most part. With the exception of the luxuries on high-status sites, which were in some (not all) cases produced by subjected craftsmen, dependent on aristocrats and kings, most of the non-local goods found on archaeological sites were probably bought, and produced for sale. This does not mean, however, that aristocrats and kings were irrelevant to the networks that have been sketched out. Far from it: they were the most reliable buyers, for élites had large entourages who needed to be fed and clothed. The threefold division of the West just sketched out has an exact correlate in the differences in levels of aristocratic (and ecclesiastical, and royal) wealth described in earlier chapters and summarized at the start of this one: for Francia had the richest ruling class by far, and the societies of Britain and Ireland by far the least rich, with the different regions of Spain and Italy somewhere in the middle. A rich aristocracy went with an elaborate exchange system, and vice versa. When looking at the factors which underpinned the geographical range and complexity of exchange, the extent of aristocratic demand was the most important. Globally, we have also seen that aristocracies were less rich in the earliest Middle Ages than they had been under the empire (and, as we shall see in later chapters, than they would be later); globally, too, early medieval exchange was simpler than either before or after. But the contrasts between the regions of the West were as significant as those global differences.
This account of the trends of early medieval exchange is different from that found in many books of the last seventy years. These took their cue from Henri Pirenne’s Mohammed and Charlemagne, which first appeared in French in 1937. Pirenne argued for the survival of an essentially late Roman economy, focused on Mediterranean trade, even in Merovingian Francia, until the seventh-century Arab invasions, which broke the unity of the Mediterranean and forced the economies of Europe in on themselves until a commercial revival, this time centred on the North Sea, in the eleventh century. His theory was pre-archaeological, and so the evidence discussed here was simply not available to him; but, beyond that, his model had at least two serious flaws. The first was that it laid far too much stress on long-distance exchange, between the East (sometimes the Far East) and the West, which was always marginal to the main lines of trade; these latter operate above all inside regions or between neighbouring regions, and only very exceptionally extend beyond them (as with the African hegemony over the late Roman Mediterranean, which was, precisely, a product of the needs of an exceptionally powerful state). The second was that most of Pirenne’s arguments concerned luxuries: the availability of gold, spices, silk and papyrus in the West (the last of these was certainly not a luxury in Egypt - it was an industrial product - but arguably had become so in the West by the seventh century). This was perhaps forgivable, as luxuries are almost all the examples of traded goods that are mentioned in early medieval written sources. But luxuries, too, are marginal to economic systems; they are defined by their high price and restricted availability, so that only the rich can possess them, and they therefore represent wealth, power and status. (The jewellery shops of Paris presumably sold exclusively to the rich; they certainly sold to Count Leudast, who was arrested and taken for execution while shopping there in 583.) The reason why they tend to be the products which most often appear in written sources is that these tell us about the rich; but they are the surface gloss on economic systems taken as a whole, which depend for their complexity on much more mundane products: clothes, knives, plates. Luxuries also exist
in every economy, whether simple or complex - they were present in Ireland and Francia alike - so they are not much use as discriminators. Now, Pirenne was actually wrong to say that the Arabs closed the Mediterranean; well before the Arabs arrived, the western part of the sea already had dramatically less shipping, as we have seen, and on the luxury level ships continued to link East and West even after the Arab conquests (spices were always accessible in the West, contrary to Pirenne’s opinion). But even had he been right, the luxury level he was discussing was still marginal; the real economic changes were inside regions.
It is not easy to say who made profits from large-scale production in the early Middle Ages. The pottery industry of Mayen might have had a single owner (this is not very likely, unless it was the king, but it is not unimaginable); it might also have been a collection of autonomous potters and kiln-owners, turning out similar wares quasi-competitively. This latter pattern seems to be how it worked in contemporary Egypt, judging by sixth-century papyri, which show the rentals of individual workshops to potters and contracts between individual potters and landowners to supply wine amphorae; it seems to me the most plausible hypothesis in the West as well. But we cannot really be sure, for there are no documentary sources for places like Mayen. It is easier to see who made profits out of distribution, for we have quite a lot of references in narrative sources to merchants. They were often quite small operators, like the debt-ridden merchant Cosmas the Syrian whom Gregory the Great helped out in 594, but they could be both important and influential, like Priscus of Paris (d. 582), a Jewish confidant of King Chilperic, or Eusebius the Syrian, who bought the bishopric of Paris with his profits in 591. The most successful merchant of the period by far was Samo, a Frank who actually became king of the Wends in the 620s, and united the neighbouring tribes against King Dagobert I; he apparently reached this status by helping the Wends in war, so even when still a merchant he must have had a certain political visibility (there is no evidence, unfortunately, about what he traded).
