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Here, in order from oldest to most recent are the not-exactly-numerous posts that have appeared on the other site in the past two and a half...

Tuesday, 25 February 2025

What’s history got to do with it? (1)

 

The ‘Lessons of History’

[This post basically argues three things: that the current world crisis, rise of fascism etc cannot be attributed to insufficient awareness of the history of the mid-twentieth century; that the facts of history do not, in themselves, contain particular lessons; and that historians do not teach history as a set of lessons to be learned.]

'That doesn’t make it any less important to teach the lessons of history. But it does suggest that the usual way of imparting those lessons has stopped working, which means – and I really want to be wrong about this – they will have to be relearned the hard way.'

Thus Rafa Behr in a recent Guardian column about the current crisis facing the world. The general thrust of Behr’s argument was pretty sound, and disturbing, but its comments on history – the ‘lessons’ of history, the ‘burden’ of history, teaching the lessons of history – betray a misunderstanding of history, how it works, how it is taught. This is widespread. Type ‘lessons of history’ into the search function of Bluesky, for example, and you will find a practically endless list of clichés on the same theme: people don’t know their history; they aren’t learning the lessons of the past; they are going to repeat the mistakes of history; those who don’t know their history are condemned to repeat it; and so on. If nothing else, current events have decisively demonstrated the emptiness – the meaninglessness – of the oft-trotted-out platitudes about the value of a historical education.

The crisis we are in has nothing to do with some failure of history-teaching let alone with ignorance of the past, at least as it is conceived in the sort of statements just mentioned. It is a failure of civics, ethics, and morality. Or, if it is a failure of history teaching, it is a failure to appreciate that there is an ethics inherent in the study of history, such as I have argued repeatedly on this blog.[1]

Let’s start with ‘not knowing your past’. The events unfolding in the USA and in Europe can hardly be argued to be the result of ‘not knowing your past’, especially if the past in question, as is most often implied, or indeed stated outright, is that of the 1930s, and especially of 1930s Germany. There is literally no part of world history that is more taught, more a compulsory feature of school curricula, than the rise of the Nazis, the Holocaust, and the Second World War. The UK is obsessed with WWII. Any high street bookstore is likely to have as many volumes on the history of the period 1933-45 as on a large portion (if not all) of the rest of world history combined. From what I have seen, ‘popular history’, as manifested in general bookshops, has a similar focus in France, Italy and Germany, and I suspect this is true of most other European and North American countries. Not that this stops hand-wringing columnists in the right-wing press writing about supposed failures in history education from making a (risible) claim that there somehow isn’t enough WWII history being told (kids these days can’t name the 5 beaches of D-Day! – that sort of thing).

TV history shows the same pattern; someone once said that the typical History Channel programme was ‘Hitler’s Pole-Dancers in Colour’ (‘Hitler’s Aliens in Colour’ might have been more accurate, but still…). So do many other areas in which history is consumed, such as games. Many years ago, some wag commented that a board-wargame entitled Frederick the Great would not have sold so badly if only it had been called Panzergruppe Frederick the Great.

The most obvious ‘lesson from history’, taught so widely, with such a heavy presence in the media and in public engagement is the slaughter of European Jewry by the Nazis. People (including Jewish historians) have referred, controversially perhaps but not unfairly, to a ‘Holocaust industry’. The argument is made for the absolute uniqueness of this event, so that any attempt to place it in a broader context of the history of genocide (even the description of other events as genocides) has been claimed to be somehow verging on Holocaust denial and probably antisemitic.[2]

No. If anything has somehow ‘allowed’ the growth of the European far right, or the fascist coup in the USA, the genocide in Gaza, it is most certainly not a general public ignorance of the history of the middle decades of the twentieth century. This fact on its own blows apart most of the platitudes about ‘why history matters’. Even this level of public exposure to the history of the Nazis and the Holocaust failed to prevent the rebirth of far-right populism – indeed it can be argued to have promoted it; the followers of Nigel Farage are precisely the demographic whose identity is structured around eighty-year-old history about Spitfires, Dambusters, Monty’s 'desert rats', and the rest. All the promotion of the notion of ‘never again’ has not stopped people (including actual professional historians) from turning a blind eye to, or even justifying, the events in Gaza.

So, if knowledge of the past, or the study of history was supposed the prevent the reemergence of Nazis, why hasn’t it? Much of the issue turns on the notion of the ‘lessons of history’, and this requires us to pause briefly to define History. What follows is not controversial. ‘The Past’ is not History. History is critical reflection on the past. The simple narration of historical events is not History, and nor is the description of ‘how things were’. These I call chronicling and antiquarianism respectively. You can’t do history without chronicling and antiquarianism (and some chronicling and antiquarianism is very good, involving top-notch scholarship); you need to establish a factual basis for your analysis. But that does not mean History reduces to chronicling and antiquarianism any more than the fact that theoretical physics can’t be done without pure maths means that theoretical physics simply reduces to pure maths. History goes beyond description.

Even if one could get unmediated access to the ‘facts’ or ‘events’ of history (and we can't - the past always comes already packaged in a story and there are no 'true stories'), however, the problem is that the events of History don’t themselves teach simple lessons. Clearly, many, many people, now think that the lesson of WWII was not that the Nazis were bad. We’ve all seen comments on the line of the following: ‘My grandad didn’t fight on the beaches of Normandy so that woke people could stop people speaking their minds [= being racists or homophobes]’. I saw a relative of a friend post, on the day that the result of Brexit referendum was announced, that Brexit was great because, while young people might not understand, his father had fought the Japanese in the jungle to keep the UK free.  In Trump’s perverse USA, the lessons of WWII have somehow got warped into something quite different from the ones I thought we had learned. Clearly, for many people now – and it would be rash to assume that many of them don’t have a perfectly good knowledge of what happened, of the military history of the period 1939-45 – the ‘lesson of history’ has somehow become the triumph of free speech. The current president of the USA has said, ‘Hitler did some good things’. I remember a time, not all that long ago, when a comment like that would have killed off anyone’s mainstream political career, even on the right wings of the main conservative parties, as soon as the speaker’s mouth had closed but here we are. The problem, though, is that ‘the facts of history’ do not, in and of themselves, rule out that conclusion.

Clearly, there are some ways in which the history of the period has simply been empirically distorted,[3] the most obvious perhaps being the Right’s assertion that the Nazis (or Mussolini) were ‘socialists’. This is so incoherent and illiterate that it needn’t bother us,[4] but, even were everyone taught ‘the actual facts’ of the rise of the Nazis and of WWII, none of this would guarantee that they would oppose Far Right political extremists. This is the problem. I have long argued, including on this blog, that the real danger was not Holocaust-deniers (who are invariably cranks whose arguments are quickly dealt with) but Holocaust-approvers. [This may be the only prediction I have ever made (outside early medieval history and archaeology) that has been broadly correct, but I digress.] What I mean is people whose grasp of the empirical facts might be perfectly sound but who read them to justify (to me) abhorrent opinions. The empiricist historian cannot deal with such people (unlike Holocaust-deniers or right-wing ‘Nazis were socialists’ columnists) by reference to the facts. Were I to say that the facts show that, say, the creation of an out-group within German society was an effective way of unifying a divided people and rallying them behind a strong leader, I don’t think that that would be enormously controversial. I think that was a bad thing, obviously, but someone else might think that this was somehow a positive to be learned from in times of crisis. Someone else might see it as a useful strategy to employ in the present and study Nazi history to find the mistakes Hitler made, in order to avoid making them again. These are all, whether you like it or not, ‘lessons from history’. Not one of them has to rely upon falsifying or misreading the historical record. Clearly I find the slaughter of minorities by the Nazis disgusting; other people see it as ‘collateral damage’, necessary for the creation of a united and strong people. I always thought that the lesson of the Holocaust was that this sort of obscenity should never be allowed to happen again; not that the descendants of the victims of the Holocaust had the right to carry out genocides on the basis of being the victims of the Holocaust(5), which seems to be a very popular ‘lesson’ drawn from the history of the Nazi period. If you’re saying (as I hope you are) ‘yes, Guy, but your lesson is the right one; the other lesson is the wrong lesson to be drawn’, you have, I am afraid, no historical grounds on which to make that statement. There is no empirical basis upon which to decide. You just have either to say ‘well that’s just your opinion, man’, or use some form of academic or institutional power to close the other person down. This is why I have said before that it’s the historicists rather than the so-called ‘deconstructionists’ who are the real relativists.

