15
The State and the Economy: Eastern Mediterranean Exchange Networks, 600-1000
Being a tradesman in Constantinople around 900 was by no means a straightforward process. According to the Book of the Eparch (or the Prefect), a set of official regulations from this period, merchants, shopkeepers and many artisans had to be members of a guild (systma) to operate, and had to sell their wares in specific places, the gold- and silver-dealers in the Mese, the merchants of Arab silk in the Embole, the perfumers in the Milion beside Hagia Sophia, the pork butchers in the Tauros. Ambulant sellers were banned; they would be flogged, stripped of guild membership, and expelled from the city. Sellers of silk could not make up clothes as well; leather sellers could not be tanners. Some guilds, such as the merchants of Arab silk or the linen merchants, had to do their buying collectively, with the goods then distributed among guild members according to how much money they had put in, to keep down competitive buying. Sheep butchers had to go a long way into Anatolia to buy their sheep, to keep prices down; pork butchers, by contrast, had to buy pigs in the city, and were prohibited from going out to meet the vendors; so also were fishmongers, who had to buy on shore, not on the sea. The eparch, the city governor, had to be informed if silk merchants (divided into five separate guilds) sold to foreigners, who were prohibited from buying certain grades of silk. He determined all bread prices, by which bakers had to sell, and the price of wine the innkeepers sold; and he also determined the profits that many vendors made - grocers were allowed a 16 per cent profit, but bakers only 4 per cent (with another 16 per cent for the pay of their workmen), over and above the price they paid in the state grain warehouse.
Later medieval western towns often had quite elaborate guild regulations like these, aimed at maintaining monopolies and internal hierarchies in trades. The Book of the Eparch stands out, however (apart from in its early date), in the degree of state control it assumes. The regulation of profit was particularly important here, and also the regulation of the ways sellers were allowed to buy their goods. Silk was controlled because its production and distribution reflected directly on imperial prestige (the regulations for linen merchants were looser). Above all, however, it was vital that the food market was controlled, for Constantinople had to be fed reliably, at prices the inhabitants could afford. Bread was no longer free, as in the late Roman empire; that had stopped abruptly by imperial decree when the Persians took Egypt in 618 (above, Chapter 11). Constantinople was much smaller now; it did not need Egyptian grain any more, and could provision itself from its Aegean and southern Black Sea hinterland. All the same, as we have seen, it was still very substantial in size; it was the largest city in Europe even at its low point in the seventh and eighth centuries, and was now growing again, reaching maybe 100,000 inhabitants in 900. (Cordoba may well have surpassed it in size in the tenth century, but it shrank in the eleventh, leaving the top spot to the Byzantine capital again.) Emperors and eparchs could not afford the trouble from its inhabitants that would inevitably appear if there were food shortages - and these, indeed, were seen by the urban population as the fault of public authorities. Trade was independent in Constantinople, but the terms of trade were closely linked to the state. We can of course doubt how effective all the rules in the Book of the Eparch were, but they are very striking as an aspiration, and it is at least true that narrative sources regularly ascribe this sort of power to officials. Liutprand of Cremona did buy prohibited silk in 968, but it was discovered and confiscated, to his fury. The Byzantine government had the infrastructure to make its laws obeyed, at least sometimes.
This introduces us to a standard feature of both Byzantine and Arab exchange, its close link to the state. This varied, certainly. It was probably greater in Constantinople than in the Byzantine provinces; it seems to have been greater in Egypt than in al-Andalus; and state control was always more likely to be enforced in the arena of urban provisioning than in that of the international luxury trade (silks and other state-interest goods apart), for that trade relied so much on private mercantile risk-taking. Arab port authorities in the tenth and early eleventh centuries even then regularly assigned official prices to imported goods, but these were only guides to market prices, which varied by supply and demand. But grain in Constantinople was only one out of several commodities which were bought from government warehouses; in Egypt, too, flax (for linen), one of that region’s principal productions, was also sold to merchants (whether for internal sale or for export) by state offices, and some of the major linen-weaving centres, such as Tinnis and Damietta, were largely publicly owned. Egypt, as already implied, had in every period a rather more dominant state sector than existed in some other regions, but the existence of operations on this scale is striking. Commerce itself might be in the hands of independent merchants, but they operated in a framework in which the public power had a considerable say. And, above all, states were huge sources of demand. Egyptian documents from the decades around 1000 show merchants regularly (and sometimes unwillingly) selling to the government itself; and, even when this did not take place, the focusing by merchants and artisans on great political centres such as Constantinople, Baghdad, Fustat-Cairo and Cordoba was because these cities had so many rich buyers who were paid by the state, bureaucrats or soldiers and their own dependants.