These were independent operators, but merchants could also operate in groups. Examples include the eastern merchants who came to Mérida in the mid-sixth century bearing gifts for Bishop Paul, or indeed the mercantile consortium Samo began with before he struck out on his own. They were also often the employees of aristocrats, trading for the latter, presumably with goods from the latter’s estates, like Jacob the Jew who sold cloth in Carthage in the 630s on behalf of a Constantinople notable, and who had the option of going on to Gaul; or the traders acting for the monastery of Saint-Denis, who got a royal privilege from Carloman II in 769 not to have to pay tolls on the rivers of Francia. But it is unlikely that most merchants were regularly employees; any of them could have been sometimes, but the markets and fairs of northern Francia, in particular, seem to have been the focus of interest of too wide a range of people for landowners’ representatives to have been more than a small part of their number. Some were ‘Syrians’, that is, from the eastern Mediterranean, particularly in the sixth century; some were Jews (though by no means all Jews were merchants); increasingly after 600, many, particularly in Francia, were Frisians, from the Rhine delta and the islands of the modern Netherlands; but merchants could in reality come from anywhere. Unfortunately, we cannot link either the origin or the economic scale of merchants to what kind of goods they carried. Our documentary sources tell us most about luxuries, as already noted; but it cannot be that most merchants concentrated on luxury exchange - there was not enough of it for them, and anyway the bulk goods discussed in earlier pages must have been bought and sold by someone. A miracle-book by Wandalbert of Prüm, dating to 839, describes one ship on the Rhine filled with pottery, and another with wine sent for sale from the monastery of St Gereon in Cologne - the former was wrecked, the latter saved from wreck, by the miraculous power of St Goar. Historians have seized on these as examples of a more normal pattern of trade than most sources give us, and rightly so. But they remain anecdotal (as well as late, by the standards of this chapter); our best source for what goods moved around is still archaeology.
We have seen that exchange across the Mediterranean slowly became less complex in the sixth and seventh centuries, and that African exports stopped by 700. In the eighth century only one important long-distance Mediterranean route is documented at all, as Michael McCormick’s work makes clear, the route from Rome, around the south of Italy and across into the Aegean, up to Constantinople. North-westwards from Rome, a link still existed to Genoa and Marseille, but it is not well documented either historically or archaeologically by now; the same is true of the eastern extension, from the Aegean to Syria and Palestine. The Anglo-Saxon pilgrim Willibald did get from England to Rome, and to Jerusalem and back to Rome, in 721-9, but it was a major enterprise, particularly once he got past the Aegean, and it occupies a large space in Hugeburc’s life of the eventual saint. Other routes did not appear at all until after 750. Inland in Europe, the main routes were certainly rivers: the Rhine, important all through; the Seine and the Meuse, increasingly; the Rhône decreasingly. In the South, the Spanish rivers are less attested, and even the Po in northern Italy had as yet relatively little documented traffic; a trade treaty between King Liutprand and the men of Comacchio, an active port under Byzantine control in the Po delta, from 715 or 730, stresses salt more often than anything else, from the delta salt-pans. This would change, slowly, from the ninth century onwards. But this restriction of long-distance trade routes was only a marginal aspect of the history of exchange, which was overwhelmingly focused on buying and selling inside regions. The Rhine and the Meuse were important because they linked different zones of northern Francia together, not because they were the start of longer-distance routes out into the North Sea. These did exist, all the same, as we shall see at the end of the chapter.