Anyway, as soon as the argument takes its stance on ethics and morals (as at some point it has to), it has left the field of history (as she is usually taught [6]) and moved into moral philosophy or ethics. [Unless, of course … see the end of this series of thoughts.]

So, the past in itself does not teach single unequivocal ‘lessons’. Does ‘History’, i.e. the discipline of the study of the past taught in schools and universities? I taught history in, in league table terms, top UK university history departments for 30 years. In that time I don’t think that I or my colleagues ever said, ‘right. So here is the lesson you should learn.’ We all try to avoid Sellar and Yeatman-style ‘X was A Bad Thing; Y was A Good Thing’. I guess most of us hoped that the ethical or moral take-aways of the histories we taught would be obvious, though this was always far less clear when you teach remote history. I heard some comments (e.g. about how slavery wasn't so bad), from, as far as I could tell, perfectly decent students, that you’d never, at least in those days, have heard in a class looking at the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. I have argued many times that the horrors of the past don’t become less horrible for having taken place many centuries ago. I wonder whether part of the issue at the moment is that the events of the mid-twentieth century have indeed slipped into the (wrongly) supposedly ethically neutral hyperspace of ‘history’, where we don’t judge.

So, historians don’t teach history as though it were a question of straightforward right and wrong lessons to be taken away. This actually is A Good Thing. If History did teach single lessons, frankly, historians would all soon be out of a job. Once the ‘right lesson’ from X bit of history had been established, there’d be nothing more to do, and whoever had been working on that would have to find a new thing to do.

What Historians teach is how to study evidence critically, how to construct an argument that showed an awareness of the different historiographical viewpoints and of the nature of the evidence and the problems with it. History is an active verb – it’s about studying, reading, thinking, not just about passively learning and knowing. I will come back to talking about how it’s there, not in the ‘knowing’ of facts, that ethics and morality ought to come into history teaching. (Though I have argued this several times before, e.g. here.) University history teachers teach that there is more than one way of reading or interpreting a historical issue. We teach them different views, and how interpretations once standard have become outmoded (for whatever reason to do with research and the history of the discipline) but are perfectly capable of being refined and coming back. We teach students that arguments based upon falsified, distorted, or unreliable evidence can be discarded, but otherwis that history actually is a debate and that, as long as they don’t fall foul of the misuse of evidence rule, all interpretations are fundamentally – historically at least – valid, some better or more subtle than others, maybe, but all valid.  Perhaps this does indeed open the door to the “Hitler did all the things he did, but does that mean he was all bad?” approach and all the checks and balances we thought were somehow inherent in the ‘facts’ have, like so many other checks and balances, failed us. Again, at the end of this series of thoughts, I will suggest a solution to this problem.

However, the point I'd like to end this post on is whether one actually needs ‘the lessons of history’ anyway (even if such a thing existed). I have always thought that the implications of statements about needing to know the rise of the Nazis to avoid future Extreme Right, authoritarian governments and genocides, were a faintly absurd. They seem to envisage a situation wherein someone says ‘I was planning to round up all the Jews in my country, put them into labour camps and then gas them if and when they didn’t seem to be useful any more, but then I read Richard Evans’ books on the Nazis and I realised that would have been a terrible idea. Phew!’ To avoid doing that you don’t need history, you need entry-level humanity. If you need to read history books to teach you that you shouldn’t strip people of their human rights, or do a genocide, then, frankly, you’re a sociopath. And if that’s what you think you want to do, then I suspect no amount of history – even at its most moralising – would stop you anyway.

I will have other things to say about the burden of history, relevance, and not repeating the mistakes of the past, but that’s for next time.

 

Notes

1. e.g. Here and here

2. Donatella De Cesare. Se Auschwitz è nulla. Contro il negazionismo, Il melangolo, Genova 2012.

3. Dr Waitman Beorn of Northumbria University seems commendably to devote a considerable amunt of his free time to fighting this nonsense on social media. Chapeau to him, though I suspect it's an unwinnable war.

4. This is where the argument for the uniqueness of the Shoah (as per de Cesare) comes in handy, as it denies the possibility that the toleration of any other genocide against any other people would somehow violate the ‘lesson’ of ‘never again’.

5. My man who was talking about how his Dad fought the Japanese to avert the EU, thought his father had fought in the jungles for six years, implying either that he had started earlier than the rest of the British Empire and Commonwealth, or that he was the one allied soldier who continued his fight in the jungle for years, not knowing the war was over. 

6. I use this phrase a lot (or ‘History as she is wrote’). It’s based upon the title of an unintentionally hilarious English-French phrase book of the (I think) 18th century called English as She is Spoke. It amuses me. One of my autistic traits is to use phrases like this and assume that somehow everyone knows the reference. Anyway, now you do.

Tuesday, 6 August 2024

CFP for Leeds IMC 2025

Call for papers for session/strand at the International Medieval Congress, 7-10 July 2025:

 

The Reach of Politics, 5th-7th centuries

How far did active participation in politics spread in late antiquity?

Can we avoid dichotomous ‘top-down’ versus ‘bottom-up’ ways of thinking by conceiving of politics as a form of circuitry wherein the political flows discursively down (or out) from the governmental core, upwards from the lowest participating rungs of society, or inwards from the peripheries (what counts as a periphery?), or around within and between groupings of roughly equal political standing?

How far down the social scale did participation reach? In what ways and at what points could the circuitry be ‘shorted’? What changes can be traced over time? What dynamics can be detected?

‘Laboratories’ within which we might examine these issues might include:

·       Taxation: Discussions of its levels and legitimacy, its collection, resistance by, and representation of, taxed groups.

·       Military service: Who should do military service, and who should not be allowed to participate? How did the extraction of such duties illustrate the flows of political discourse and the reach of participation in politics?

·       The law: How did the working of the law illustrate the reach of politics, and the nature of political circuitry, its ‘switches’ and ‘resistors’?

·       Assemblies: who attended? At what social or geographical level? What actual role did they play? What happened if they went ‘off-script’? (Obviously some assemblies are incorporated in discussions of the extraction of surplus, the law, assemblies of the army, and so on).

·       Information: What information did governments collect about its citizens and what use did they make of it? What information flowed in the other direction and how?