As we have seen, and as we shall see again, after the end of the Roman empire in the West, which was a strong and centralized state and which moved large quantities of goods around on its own behalf, exchange in the post-Roman kingdoms depended for its intensity on the wealth of landowners - aristocrats, churches and kings. The richer landowners were, the more exchange there was, and the more complex its patterns. This was broadly true in the eastern Mediterranean as well; but state power, based on tax-raising, continued here, and state buying-power was normally on a somewhat larger scale than that of private landowners. Furthermore, private wealth allowed people access to state office, and thus access to the greater emoluments made possible by taxation. This was so even in the Islamic world, where private landowners were usually less automatically linked to political power, and so could be seen as a rival source of demand to that of officials and soldiers. Taken as a whole, it is the changing wealth of the state sector that is the best guide to the changing scale of demand, and thus exchange, in the Byzantine and Arab East. Where private landed wealth had a different trajectory to the wealth of the state, it must have affected demand as well, and its local variation adds a further level of complexity to our analyses. But broadly the two moved in tandem in most of the East, and the state system is also rather better documented. I shall be saying more about the latter in this chapter as a result.
The gap in our evidence for the landed aristocracy matches the very serious gap in our seventh- to tenth-century evidence for the peasant majority in the East. The millions of documents regularly produced for governments and private individuals in Byzantium and the caliphate have almost all been lost. Only for Egypt do we have the sort of local land documentation that we can find in Francia and Italy, thus allowing in a few cases the reconstruction of peasant societies, as in the case of the eighth-century Coptic village of Jeme, in western Thebes in Upper Egypt; and the uneven publication of Egyptian documents in Arabic means that we cannot as yet easily do this for the period after 800. Rural archaeology is currently poorer for the period after 650 or so than for before, too, in nearly every region. We looked at Byzantine and Andalusi aristocracies in Chapters 13 and 14, and I shall of course be referring to some aspects of peasant economy and society in this chapter, for they will inevitably impinge on issues of wealth-creation, taken as a whole: put simply, the richer élites were (whether from tax or rents), and the higher aggregate demand was, the more the peasantry was exploited - an equation which must be understood to underlie this whole chapter. But we shall have to wait for future research before we can confront the detail of most eastern peasant social realities after 600-650, so as to compare them with those of the West. Urban s
ociety is better attested, as we have also seen in the last four chapters. One urban society is particularly clearly documented, the Jewish sector of the city of Fustat in Egypt, whose genza or storehouse of waste paper (kept because Jews would not destroy the word of God, and thus any paper with writing on), founded in 1025, preserves thousands of texts, which begin to be numerous around 980. Most of these are eleventh-century or later, rather than from the tenth, but I shall use some early eleventh-century genza texts here as well, as they transform our understanding of how urban societies could function at the very end of our period. Despite the wealth of the eastern Mediterranean, then, our surviving information about the socio-economic history of the period 600-1000 is even bittier than it is for the West. I shall focus here, necessarily briefly, on three regions in turn: Byzantium, with its seventh-century crisis and ninth-century revival; Syria and Iraq, rivals throughout, where economic protagonism moved decisively from the first to the second in 750; and Egypt, the region with the most continuity. We shall then look at the international commerce which linked them.
As we saw in Chapter 11, the military disasters of the 610s and 640s caused the Byzantine state to change markedly. It adopted a localized and mostly demonetized tax structure, matching a localized military structure, focused on defence. Never again would the state transport its own goods long distances on any scale, even if Constantinople maintained itself as a fiscally supported focus for commercial demand. It is also likely that the landed aristocracy, never as rich as in the West, lost some ground, given its invisibility in the sources before 850 or so, and given the constant raiding that will have reduced agricultural productivity in much of Anatolia until the frontier stabilized in the eighth century; as noted in Chapter 13, even in the tenth century, when our sources all agree that a process of local affirmation of aristocratic power was firmly under way, it is hard to argue that they were as dominant across the whole empire as was normal in the West. The tiny amount we know about peasant society at least shows that there were indeed some areas of the empire where aristocrats did not have full control in the seventh and eighth centuries. The lands west of Ankara described in the early seventh-century Life of the ascetic Theodore of Sykeon had largely independent peasant communities already in the years leading up to the Persian invasions, indicating that aristocrats never had been wholly hegemonic in parts of the Anatolian plateau. If the Farmer’s Law, a private handbook of agrarian law from the period 650-850, can also be located in Anatolia (as the absence of reference to olive-cultivation in it may imply), then such peasant communities continued to exist there after the invasion period as well. In both texts, the state remains present, unquestioned, as a tax-raising and judicial power. There were also considerable wealth differences in each, with richer peasants dominating the community and leasing land to poorer peasants. But external landowners are relatively unimportant in the earlier text, and absent in the later. This is not a guide to the empire as a whole, or even to the whole of Anatolia (aristocrats were rather strong in Cappadocia, further east, in both the fourth to sixth centuries and the ninth to eleventh, so plausibly in between as well); but the patchiness of local aristocratic dominance is made clear by these texts, and this almost certainly increased in the crisis centuries.
