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

by Chris Wickham

  Egyptian agriculture was carried out through a hierarchy of substantial villages, whose head-men also handled tax-raising, subordinate in this respect to provincial capitals. The records of taxation, which are good for Arab Egypt, show its systematic nature, inherited from the Roman period, and not relaxed later (as eighth- and ninth-century tax revolts show). Landowning was fragmented in Egypt, however; there were always peasant landowners, and the élites which ran villages were usually rich peasants, and little more. Post-conquest documents imply that great landowners were notably fewer and less rich in the early Arab period than under the later Roman empire, and this did not change until the late ninth century. After 850 three developments led to larger landholdings again: more Christians converted to Islam, thus gaining access to state patronage, which was by now sometimes expressed in terms of grants or leases of state land; more Arabs began to acquire land as well (for a long time Arab immigrants had stayed in Fustat and lived off state salaries, as we saw in Chapter 12); and, from 800 or so, the financial administration began to farm out the rights to collect local taxes, rights which could under certain circumstances be turned into effective landholding over wider areas. Tax-farming turned into full ownership less often in Egypt than it did elsewhere in the Islamic world, for the state never relaxed its grip on the mechanisms of taxation, but it certainly helped the establishment of local control. For the first time in many centuries in Egypt, a late ninth-century estate (day‘a) could consist of a whole village (indeed, by the eleventh century day‘a . could simply mean ‘village’). This was not universal, and fragmented ownership survived past 1000 in Egypt, as did direct tax-paying, but a clear change is visible here at the end of our period.

  This weakening and renewed strengthening of a landowning aristocracy, which is paralleled elsewhere (for example, in Byzantium) as we have seen, had less effect on the rest of the Egyptian economy, however, than it did in other regions, precisely because of the continuing strength of the tax system, which independently brought wealth into the cities, and, above all, Fustat. This was the basis for an active exchange network which, throughout our period, unified Egypt into a single economic whole. The Nile helped here, as an easy and cheap routeway which ran by or close to nearly all the population of the region. As a result, we can trace artisanal productions which were available from north to south. The fine pottery of Aswan in the far south can be found up to the Mediterranean, 1,000 kilometres away, throughout the early Middle Ages, a unique achievement in scale and continuity in our period. The Aswan kilns continued to produce Red Slip ware in a Roman style until the end of our period and beyond, too, centuries after tastes had changed elsewhere, although increasingly alongside other ceramic types, white-slipped and painted wares, and, after 800, polychrome glaze, following Iraqi fashion. And, although archaeology cannot track it, we can tentatively say the same for cloth; linen and wool production had always been substantial in Egypt since Roman times, and there is never a period in which its sale is not attested in documents. A cache of late ninth-century papyri from the Fayyum, a large agricultural basin to the west of the Nile 150 kilometres south of Fustat, shows a set of Arabic-speaking cloth merchants and related officials buying and selling up and down the Nile from Qus in the south to Alexandria in the far north. The main figure of this papyrus set, Abu Hurayra, lived in Madinat al-Fayyum, the main city of the basin, in the 860s-870s, although others were based in Fustat, which was clearly a major node in the whole exchange process.

  These wide exchange networks were not all that Egypt had, either. We can see an exchange hierarchy in ceramics, with local productions (based on local clays) fitting into the Aswan hegemony, and cloth production was certainly associated with many local centres too (based on local flax and sheep), as well as well-known major artisanal cities like Tinnis and Qus for linen, and Bahnasa in Middle Egypt for wool. There were differences here in status, price, taste and convenience, as in all elaborate commercial systems. And the Egyptian system, in the whole period 650-1000, was by far the most elaborate anywhere in Europe and the Mediterranean. Continuous urban demand saw to that. The demand was also, of course, for food, and also certainly for more diversified artisanal goods than cloth and pottery, too; we can say little about them between the sixth century and the late tenth, for our documents are about other matters, but, given the rest, there is no reason to doubt it. One of these goods was still papyrus, an industrial production based in the Delta; it was only in the late ninth and tenth centuries that it was supplanted by paper, a linen by-product.