·       Public works: How – if at all – did late antique governments provide for the welfare of their subjects, whether in the provision of entertainment or spectacle, public health, poor relief (is there more to be said here after Peter Brown’s Through the Eye of a Needle?), and so on?

·       ‘Citizenship’: How did contemporaries conceive of membership of a polity?

·       Archaeology: Are there archaeological as well as documentary historical ways of investigating these issues

If you have a 20-minute paper to offer on any of these issues – or others that I haven’t thought of – using material from the last century of the western Roman Empire to the end of the seventh century, please contact me at:




Professor Guy Halsall

Honorary Research Professor in the Department of Archaeology, Durham University

Corresponding Member of the German Archaeological Institute



 

Thursday, 4 April 2024

“If anyone wishes to cast off their kindred, let them go to the assembly…” Kinship, community, and identity in Merovingian Gaul

[This is a somewhat rewritten version of a plenary lecture I gave at a conference last year on the dissolvement [sic] of kinship ties, shorn of ad libs and jokes and rendered into slightly more formal acadermic language.

Essentially, I take a clause of the Pactus Legis Salicae - concerning the ritual to be followed by someone who wished to cast themselves off from their kin - as a springboard to explore some ideas about what one might call the 'lived reality' of kinship in the post-imperial West. How rigid were the ties of kimship? How significant were family groups? Were people bound tightly into kindreds and constrained to act in accordance with the obligations of kinship? After some close reading of aspects of the clause itself, I look at why someone might want to cast off their kin, or in what ways this might have been desirable. That in turn raises issues of how we think of kinship, whether (and/or to what extent) it is 'natural' and whether (and/or to what extent) it works in ways differently from social ties that are not - notionally at least - related to blood relationships. What change did following the ritual of PLS clause 60 relly make; could you really cast off your kin, or even specific kinship relationships? I argue that, if anything, following this procedure defined you more closely by your relationships to your kin. The paper ends with some geneal conclusions about the strength of kinship and its relationship to community in Merovingian Gaul.

I am wondering whether it's worth trying to publish. I am not sure it is but if anyone thinks it is worth trying to write up properly and has any suggestions (or offers), they can get in touch. My academic email contact is now guy[dot]halsall[dot]academic[at]gmail[dot]com. Clearly it needs a fair bit of work but I think there might be points here that are worth getting into print.]


In this paper I would like to discuss the practical or lived reality of kinship relations in the post-imperial West, using as a springboard a strange-looking clause of the Pactus Legis Salicae (the Compact of Salic Law). This law-code is generally supposed to have been issued by Clovis, the first king of the Merovingian dynasty about whom we know anything, probably shortly before his death in 511. It applied, it appears to tell us, in the lands between the River Loire and the Carbonnarian Forest – the Ardennes – in other words within what had by the seventh century come to be called the kingdom of Neustria or ‘the new lands’, one of the three kingdoms into which Frankish Gaul was usually divided. Clause 60 of the Pactus concerns what you have to do if you want to cast off your kindred. It reads as follows:

Concerning him who wants to remove himself from his kindred

1: [If anyone wants to remove themselves from their kindred], they should walk [ambulare] into the legal assembly [mallus], before the Thunginus or hundredsman and there they should break four sticks of alder wood over their head and they should throw those sticks into the four corners of the assembly and they should say that they cut themselves off from oath-helping or inheritance or from any reckoning (or calculation) of those people.

2: And if afterwards, if someone from their kin should die or be killed, nothing of the inheritance or compensation will pertain to them.

3: If indeed they should die or be killed their inheritance or compensation will not belong to their relatives but will go to the fisc, or to whomever the fisc wants to give it.

Before progressing, some preliminary points about the text and its translation need to be made. The first is to repeat the well-known fact that the generally-used text of the Pactus Legis Salicae is really the best guess of Karl-Augst Eckhardt, worked out in pretty dubious circumstances in the middle of the twentieth century. The standard edition is something of a Frankenstein’s monster put together from several fundamentally different manuscript traditions, all of which are at least 200 years later than the presumed date of the law’s issue. The last section, about the fisc, has been argued to be a later, though still sixth-century, addition.

Second, there is the gendering of the text. The title of the chapter, and the second and third clauses are cast in the masculine generic. This is actually quite unusual for the Pactus, most of whose clauses begin with a gender-neutral ‘si quis’: ‘if anyone’. On that basis Eckhardt reconstructed the start of the chapter the same way: ‘if anyone wants to remove themselves…’, although the manuscript authority for that is pretty weak – two of the later textual traditions. The earlier text-groups do not have anything; they just begin ‘he should walk into the mallus’.

The 1992 translation of the Pactus translated (as it often does) that si quis as ‘he who’, leading to the curious situation where the sixth-century text used more inclusive language than its modern translation. There were, however, two scholarly reasons for that, both based in old assumptions about post-imperial western law. One was that it was all ‘Germanic’, representing different branches of legal tradition that all ultimately went back to some common body of proto-Germanic custom. That in turn meant that the gaps in one code could be filled in from the others. The other assumption, related to that, was that in ‘Germanic’ law only men were legally competent, all women having to live under the legal guardianship or mundium of men. That was based upon clear statements to that effect in the mid-seventh-century Lombard Edict of Rothari, but that code was promulgated in very particular circumstances and there is no reason at all why its ideas should have applied anywhere at all outside northern Italy. Nor indeed does the general idea find support in the texts of non-Lombard Law, or descriptions of court-cases, all of which envisage or indeed demonstrate women managing legal affairs. Nonetheless, it led to translators up to the end of the last century inserting all sorts of inaccuracies, extra phrases, and jurisprudential pretzel logic, into their translations. The text of Salic Law is, however, usually gender-neutral and makes no statements at all about the legal incompetence of women. Indeed, it usually implies the opposite.

What then might it mean that Clause 60 of the Pactus is, according to most text-classes, cast in the masculine? Once we free ourselves of the assumption that only men were legally competent in post-imperial law, I do not think it is very significant. First there is the simple grammatical point that, provided it was envisaged that at least one man be among those referred to, Latin used the masculine third person, as in many modern languages, such as French – until very recently. Second, an assumption about a norm is not the same as a description. By way of analogy, Geoffrey Elton’s The Practice of History is, in a way that now jars but was at the time completely normal, entirely cast in the masculine generic: when a historian reads his sources, he will, …. But, while Elton might have perceived that most historians were men – and even if he thought this was the correct way of things, or thought that women could not or should not really be historians – you could not argue that he thought that all historians actually were men.  The same probably goes for the masculine generic in the Pactus. It might have been the norm (as I suspect, statistically, it still is even now) for most people engaged in law cases to be male but that did not imply that women were never, or had no right to be, actively involved as principals. It might have been rare; it might have brought about a bit of tut-tutting on the part of some people, but it was perfectly legitimate. The circumstances under which one might want to invoke this procedure might indeed have included those that applied to women specifically. For all these reasons I cast my translation in a gender-neutral expression.

Third, note that the law says that the person should walk (ambulare) to the assembly. Salic Law does at least once use the verb festinare – a plaintiff should hurry to someone’s house – but it uses ambulare several times, always when talking about a ritual where a principal has to go to some sort of public assembly or meeting and either say a particular form of words or undergo an ordeal. There are two points about this. The first is that you are supposed to go to the court slowly, in public, in the gaze of the community. The communal gaze was very important in sixth-century Frankish society and local politics. Related to that point, the second observation is that this specification, like a lot of things in Salic Law, seems to try to stop things being done too hastily. It was, I assume, a big deal to cast off one’s kin so an individual might want to have time to back down before they got before the thunginus and did something from which there was no going back.