Corresponding to the difficulties experienced by the Byzantine state and aristocracy, the seventh and eighth centuries show, particularly clearly in fact, a crisis in urbanism. Archaeologists and historians argue about whether there was already a dip in urban vitality in the Byzantine lands after 550; but no one any longer seriously argues that there was not a systemic crisis in the early seventh century. Urban archaeology makes this too clear. Building cannot be shown to have continued after 650 in most of the dozen or more cities with decent excavation; most show areas of systematic abandonment in the same period, as with the particularly well-excavated street of shops in Sardis, in the Anatolian lowlands close to the Aegean, which were abruptly deserted in the 610s, or the gymnasion in Ankara whose burning can be precisely dated to the Persian sack of 622, for a Persian ring-stone was excavated in the burnt level. I am normally cautious about drawing too catastrophist conclusions from anecdotal examples like these (prosperous cities have abandoned areas too, and can also recover from being sacked), but the accumulation of evidence in the Byzantine lands is too great to be gainsaid. It is significant that the best counter-example, Gortyn on Crete, was on an island, and thus safer from Persian/Arab or Avar/Sclavenian raids: here Heraclius (610-41) reconstructed the city after an earthquake, and a late seventh-century artisanal quarter, probably extending later as well, has recently been excavated. Elsewhere, all we get is new walls, sometimes enclosing only portions of the ancient city, and sometimes on hills above the old town.
The Byzantine state continued, as we have seen. Even small hill-top cities (now often called kastra) could still have a political-military role, and also still had bishops (although these, as we have also seen, often preferred to live in the capital). There is some evidence, furthermore, that some hill-top fortifications were citadels for islands of surviving settlement in the ancient cities below, as at Euchaita and Amorion, both on the Anatolian plateau, or at Corinth in central Greece, or at Myra on the south coast of modern Turkey. Whether this scattered occupation was sufficiently dense and economically diversified to be called ‘urban’ cannot yet be said: of these, Amorion and Corinth are perhaps the most likely. Overall, however, we have to recognize a new urban typology. Some ancient cities were wholly abandoned or reduced to small strongholds. Some developed this scattered pattern, with greater or lesser levels of organization or urbanization. A few continued to be active as urban centres, though on a considerably reduced scale, like Ephesos, Miletos and Athens on the Aegean coast - Ephesos’s new walls left much of the old city centre outside them, but still enclosed a square kilometre of land; the city is recorded by Theophanes as having a major fair, yielding a large sum in taxes, in 795-6. And a handful of cities may well have seen rather less change, though excavation is less good in them precisely because of the urban continuities there: Thessaloniki, Iznik (ancient Nicaea), Izmir (ancient Smyrna), Trabzon, major political centres in each case. This is not total urban collapse, but even on an optimistic reading of the evidence we might propose that four-fifths of Byzantine cities lost all or most of their urban characteristics.
The significant feature in common to most ‘successful’ early Byzantine towns is that they were thematic centres. (Ephesos, long a commercial entrepôt, is the main exception.) It looks as if the state focused on its main local military and administrative centres; if landed aristocrats joined the army and civil bureaucracy, they may well have gone to such towns too. These towns thus remained sufficiently potent centres of demand to retain their urban characteristics: markets, perhaps some artisanal specialization. But there were far fewer of them than in 600. When Byzantium achieved greater military and political stability again, slowly after 750, more visibly after 850, the number of active cities did not greatly expand, either. They increased their own sizes again, although it is as yet hard to be sure exactly when from the archaeology; the eleventh century shows it better than the tenth, although in Sardis, and also in Hierapolis on the western edge of the Anatolian plateau, it is already visible before 1000. But the Byzantine empire never again re-created the density of late Roman urbanism in its territory.
Our evidence for commerce outside the capital, also largely archaeological, both mirrors this picture and nuances it. The seventh century saw the abrupt end of the Aegean’s main industrial tableware production, Phocaean Red Slip ware, and its more local imitations; painted wares of reasonable quality sometimes replaced it (for example in Crete), but their distribution was very localized, and in some places (notably in inland Greece) all we find is handmade pottery, indicating the end of professional production. Amphora production, for oil and wine, also localized and simplified; the standardized Aegean globular amphora, LRA 2, was replaced by a variety of related but more local types. The
se developments, into the eighth century, imply a breakdown in demand for goods, and thus the weakening of concentrations of wealth, whether public or private. But this is not the whole picture. Constantinople itself had an industrial ceramic production, of Glazed White ware (GWW), which began around 600 and continued for many centuries. In the next two centuries there are sporadic finds of this pottery type in a wide range of places across the Aegean, down to Crete, and even Cyprus (which had its own productions). These show that the Aegean did not lose a certain level of medium-distance exchange. This is supported by the (probably) eighth-century Rhodian Sea Law, another private legal manual, which discusses the relationship between ships’ captains and merchants on ships, and which presumes as standard cargoes an array of goods that are hard for archaeologists to find: slaves, linen, silk, grain, as well as wine and oil in (presumably) post-LRA 2 amphorae. Seventh-to ninth-century saints’ lives also regularly feature shipping, often but not only for grain. The Aegean was by now, as we have seen, Constantinople’s agrarian hinterland; the demand of the capital, even if nothing else, kept ships on the sea. GWW tableware was probably one of the things the capital sold in return.
The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000 Page 45