  The genza documents of the late tenth century and onwards thus illuminate a world that had been economically complex for centuries, not to say millennia. But there were also changes at the end of our period. Already in the late ninth century, we can see signs of a larger-scale investment in artisanal production that seems to be new. The governor Ahmad ibn Tulun (868-84), who ruled Egypt more or less autonomously, invested privately in linen according to early tenth-century narratives, and so did lesser officials. The largely state-run Tinnis linen industry appears in these narratives, as it also did in the Fayyum letters, as a major textile centre. It is hard to trace it earlier than 850 with any certainty, but Ibn Tulun upgraded its infrastructure with public money, and dated Tinnis textiles survive from the 880s. These are luxury items, and the state factories were substantially devoted to the production of court fabrics; but the Delta linen towns also sold on the open market, and by the tenth century exported cloth too, to the Mediterranean (Tinnis is on an island, and is also a port) and to Iraq. The word ‘export’ is the main novelty here. Since the Arab conquests, Egyptian production and consumption had mostly been internal. Even with ‘Abbasid fiscal centralization, it is hard to find very much reference to exports and imports in our evidence. Demand inside the region was evidently steady enough to make interregional exchange less necessary, except for the luxury trade, which always existed. But in the tenth century our evidence for it increases, and by the end of the century Alexandria and other ports were full of ships, moving goods from Egypt to Palestine, Tunisia and Sicily; from the latter two, other ships went westwards to al-Andalus. Egypt exported not only made linen cloth but also flax, to be made up in Tunisia and Sicily; sugar, another industrial product, was also an Egyptian speciality. But the range of goods exported from Egypt, and also imported, was by the end of our period very substantial indeed. The Fatimid conquest in 969 meant that Egypt, Tunisia and Sicily were for a while under the same government, which facilitated this; but Egypt was the major motor of this commerce thanks to the continuing strength of its internal market, as the Fatimids recognized and promoted.

  Joseph (Yusuf, or in Hebrew, Yosef) ibn Ya‘qub ibn ‘Awkal (fl. c. 970- 1040) is the first really large-scale merchant in the genza documents. His family may have come from Iran initially, but were settled in Fustat by his father’s time; he spent his life at Fustat and in the new Fatimid capital of Cairo just outside it. He and his sons ran an import-export business, employing numerous secretaries in their headquarters, and agents in both Egypt and abroad, above all in Tunisia and Sicily. They exported flax from Egypt, buying it from small towns in the hinterland of Bahnasa and in the Fayyum and sending it down the Nile from Fustat to Alexandria (thus bypassing the linen factories on the other side of the Delta) and then to the west. They also exported dyestuffs, madder (Egyptian-made), indigo and brazil-wood (both imported); imported pepper and spices, and Egyptian-made sugar; and more expensive luxuries, in particular pearls; 83 different commodities in all. The imports were largely from the Indian Ocean trade; Fustat-Cairo was becoming the principal commercial node between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, which it remained for centuries, although that latter trade was not Ibn ‘Awkal’s speciality. The business bought in return, from its Mediterranean partners, gold (North Africa was the contact point for the Sahara gold trade), copper, lead, olive oil (still an important Tunisian product), its by-product soap, wax, animal-hides, and silk. This sounds solid enough, but Ibn ‘Awkal�
�s business was in reality rather more delicate than that. The genza letters are full of descriptions of the difficulty agents had in selling at exactly the right moment to get a decent profit; and Ibn ‘Awkal, like every other merchant, had to make informal deals with friends, clients and even rivals, who were on the spot, trusting them to act in his interests. This did not always work. We have a long indignant letter from Samhun ibn Da’ud ibn al-Siqilli (‘son of the Sicilian’) from around 1000 in which a by now probably ex-friend, or client, complains among other things that he had made a loss on Ibn ‘Awkal’s brazil-wood; that he has had to sell Ibn ‘Awkal’s pearls without taking any profit; worst of all, that the latter had not paid Samhun’s creditors despite promises, and despite all that Samhun was doing for him to the detriment of the latter’s reputation; and overall, that Ibn ‘Awkal had been critical with no reason and high-handed into the bargain. There is no reason to think that the Fustat merchant was an especially sympathetic character, in fact. But most letters to him were highly courteous, and explained how the sender had protected his interests, often in adverse situations (war, water damage, low prices), but usually with success.