Fourth, there is the issue of the four rods. Old scholarship suggested, plausibly enough, that the four rods represented the four shared sets of great grandparents implied in Frankish law’s concentration on people related within three generations. In another clause a person can adopt someone or transfer property to them by throwing a stick into their lap. Staffs or sticks feature regularly in Frankish Law but it is not normally stipulated that they be of a specific wood. This clause says you have to have sticks from a particular type of tree, but why alder? Alder is pretty common throughout Europe but it grows in particular places. It grows in wet areas, by or in streams or marshes; it is a ‘pioneer’ tree species: that is, one of the first species of tree to appear if you let an area of land turn to forest: birch is the pioneer species par excellence. You will not find it so easily in established forest; it gets crowded out by the bigger trees. It is thus a kind of tree found in transitional areas, whether the transition is from dry to wetland or from arable to woodland. I wonder if there is some symbolic value in its use in the transition from being within to being without (or outwith) a family. Another feature of alder is that, being a quite supple wood, it is used for binding things, wattles or hurdles for example, so again there might be symbolic value in breaking a wood usually used for binding. As just alluded to, alder is a strong, pliable wood: alder rods are not easy to break. What this seems to me to imply is that if someone did not want to run the risk of not being able to break the rods and having to take time twisting, bending and tearing them (all over the top of their head, remember) and potentially looking rater foolish, they would either have to go and choose their sticks carefully or they would need to let them dry out and become more brittle. The fact that an individual actor would have to go and find a particular type of tree and then either choose a particular dead bit of the tree, or let the sticks dry out, or somehow prepare them before the assembly all seems, again, to show a concern to stop this undertaking from being carried out hastily or in the heat of the moment. [I’d like to mention here the common use of the tree to symbolise the family. Is the breaking of twigs representative of breaking off a particular branch of the family tree? I would like to thank an attendee of the lecture, whose name I have forgotten but it may have been Jessie, for mentioning this - probably quite obvious - point that I had nevertheless contrived not to think of, in discussion afterwards.]

Did anyone ever do this? The short answer is that we do not know; there are no records. At first sight it seems a strange thing just to make up. Even if we think the law recorded actual procedure, however, at some point a judge or collection of elders must have sat down and invented the ritual. It is true that within a century or two even early medieval people thought Salic Law was a bit weird and poked fun at its provisions but, importantly, in his Feudal Society, Marc Bloch refers to a ritual of breaking twigs and throwing them on the ground to cast off a relationship – in that case, interestingly, a tie of lordship and dependence: ‘A ceremony … in which perhaps was revived the memory of the gestures used by the Salian Frank in times gone by.’ Here I will proceed on the basis that this was not all some flight of fancy on the part of the law’s compilers.

My final preliminary point is that Salic Law is very often concerned with the performance of rituals in front of an audience which, by their very strangeness, were memorable. The memorability of the scene transcended the transience of the ritual itself and thus created a sort of communal record of the event and the legal decision. Documents and written records do not feature. As we will see, this is fairly characteristic of sixth-century northern Gallic society and politics.

*

After this initial discussion of the details of the clause itself, we can pose a key question: why would anyone want to cast off their kindred? The most recent treatment of this issue in English of which I am aware is forty years old, in Alexander Callander Murray’s 1983 book on Germanic Kinship Structure. Murray devotes a few pages to clause 60 of the Pactus, arguing very cogently that the law surely cannot have meant that someone would actually have cast off all of their kindred. How would that have worked? Would it include his own children? It is important to stress that Frankish kinship was bilateral. The legal rights and obligations referred to in the law technically applied to all people related within three generations on their mother’s or father’s side; if someone shared a great-grandparent on either side with someone else, they had legal obligations to them. Stepping outside the law for a moment to look at the archaeological evidence for the sixth-century northern Gallic countryside, we will see that we are talking about very small settlements grouped into small communities, possibly sharing a cemetery as a ritual focus. In these circumstances, the chances of not being related to someone else within three generations on either the mother’s or father’s side were probably significantly less than sharing a great-grandparent with them. Casting off the whole of one’s kindred would likely leave you with no obligations to, or rights to expect support from, almost everyone in one’s everyday community.  Murray’s conclusion that the law cannot have meant shearing an individual off from their entire kindred but, rather, that it meant that someone cut themselves off from obligations to a specific relative, or a particular group within their kindred, is thus surely correct. We should, then, understand the term parentela in this context not as kindred (though it has this meaning) but as kinship (which it can also mean). The person is going to the mallus and declaring that they cut off their kinship with this (or these) particular individual (or individuals).

This seems to make much more sense. Someone – male or female – might wish to sever their links with a specific kinsperson or group of relatives for a wide range of reasons. A segment of someone’s legally-defined kindred might have been serial wrong-doers and the individual at the mallus had simply had enough of having to help pay their fines. This, broadly, is the circumstance Murray envisages. Alternatively, a Frankish woman might have wanted to remarry but her kin might have been causing problems because of their claims on the inheritance. Someone might just have wanted to cut a person or one side of the family out of their inheritance; remember that this clause comes directly after the famous clause 59.6 about the inheritance of ‘Salic Land’. It might alternatively have been a more positive declaration than that. In a situation of bilateral kindreds and kinship legally defined as within three generations, all sorts of problems might have arisen if there was trouble within the (broadly-defined) family. If some of the demands on kin worked as mechanically as they have often been assumed to have done – even to some extent by Murray – if the ‘feud’ worked in the ways it is supposed to have done one might find oneself in some tricky situations. Not entirely flippantly, what would one do if Baddo, a cousin on one’s mother’s side, beat up or killed Dado, a cousin on one’s father’s side? Did one avenge the killing of cousin Dado by killing one of Baddo’s cousins, i.e. oneself? Did one pay a first cousin’s share of Baddo’s fine and then receive a first cousin’s share of the compensation – by buying oneself a cow? As is well-known, many medieval epics play on the tragedies of the supposedly implacable demands of kinship, but the extent to which such stories ever occurred in reality is debatable. It is possible to see the ritual of clause 60 of the Pactus not simply as a declaration of non-kinship but simultaneously as a declaration of more active kinship with someone else, or with a particular part of your broadly-defined kin-group.

This all raises a raft of really fundamental questions about kinship, kinship ties, and society. Given the stress in the historiography about the importance of the kin-group in early medieval society, why would anyone be mad enough to remove themselves from it? We have just seen that that is probably not what is going on in clause 60, but the issue remains. Just how important was the kindred in sixth-century northern Gaul? Were people bound into their kin-groups by all sorts of weighty ties and obligations that compelled them to undertake particular courses of action, in spite of themselves? Some of these assumptions come ultimately from the idea of the post-Roman centuries as ‘the Dark Ages’, when proper government did not exist and when people were compelled to look after themselves. A individual needed to be part of a kindred to protect themselves, to make sure they could get redress in disputes, and to stop everything descending into anarchy and a Hobbesian bellum omnium. Most early medieval historians now reject that way of seeing things, although some of its basic assumptions and implications remain.