Two other points need to be made about exchange. The first relates to money. All documented early medieval societies had standards of value, and these were almost all in coins (the exception was Ireland, where valuations were in slave women and cows). The Romans had minted a range of coins, in bronze, silver and gold, to aid tax-collection above all. Given the simpler fiscal systems of the post-Roman world, a complex set of coins might have been no longer seen as necessary, and the successor states certainly minted fewer types and on a smaller scale, after the Vandals and Ostrogoths at least, who followed Roman patterns. The Franks after 550, and the Visigoths and Lombards, minted gold coins above all (with silver coins alongside these in Provence and Lombard Italy). In Francia, where minting was especially decentralized (there were up to a thousand mints in Francia), the percentage of gold in these coins began to drop in the 630s-640s, and by about 675 coins had become entirely silver. Around 760 the Carolingians reformed the coinage, formally establishing the silver denarius as their currency, and they extended this single coinage to Lombard Italy in 781, after Charlemagne’s conquest. The denarius dominated the next several centuries of western European coins. In England, debased gold coins had been minted since the early seventh century, and silver since the 670s; in the 760s these, too, were replaced by silver pennies that were parallel to those of the Carolingian monetary reform. These changes show, first, a narrowing of the range of coins minted; and secondly, a switch from gold to silver, which was complete in Latin Europe (apart from in the independent principality of Benevento, which remained closer to Byzantine traditions) by 800.
These changes are good guides to the simplification of state structures in the West, and also to the gradual lessening of the availability of gold, which was barely mined in Europe in this period. They do not tell us much about exchange, however. Historians traditionally put a great deal of weight on monetary issues, for it seemed to them that commerce was impossible without coins. This is not actually true; any merchant in a traditional society can cope with barter perfectly well as part of a bargaining process, as long as a common standard of value exists, and only an unsuccessful merchant will come away from a market with money rather than with goods t
o sell at the next market: coins themselves do not have to be involved in the process at all. It must also be noted that once the bronze or copper small change of the Roman empire was unavailable, almost all early medieval issues were fairly high-value: a Carolingian denarius was worth around £12 in the money of 2007 judging by the bread prices listed in the acts of the synod of Frankfurt in 794, and a Merovingian or Lombard gold triens or tremissis was nominally worth four times that, around £50. Only some Northumbrian and Italian issues seem to have been worth substantially less. Coins were thus in this period somewhat clumsy aids to exchange; they were standards of value for bargainers, and they were convenient ways of hoarding wealth, but they were not as yet the metonyms for commercial activity that they would later become. Coins do, on the other hand, if they are found in archaeological excavations, give us reliable guidance as to the geographical scale of economic networks, because where they were minted is normally made clear on the coin, and they can be fairly closely dated. These networks have not been studied as rigorously as one might have expected (the best distribution maps are currently for England), but broadly they seem at present to support the patterns, based on ceramics, already described. There is more work to do in this field, all the same.
The second point relates to gift exchange. Gift exchange is an alternative way of exchanging goods to commerce: it passes goods from person to person, but the purpose of this is to cement social relationships, not simply to allow each party to get what they really need, which they can do from a stranger as easily as they can from a friend. Indeed, gifts do not have to be essential items at all, as Christmas-present buying clearly shows. Exchanges of gifts (whether objects or services) were very common in the early Middle Ages. Embassies regularly took gifts with them, and kings could be quite competitive in their generosity to each other, sometimes taking pains to make points to the recipients. A letter of Cassiodorus concerning a water-clock that Theoderic the Ostrogoth gave to the Burgundian king Gundobad around 506 makes it clear that the gift was intended to show the superiority of Italian/Roman technology; so too, we can assume, was the mechanical organ given by the Byzantine emperor Constantine V to Pippin III of Francia in 757, which the Franks wrote up in chronicles. Kings gave gifts to their dependants, too, on a far richer scale than the dependants gave them in return, and part of the quid pro quo was personal loyalty; gifts of land, indeed, had the same assumption underlying them. Donors of land to the church, similarly, expected at least clerical or monastic prayers in return, and often made explicit that they hoped to be rewarded by going to heaven after their death. In England and Wales, giving a lavish feast might mean that the invited guests were expected to fight for their host, as we saw in Chapter 7. All personal relationships were sealed by gifts. They could also be ambiguous, just as personal relationships were, as when Bishop Praetextatus of Rouen, at his trial for treason to King Chilperic in 577, said that he had not bribed men to oppose Chilperic, but had simply given them gifts because they had already given him horses - the gifts (according to Praetextatus, at least) had a different meaning from what outside observers thought.