  Ibn ‘Awkal did not trade with Iraq or further east, or with Byzantium, and little even with Syria/Palestine, but he can in other respects stand for an entire network of (usually smaller) Fustat merchants, above all in the diversification of his activities. He was also, it may be added, a pillar of the Fustat Jewish community, and a local representative of the important yeshivas (religious academies) of Baghdad and Jerusalem; had he been Muslim, he would have been a leading member of the ‘ulam’. He was socially central, that is to say, not just economically representative. The only misleading aspect of the entire Ibn ‘Awkal dossier is that it deals with external trade at all. Most Egyptian commerce remained internal to the country. However active the Mediterranean network was, or any other external exchange network, it was Nile traffic, between the major cities and towns, that dominated Egyptian exchange, in 1000 as much as in 700. The real-life feel of the world of the genza letters leaves such an effect on the reader that one can forget this basic economic fact; but it was important, all the same, and would remain so.

  The economic history of each of these regions was different between the seventh and the tenth centuries, but it had structural elements in common for all that. The continuing strength of the state in both Byzantium and Egypt compensated, as a motor of exchange, for the temporary weakening of local aristocratic wealth, though this compensation was rather less pronounced in Byzantium, where the state had its own difficulties in the seventh and eighth centuries. In Syria, aristocracies stayed prosperous until 750, but were less integrated into a single regional market by the Umayyad state than Umayyad governors managed in Egypt; after 750, the reverse occurred, with local foci of prosperity slipping, but a fiscal-led integration of regional commerce developing. In Iraq, finally, both aristocracies and (overwhelmingly) the state increased their force in the late eighth century, and set the region up as a major agrarian, artisanal and commercial focus for a century and a half, after which the region slipped back again. We could add al-Andalus, over in the West, to this gallery of examples too, where a set of localized aristocracies of varying wealth existed throughout, but the state became notably stronger in the tenth century (above, Chapter 14), allowing the integration of the economy of the whole peninsula and the creation of some export specializations, silk, saffron and qirmis (crimson dye) among them. Much the same could be said of the Tunisian heartland of Ifriqiya, though there we can see an effective state already in the ninth. The ninth century in many places (except perhaps Syria) saw more internal exchange than the eighth, the tenth century everywhere (except Iraq) saw more than the ninth.

  These broadly drawn trends occurred in the internal economies of these regions; but they had an effect on interregional exchange, too, especially in the Mediterranean. The first great Mediterranean trade network was that of the Roman empire. As the empire fragmented, Mediterranean exchange lessened: slowly in the West from 450 onwards, reaching low levels by 600, and snuffing out by 700, as we saw in detail in Chapter 9; rapidly in the East in the seventh century, in the context of the great wars of the 610s-640s, and the fiscal decentralization of both Byzantium and the caliphate thereafter. In the eighth century there was less Mediterranean-wide trade than there had been for over a millennium. Not none; there was always a small-scale network of boats nosing from port to port. The Aegean, as we have seen, maintained a certain enclosed identity as the focus for one level of Byzantine exchange. So did the Tyrrhenian Sea, in the triangle between Rome, Calabria and Sicily, fortified by the continuing force of the city of Rome as a market, as we saw in Chapter 9. As we saw in that chapter too, Michael McCormick has pinpointed the route from Rome to Constantinople as the most important sea route still open in the eighth century. It is not chance that it is the route which linked these two more localized maritime networks; it must have been further reinforced by the fact that Sicily was still a Byzantine province in that century, and probably one of the richest ones. We must recognize, too, that a luxury trade always existed in the Mediterranean, as also in the Indian Ocean, bringing silk and spices to Italy and Francia in return for timber and slaves. But, as we have also seen, luxuries are marginal items to the economy as a whole. In the eighth century, outside restricted areas, the bulk trade in food and artisanal goods had gone, even in the Arab-ruled provinces of the southern Mediterranean, which were always in our period the richest. The seas must have been relatively quiet.