Kinship is a social construction, and it is entirely contingent upon time, place, social context. It is important not to confuse it with biological or genetic relationships. There is nothing natural about it. I, for example, have Greek family, but if they were not Greek they would not be family. They are the in-laws of one of my sisters-in-law. Few English people regard the in-laws of their in-laws as family, but my in-laws’ in-laws absolutely regard me as family and treat me as such. It is not just expectations of hospitality that are under consideration, though; if I had a sister, she would, in Greece, be ruled out from marrying their other son. If we had a huge falling out that would for them be a very real dissolution of kinship ties. If someone fell out with their ‘in-law-in-laws’ in England it would be unusual to regard kinship ties as coming into it at all. The dissolution of kinship ties can thus only be understood in specific social context. Kinship ties cannot simply be understood to have existed on the basis of biological consanguinity.

But, leaving aside ideas of obligations and marriage restrictions one would like to think that there were bonds of affection, at least, between close kin that were natural; mammals are instinctively protective towards their children, at least when they are young. Sadly, however, a few depressing minutes with the grimmer side of the news cycle will disabuse the reader of the notion that feelings of protectiveness and affection are automatic or universal. So, indeed will brief exposure to early medieval history; one will soon find kings killing, maiming, torturing, or blinding their own children. King Chilperic I of Neustria had a hand in the killing of two of his sons, as well as one of his brothers; his wife, the notorious Queen Fredegund, allegedly tried to kill one of their daughters by slamming her head in a treasure chest. So, while there may be no reason to think that medieval people were less emotionally invested in their children, or that the range of relationships and emotions within families was any different then from now, by the same token, there seems no reason to suppose that early medieval people automatically loved their children either. The more important variable is social attitudes and the expectations about how one responded to emotions, how one expressed them, when one was expected to suppress them. Mothers in certain social groups might have been expected to hand their babies over to a wet-nurse, regardless of their own feelings. There is some evidence for early medieval infanticide; I do not think we can extrapolate from that unpleasant, disturbing fact to conclusions about the levels of affect between parents and children. These are areas, tensions, often explored in literature.

There are two sides to the issues I have been setting out. Can kinship-ties be dissolved where people did not think kinship existed? It is important not to confuse kinship with biological or genetic relationships. In many slave-owning societies, slaves are not believed to have kinship. The slave is, in the classic formulation of Orlando Patterson, a ‘genealogical isolate’: the slave has no family; he or she can be sold away from parents, siblings and children; slave marriages are not seen as valid. Salic Law seems to share this world view: ‘if anyone steals someone else’s male or female slave, or horse, or mare’ (PLS clause 10.1). A slave is property and, in this world-view, you are no more dissolving kinship ties by selling a child away from its parents than in selling a weaned foal away from its mother. This statement does not imply that such actions did not involve trauma, that they were not horrific. Horrific inhumanity is the defining characteristic of slavery and we should never forget that. The non-recognition of slave kinship (at least in the sixth century, possibly less so in the seventh) is an illustration of the fact. We do not know what slaves thought about kinship; we might suspect that it was fairly provisional and realist. Were they simply expected to suppress the usual, natural feelings towards their children; did they somehow internalise those expectations? If the ideas of the people who owned slaves and who defined the rules or norms of kinship were that slaves existed in a situation outside kinship, and we do not want to fall into the trap of confusing kinship with bonds of affect, then – except when we are talking of the enslavement of hitherto free people – can we talk, analytically, of dissolving kinship ties among slaves? As intimated, attitudes to slave families it may have been changing in the Merovingian period but, as unpalatable as they are, these are things that need close consideration.

Second, we distinguish certain kinds of non-biological kinship as ‘fictive’ but, as social anthropologists used to say in the ‘80s (and as we have in effect seen), all kinship is fictive or at least constructed. People bolstered biological relationships with other forms of kinship. In 613 Chlothar II of Neustria wiped out what remained of the rival branch of the Merovingian family by killing all his first cousins, twice removed, but the one he spared – Merovech – he spared because he was his godson. Creation of such fictive kinship ties did not always work. In the ‘Revolt of the Dukes’ in the late 580s Queen Brunichildis tried to detach Duke Berthefried from his ally Duke Ursio by reminding him that she was the godmother of his daughter, making them co-parents. But that failed; ‘I will never abandon Ursio’, said Berthefried, ‘until death comes to tear me from him.’ Which, inevitably, it did. The obligations of fictive kinship could dissolve as easily as those of blood ties when push came to shove.

The existence of kinship ties should not be assumed on a priori grounds. Historiographically, there was a tradition of reconstructing all of the links that existed between aristocrats, and creating extended noble families – and reifying the families so created by giving them names: Agilolfings, Widonids, etc. The assumption was that these were ipso facto, real and important political groupings. It is, however, empirically absolutely clear that they were not. Just like the Merovingians, these supposed aristocratic clans took sides against, fought with, and killed their relatives. Who a particular socio-political actor took sides with, or against, within their broad kindred, was clearly contingent. People chose which ‘family’ they were part of at any given moment. Close ties of consanguinity need not have been of paramount importance. One of the reasons that there is a constant theme within political rhetoric, of the need for the ‘strong family unit’ is precisely because it is something that has never existed; it is a fetish.

There is an important caveat to be made here, though. These choices were not necessarily made lightly; we are not talking about some emotion-free ‘rational choice’ model. It is important not to ignore potentially ‘irrational’ affective bonds. Hence the law’s stress on deliberation; taking time to reflect. Whether these affective bonds and the emotional stresses in making a choice were any greater when thinking about family than when thinking about having to break with close friends, old comrades in arms (as with Ursio and Berthefried), and so on, is, however, unknowable and, in my view, unlikely.

Here we return to the Pactus Legis Salicae. Clause 58, two clauses before the one used as the focus of this paper, is the clause ‘Concerning the Chrenecruda’. The chrenecruda is another of the Pactus’ strange public rituals, this time about calling upon an individual’s kin to help them pay a fine if they had no more property to give. This involved the person in question getting witnesses together at their house, taking handfuls of earth from their hearth, and throwing them over the relatives they needed to help them pay – in a designated order, from both sides of their family, and to whom they were related within three generations – and then, shirtless and barefoot, but stick in hand (here it can be any kind of stick) jumping over their fence and symbolically abandoning their house. The sorts of kinship ties or obligations referred to in clause 60 had thus to be activated as well as dissolved through public ritual. The dissolution of kinship ties was thus no more of a problem than the activation of such ties. We return to the assumption that somehow these ties and obligations were natural or that the default situation was that they somehow applied. Mostly, though, they existed in what I would call a zone of potentiality, there to be invoked or to be renounced.

*

On this basis, let us revisit the law and the process it envisages to think about kinship and identity, within a community and what difference the procedure might make to that. As we have seen, everything has to be done properly, in public. The individual in question walked through the community to the assembly. This is a scene into which they were interpellated, in the term often associated with Louis Althusser: they were called upon to speak from a particular subject position. They were called upon to identify themselves. Now, identity is an overused and under-theorised, under-understood term in medieval studies. What does it mean to adopt or declare an identity, to identify yourself? Identities are categories, they are signs and they raise all sorts of signifieds. They carry with them associated imagery, expectations of correct behaviour.

Our person has walked through the community, gone before the mallus and declared themselves to be related to particular people. They have identified themselves as occupying a particular position within a web of relationships. This is narrowed to some extent by the context but the implications of this law presumably make relevant all sorts of other aspects of their person: age, gender, ethnicity, wealth. The question I want to ask is whether – or in what ways - the procedure actually dissolves kinship ties. The person goes before the community, in a formal setting and, in effect, says ‘here I am’. The other people of the community, seeing them, know them. We know you; you are so-and-so, son of so-and-so and so-and-so. What, then, might it have meant to go before the community, in this context, and declare and create a situation of non-kinship?

John Lennon’s mawkish song ‘Imagine’ contains the lines ‘imagine there’s no heaven / it’s easy if you try’. But it is not at all easy. You cannot imagine there is no heaven without simultaneously bringing to mind the idea of heaven that you want to imagine does not exist. This is the problem that undermines the notion of casting off kinship by public ritual. If you go to court and say, effectively, that by this strange and memorable ritual ‘I want to you to record that I am not related to this or that person, or these people, who, we all know, is/are actually one of my relatives/ are actually my relatives’, that is not something that can be remembered separately from the knowledge that in fact, you are that person’s cousin, or a member of that family. You know my cousin? Imagine I am not their cousin; it is easy if you try. In the circumstances where you might come to me, as a member of that kindred, or as that person’s cousin, to call upon me to do something, on that basis, you should no longer call upon me to act in that way. You have not dissolved the kinship tie at all, as much as fixed it in a particular mode. Henceforth you are that one of the Joneses who cast off his kinship; Baddo’s cousin who did not want to be his cousin. That is ironic given what I said about kinship relations normally existing in a vague zone of potentiality. You might not generally be regarded as a particular person’s second cousin, or first cousin, once removed, in everyday life; henceforth that non-kinship would become a key part of your identity. Even with close kin, whose relationship to you would normally be known, if the problem was that you wanted to cut your links to difficult kin, the problem would hardly be alleviated by this process; if anything it would only make things worse. The spectre of that kin relationship will constantly haunt you.

The only circumstance, really, where this would not effectively be the case would be if you moved to a completely different part of the kingdom, Aquitaine say, where different laws applied anyway. The person is saying ‘I am off and I am not coming back; do not come looking for me in Clermont or Tours or Bordeaux to help with fines; and I promise I have no claim on my kin back here.’ As I wrote this lecture, I began to wonder whether that is really what it is about; it makes sense of the addition of the clause about the fisc too. It is possibly the only circumstance in which kinship and its ties would really be dissolved, at least over time. Apart from with death. I’ll just leave that possibility hanging there.

What makes me think that Clause 60 of the PLS is not really about what to do if you move somewhere else is its context within the code. It comes at the end of a little cluster of clauses: clause 56 is about someone who refuses to come to court; clause 57 is about judges who refuse to give a judgement; clause 58, concerning Chrenecruda, is about the situation where someone does not have the wherewithal to pay a fine and, I assume, his relatives do not automatically choose to help them out; clause 59 is about what happens where someone does not have the usual heirs; and clause 60 concerns what is to be done if someone does not want to be part of a legally-defined kin-group. All four clauses concern situations where the usual procedures do not apply.

*

As far as I am aware, this is the only post-imperial law about casting off your kin. The corpus of so-called ‘Barbarian’ law from the immediately post-imperial period has nothing else like this. It is difficult to know what to make of such a comparison. The different codes cover different things (it was partly for that reason that the notion of a shared Germanic law was so attractive; earlier historians were tempted to fill in the gaps in one code with clauses from another). Partly this is because the codes are not just records of what they at least suggest are the standard logics and procedures of customary law; some are also collections of legislation relating to very specific circumstances; and some individual clauses are so specific that they can only represent responses to individual cases that had, so to speak, recently crossed the king’s desk. The Lombard Code of Rothari, for instance, has two clauses about people killed by bits falling off buildings being constructed by Master Builders of Como. There are surprising absences even so. There is almost nothing in early Anglo-Saxon law about inheritance. Thus I am not sure that one can extrapolate with any confidence from the fact that the Pactus discusses how to abrogate a kinship relation, whereas other codes do not, to differences in the strength of the kindred between Frankish Gaul and other areas of the West.

Nonetheless, even if we cannot compare with other areas, we can at least ask questions about sixth-century northern Gaul. It is interesting that the lawmakers thought it was worth including a clause on this topic, and might even have known of a ritual that was used. It is, however, impossible to decide whether this was because they thought people were likely to want to renounce or dissolve a kin-relationship, and thus that kin-groupings were pretty fluid in practice, or whether the opposite was true: that the bonds of kinship were so strong that you needed to set out, clearly, a specific, deliberate, memorable public ritual for situations when people really wanted to cast them off. Sixth-century social structure in northern Gaul does seem to have been rather more fluid than it was even a century later but can we extrapolate from that to a corresponding fluidity of kinship, or might we rather argue that the instability we see in other areas might have led to a strengthening of kinship as a unit of social organisation? It is ultimately impossible to choose between these options. What seems clear, though, is the importance of the local community in determining acceptable or unacceptable courses of action. This might have transcended the importance of family.

As I have mentioned, Salic Law is full of public rituals like that in clause 60, carried out in the communal gaze. Like sixth-century burial ritual, they create memorable scenes that record acts and decisions in a situation where written records seem not to have impinged on the concerns of the law’s compilers. They are mostly – though far from entirely – absent from Salic Law’s seventh-century equivalent, Ripuarian Law. But the absence from Ripuarian Law of these rituals is probably related precisely to two things. First: Ripuarian Law frequently states that you can get out of the usual procedures of customary law via the use of documents. We have surviving examples of model documents drawn up precisely to do the sorts of exceptional thing that Salic Law required some kind of public performance to carry out. But access to written documents was socially restricted, so one of the ways in which the increasing rigidity of the social hierarchy manifested itself may have been in the limitation of the opportunities to avoid restrictions of custom to people of higher social classes. Related to that is the second point, which concerns time. Salic Law is very much about the here and now. It has almost no concern with the projection of situations, or how they might change, into the future. What it does, as I have said, is prescribe memorable rituals as records of decisions, but clearly the longevity of such communal memory was limited. Ripuarian Law has much more interest in the future. To some extent that is visible in the way it talks about the preservation of decisions in written documents, records which, potentially, can be kept forever. It also worries about extending the memory of public ritual into the future. If you do not record something in writing, bring small boys to the assembly and box them round the ears so they remember the day that a particular thing happened. Most specifically, there was no need for the ritual of chrenecruda. Where, in Salic Law, someone who could not pay a fine underwent the ritual of throwing earth over living relatives, rippling out to those related within three generations, the equivalent law of Lex Ribvaria simply says if you cannot pay, your family pays over three generations – your children and grandchildren keep paying until the sum is paid off: again we see that concern with the future, and no need for ritual. The sort of decision made via the ritual of PLS clause 60 was recorded by drawing up a written document, and – I assume – was an option only available to people of a certain status.