  In the ninth century this was slowly reversed. The rise of Venice and the Adriatic route after 750 or so is one small sign of it: small, because Venice focused on the luxury trade mentioned earlier, although this must have been expanding for Venetian wealth to increase as fast as it did in the ninth century (below, Chapter 22); Venice traded with Byzantium and also with Alexandria, from where it stole the body of St Mark, henceforth the city’s patron saint, in the 820s. The ninth-century Tunisian conquest of Sicily allowed for more movement, for Sicily was a great deal closer to Tunis than it was to Constantinople, and there was much exchange between the two regions henceforth; we have seen them operate as a pair in their links with Egypt two centuries later, and that pairing began here, at the latest. South Italian ports like Amalfi and Naples benefited from Arab connections which were now nearer (they indeed colluded in Arab attacks on the Italian mainland), and Amalfitans were regularly to be found in Egypt and the Aegean a century later too. Inside the Arab world, we find more casual references to movement along the African coast, using Tunisia and Sicily as halfway points in the route from Egypt to Spain; and ‘Abbasid centralization, even if focused on Iraq, helped to link Egypt closer to Syria, a link which remained, for autonomous Egyptian rulers after the 860s tended to control Syria as well. All this movement was doubtless still largely in the luxury trade, but there was more of it, in ever more complex patterns; and not all of it was luxury, as with the Arab merchant ships carrying large quantities of olive oil, captured off Sicily by a Byzantine fleet in the 880s, oil that probably came from Tunisia.

  In the tenth century there were two further developments. One was that sections of the Mediterranean which had hitherto been relatively cut out of these developing systems, like southern France, were brought in as well; several Arab wrecks from the mid-tenth century have been found off the French coast, apparently from Spain, containing amphorae (for oil?), tableware, copper or bronze, and glass. Byzantium, too, less of a protagonist as yet in the ninth century, is much more visibly so in the tenth, selling quality silks and timber in the Egyptian market, and, later, cheese, a major source of protein for Egyptians; on the south Turkish coast, Antalya became an important entrepôt for trade with Syria and Palestine, and south to Alexandria. The development of the port of Almería in 955 by the Andalusi caliph ‘Abd al-Rahman III was intended to focus and expand the Spanish contribution to this exchange network, and as far as we can see it did just that; Almería makes frequent a
ppearance in the genza documents around 1000 and later. Though certain routes (such as from Alexandria to Tunis) were doubtless more prominent than others, one gains the impression that by the late tenth century one could sail from almost anywhere in the Mediterranean to almost anywhere else - not always directly, but without very much difficulty.

  The second development, already indicated by these references to oil-amphorae and cheese, is that it became more normal to transport bulk goods again, for a relatively large-scale market. Tunisian olive oil reached both Egypt and Italy by 1000, just as it had done in 400, although grain was never again a major item of international exchange; that had depended on the fiscal needs of the Roman empire rather than any natural interchange, since it was produced everywhere. Probably on the back of oil, we also, as in 400, find Tunisian glazed pottery in Italy by the end of the tenth century. And, above all, the astonishing choice by a sector of Egyptian merchants, by 1000 at the latest, to send flax to be made into linen cloth in Tunisia and Sicily rather than in the great Egyptian linen factory towns, testifies to a set of commercial relationships that had become large-scale and symbiotic, as well as complex and competitive. Bulk trade did not dominate everywhere yet, or ever; all the same, it is here that we can speak of real interregional/international exchange systems, rather than the thin luxury-based links of two centuries earlier. By the tenth century, the second great Mediterranean trade cycle had properly begun, and would continue to the late Middle Ages. In the eleventh century, newly active Italian ports, Genoa and Pisa, would begin to take over the western part of these Mediterranean networks by force and direct them northwards; the Crusades had similar results in the East; but the trade cycle remained, and even expanded, thereafter.