*

I have used this odd little clause from sixth-century Frankish law to try and make, or reinforce a number of basic points. Above all, kinship ties are socially constructed; where social norms do not regard relationships as kin relationships, regardless of biological relationship, kinship does not exist; the converse is also true: social norms might regard kinship very much as existing between people who have no genetic connection. In turn, people might have stronger affective ties with people with whom they have no kinship ties of any sort. More importantly, those relationships, ties and obligations are not immanent; they do not exist automatically; people are not automatically obliged to act in predictable, prescribed fashions simply on the basis of the existence of a relationship as, what Bourdieu called ‘official kin’. This view of early medieval people as keyed into extended kinship webs which dominated their everyday lives via systems of familial honour and shame, rather like north-western European views of Mediterranean (or, conversely, ‘Celtic’) societies, is one that ricochets between poles of condescension and romanticism. Clearly, outside the ‘effective’ or practical kin of the immediate nuclear family, early medieval people frequently did choose their family; contingently deciding when, and when not, to make their implication in a particular kinship relationship part of their identity and use it to justify their actions. It seems to me however to be going too far in the opposite direction to see early medieval actors simply as ‘rational actors’, driven purely by dispassionate calculation. People killed and, in the case of Duke Berthefried, who could – possibly – have lived, died for the sake of affective bonds, whether or not based upon kinship. Both of the extreme views make early medieval people into programable two-dimensional cut-outs. The people of the post-imperial centuries in western Europe, as throughout the globe throughout history, were much more unpredictable and interesting than that.

Monday, 22 January 2024

Spectres of Marcus: the Roman Empire ‘between two deaths’

This time, ah - ah

Is coming like a ghost time


When I wrote Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, getting on for 20 years ago, I used a three-part organisation of the text: Part 1: Romans and Barbarians in an Imperial world; Part 2: A world renegotiated; Part 3: Romans and barbarians in a post-imperial world. I used the term ‘post-imperial’ for a couple of reasons. I borrowed it from Andrew Gillet, who had coined it because of problems with the term ‘post-Roman’. People after 476 weren’t in any sense ‘post-Roman’. Many thought they were still Romans; many were still trying to do things to look Roman; many continued to call themselves Romans (not least in the Greek-speaking east). I also thought at the time that the western Empire had ended in 480 and that people at the time knew that it had ended. I thought this partly because of arguments by Jill Harries about Sidonius Apollinaris’ letters at the time, and on the basis of some of the changes that were taking place in material culture in the last quarter of the 5th century. So ‘post-imperial’ seemed like a very good term to use for the period after 480.

I no longer think that the western Empire ended in 480, and I no longer think that people at the time thought that it had ended. About ten years ago I argued that Sidonius’ comments about the Tiber’s dwindling stream compared with the strength of the Moselle, were something that a Gallic poet might equally have written to a third-century Gallic emperor resident at Trier. The work I did on Style 1, about a decade ago (but never published) also stressed the ‘not knowing’, the indeterminacy of the period and the way that the decorative style played with traditional Roman iconography and indeed could not make its point without that.

This leaves me with a terminological problem. Neither ‘post-Roman’ nor ‘post-imperial’ now seem to me to be adequate terms for the period between Nepos’ murder and the wars of Justinian – during which I contend people did begin to realise that they were no longer living in the Roman Empire. So what do I/we call that period? If (or, as I hope, when) I do a 2nd edition of Barbarian Migrations, what do I use as the title for Part 3?

During that period I argue that western European polities (and politics) continued to operate as though the Empire did still exist and they were a part of it. By the earlier 6th century Frankish and Ostrogothic rulers displayed serious imperial pretensions. Indeed it was this that seems to have led the eastern emperors to start to promulgate the idea that the West had ended, been lost, been conquered by barbarians, in the fifth century (in 455 or 476). Politics were oriented towards the notion of an Empire, but an Empire that did not function as such in the west. It was something spectral, or phantasmic: something believed to be there and affecting people’s actions, but not there in reality. It’s in this sense that I like to think of the period between 480 and say 550 as the western Roman Empire ‘between two deaths’. In one sense, as a functioning political organisation, the Empire really did die with Nepos in 480, but in another sense it only died when Justinian declared that it was dead, 50 years later.  When I was interested in the thought of Jacques Lacan, ten to fifteen years ago, I toyed with the idea of trying to think this issue through his writing about Antigone ‘between two deaths’. In – in Lacan’s terms – the ‘symbolic’ register (loosely, the register of language and the world as it is) the Empire died in 480; in his register of the Imaginary (the world as we think it should, or ought to, be) it didn’t die until Justinian’s wars. Now, away from my books, I can’t remember whether the two deaths at stake in Antigone are in the same sequence, first in the Symbolic and then in the Imaginary, but I think there are issues to think about there, in analysing the society and politics of that period.

For now, what I want to stress is that spectral aspect of the period (again, see also my unpublished piece on Style 1 for the 'undead' Roman Empire). So I give you (and, provided no one has come up with this before, claim as my coinage) a new term for the period between c.475 and c.550:

Ghost-imperial 

I thank you.

Thursday, 30 November 2023

Reflections on the End of Western Antiquity: 4. The supposed ‘Rupture’ of the Ancient Mediterranean , Part 4

Several problems are raised by the economic/political paradigm. As indicated last time, my aim here is not to replace them but to add a new level more concerned with ideas, attitudes or culture. To this end it’s important to note that the broad outlines of economic development sketched in Part 3 match, in general, those of the shifts in culture mapped out in Part 2, of the gradual turning away from each other of west and east (especially of east).

One difficulty is the lack of fit between the political change and the archaeologically-revealed patterns of exchange. The alleged end of the western ‘tax spine’, after the Vandal conquest of Africa, does not seem to me to fit the data very well. One issue is what exactly the Vandal conquest of Byzacena/Proconsularis and the 442 treaty with the imperial court actually meant. This is really for another time, but it seems to me that the treaty is generally reconstructed in terms of a ‘barbarian invaders/conquests’ paradigm that relies on a lot of assumptions that are not necessarily supported by the evidence itself. More importantly for current purposes, though, the patterns of African trade don’t really change after c.440. As we have seen, African traders if anything found new markets after that date and continued to trade with Italy and the south of Gaul as before, even if quantities might have declined. These issues also affect the argument that claims that the end of the western imperial command economy produced a dramatic shift in interregional connections. Logically, this ought to have happened but it does not seem to me to be readily visible in the archaeological data, in which pre-existing patterns continue, even if along (similarly pre-existing) trajectories of reduction in scale. You might not find much ARS or many African amphorae in northern Gaul in the fifth century but then you wouldn’t in the fourth either. Most of the northern Gaulish landscape was harnessed to the provisioning and remuneration of the Rhine army and it seems likely to me that, as James Harland has suggested, Britain might have also played a major role in the supply of the frontier garrisons. Consequently, the breakdown of regular government and the end of the imperial command economy is seen in the well-attested crisis in those areas, not in the patterns of Mediterranean trade.

We might also ask whether the reimposition of imperial rule is in itself sufficient to explain the startling shift in the direction of African trade in the sixth century. This seems superficially attractive as an explanation but closer reflection raises some important problems. One might, first of all, ask why the government would redirect the African annonae to Constantinople, which was amply supplied from Egypt and elsewhere already. Would/should we not see a decline in the market share of Egyptian exports if that were the case? More importantly, why would the imperial government not have reestablished the supposedly-ended (and supposedly crucial) ‘tax-spine’ to the newly reconquered city of Rome, and Byzantine Italian territories? African exports continue to reach Italy, albeit mostly (and increasingly to the detriment of other areas) Rome and in gradually decreasing numbers, until the end of the seventh century.

We might also think more closely about the ways in which wars affect long-distance exchange. Pirenne and others ascribed the breaking of long-distance Mediterranean trade to seaborne piracy, whether Arab or Vandal, but this is an implausible mechanism. Even if one were to assume that no one ever thought to provide merchant vessels with armed escorts, the relationship between piracy and seaborne commerce resembles that – in that early computer programming exercise – between foxes and chickens. If the chicken population [or seaborne merchant traffic] grows, the fox population [or profitable pirate activity] grows with it, because of the increased availability of food [loot]; there comes a point though where the fox population is so great that it is killing chickens faster than the chicken population can reproduce itself; at that point the lack of food leads to a decline, through starvation, in the fox population; eventually, however, the low numbers of predatory foxes allows the chicken population to grow again; and so on. Put more simply, you can’t have pirates without merchant ships for them to prey on. Pirenne’s thesis creates an image of a period during which Arab pirates wearily put to sea in spite of there being no shipping to attack. ‘Well, me hearties, none of us has seen a merchantman for ten years but here we go again; another day another dollar.’ The other strange point about Pirenne’s thesis is that although he thought – correctly – that long-distance trade flowed mostly from east to west, and although he thought this on the basis of texts describing imports from Palestine and Egypt, he still thought that the decisive blow to Mediterranean trade was dealt by the Arab conquests and/or by Arab fleets – creating the image of Arab pirates attacking ships that had sailed from their own ports [‘pirates on the starboard bow, cap’n!’ ‘Don’t worry lad, their ours.’]…

Be all that as it may, we might wonder how warfare affects trade. The key point I want to make is that for it to have seriously detrimental effects it needs to be ongoing for a long time. Even heavy fighting for a year or two, or a few years, is unlikely to bring about any serious shifts in trading patterns. Such events can be factored in to the usual response strategies. Campaigning by even small armies (as were the norm in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages) could produce famine but such could be responded to within the normal patterns of redistribution and relief, where they functioned. They might even produce windfalls for merchants able to sell at famine prices. More serious contenders as causal factors in long-term change are long periods of warfare such as the Gothic wars in Italy, or the wars with the Moors after the reconquest of Africa from the Vandals, or, especially, the long war between the Empire and Persia, and then with the Arabs. Such warfare is important not (or not just, or principally) for disrupting commerce, though it probably did so (though we might also remember that armies need provisioning and can act as markets) but through the disruption of production/supply and demand. Displacement of population or disruption of seasonal agricultural activities through the movement (year in, year out) of armies, associated famine and disease (plague especially from the mid-sixth century) dislocates or prevents the production of the surplus that in some way or other acts as the basis for commerce, as well as (partly in consequence) the ability for craftsmen to make the products that are traded, or the ability for markets to be held regularly with the usual security. It might be that twenty years of insecurity after Belisarius’ conquest had serious effects on some African production, but clearly it didn’t kill it off entirely. Similarly, the Gothic wars didn’t entirely end the market for African products in Italy. The wars in the east from 610 to mid-century do seem to have been fatal for the old eastern Mediterranean complex of commercial networks, production, and distribution, etc. Once again, though, we’re entitled to ask why, when the dust settled, they didn’t reemerge even if the materials being produced took different forms. Certainly, the creation of the Caliphate led to a profound rearrangement of trading networks – greater links between North Africa and the sub-Saharan world being one of the most important developments – but again, one would have to ask whether there was anything economically more logical or natural about those networks than the previously existing ones. Any investigation of that issue will lead you quite quickly to the role of attitudes, ideas, mentalité in shaping networks and connections, commercial and otherwise.

Some of the economic explanations adduced (concerning supply and demand, production costs, etc), while plausible and sophisticated, function mainly as descriptive extrapolations from data. They don’t necessarily emerge from the data themselves. Clearly, too, they are teleological extrapolations backwards from the eventual outcomes. All of this is fair enough, but the issue does need to be flagged up. And again there are some problems that arise, in my opinion anyway. One concerns the demise of the Mediterranean commercial links with the north-west. Some things from the Mediterranean were simply not available locally – olive oil is the obvious commodity here. Given the dominance of African oil production in the late imperial west, this ought to have been an important basis for commerce (and surely was). But what markets were there for this? Western towns generally contracted in size from the third century onwards but Mediterranean wares continue to be found in some north-western regions. The church’s need for oil for lighting and also for anointing, and the growth of Christianity may have provided new markets as, in the fifth century, might the new elite in western Britain wanting to show its prestige and Roman-ness. Alongside the seeming demise of the old Roman elite further to the east, this might explain the shift in the routes via which African exports entered Britain. What seems odd to me, though, is that when the economy in the north-west recovered in the late sixth century (with the revival of towns, greater aristocratic control of surplus, related increase in church foundation, increased monetisation of the economy, growing craft-specialisation, newly established markets, etc) the market share of Mediterranean products, having managed to persist through over 200 years of economic change and (especially) decline, suddenly disappeared. Imports found on sites all around the Irish Sea (east and west, north and south, rather than principally on its southern and western shores, as hitherto) seem to come almost entirely from various parts of Gaul. Descriptively one can say that more local products squeezed out the African imports but one would still need to ask why. Costs, etc, don’t seem to me to present the whole story. The whole point of my discussion thus far is, on the one hand, that normative, supposedly natural, logical, or eternal economic laws of supply and demand are in themselves inadequate to the task of explaining the changes of the fifth to seventh centuries. But so too is the notion that trade can just be ‘turned off’, like a tap, by high-level political events.

It's time, I think, to try to add some elements of ideas and worldviews to the picture to round it out (rather than replace other explanations with them). I have already said that the development of western economic systems runs to some extent parallel to some changes in outlooks and attitudes (though not necessarily to high politics or governmental shifts). This is not in itself news. Long ago it was pointed out (maybe by R.S. Lopez – I will check and correct if necessary when I have my books) that the papacy was quite happy to import Egyptian papyrus until the rulers of Egypt started stamping papyri with (to Christians) unacceptable quotations from the Qur’an. The shifts in trading routes and networks after the creation of the Caliphate are also clearly about something other than laws of economics. The demand for Mediterranean goods in western Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries was surely in large part because of the cultural cachet of commodities produced in, or somehow associated with, the Christian, Imperial, Roman World. As has been mentioned this period represents the high point of Romanitas in the region. Were easterners simply no longer interested in western trade and markets? It’s not as if there were no important commodities to be had there, and – as noted – the market opportunities ought, if anything, to have been improving. Three letters of Gregory the Great (and I am grateful to Helen Foxhall Forbes for drawing my attention to them) are significant here. Gregory is writing to the Patriarch of Alexandria who, he has heard, needs large timbers for Alexandrian vessels. Gregory could, and did, get his hands on just the sort of timber that’s wanted (in Calabria if memory serves), and get it transported up to Rome, but the Egyptians didn’t send ships that were big enough to take them, and cutting them to fit would, obviously, rather defeat the object. Gregory, it seems, is quite keen to help and to provide this timber, which obviously isn’t available in Egypt, but the Patriarch, it appears, can’t even be bothered to write back.

Thus, I would propose that an important reason (not, for clarity the reason, or the most important) for the end of any significant market share for Mediterranean commodities is that final cultural turning away of east and west after the mid-sixth century. This is a conclusion that has some important bearings on the debate upon pre-modern economies, between ‘formalist’ and ‘substantivist’ positions.