In the third part of these reflections we finally enter the territory of the Pirenne Thesis, and indeed of my project: the changes of the late sixth and early seventh centuries.
Let’s recap. Around 530, in spite of all the developments
discussed last time, in spite of the socio-cultural dislocation that had been
going on since the third century, and in spite of the dramatic events of the
fifth, western Europe still thought of itself as part of the Roman Empire.
Trade and exchange still united the Mediterranean and some areas beyond. Commercial
networks reached round the western coasts of the Iberian Peninsula, and Gaul,
as far as the eastern shores (mainly) of the Irish Sea. These contacts made the
fifth and sixth centuries the period when the Romanitas of the western
highlands of Britain was most strongly asserted. An inscribed stone in North
Wales shows that those inhabitants of the region who were interested or cared
were still aware of who the current consul was.
Obviously, there had been cultural changes. By this date, in
most regions of the western Empire, villas had ceased to exist as such. Did
this mean an end of Romanitas? Clearly not. The idea that the end of the
villas reflected a conscious decision to reject Rome was one of the sillier and
most insular ideas (of many) to permeate British archaeology in the ‘90s and
‘00s. Only a few areas still had any significant number of villas (occupied
recognisably as villas) by the second quarter of the sixth century (notably the
south-west of Gaul, though a revival might have been under way in Italy) but
there was heavy investment (including on the site of former villas) in
Christianity and in other, new expressions of Roman-ness. As noted, westerners
still thought they were living in the Roman Empire. Further, a martial model of
masculinity had emerged in the late imperial period which, although
ostentatiously setting itself up as rejecting traditional aspects of civic
masculinity, was still very much a manifestation of a Roman identity and relied
on the existence of traditional ideas for its socio-political cachet. At the
start of the sixth century, both Theoderic the Ostrogoth and Clovis the Frank
allowed themselves to be addressed as augustus. This turned out to be
crucial, as we’ll see.
Let’s pause here, though to look again at the turning away
of the east from the west. Jeroen Wijnendaele recently reminded me of the point
made by R. Blockley that even in the fifth century, Eastern Roman writers had
started to refer to the inhabitants of the Pars Occidentalis as
‘Italians’ or ‘westerners’, while referring to themselves as Romans. Around the
middle of the sixth century, Cosmas Indicopleustes wrote his Christian
Topography. This, mostly, is concerned with his voyages, early in the
century, around the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, with famously valuable
accounts of various regions in and around that sea (whether or not he had
actually visited them). What I find interesting, though, is that, although
resident in Alexandria and writing about the nature of the world, Cosmas shows
pretty much no interest in the western Mediterranean. He knows it exists and
goes as far as Cádiz (not actually on the Mediterranean…) but that is about it.
One might of course argue that Cosmas’ own experience simply hadn’t taken him
that way, and that he was writing a Christian topography based, obviously on
the holy land, but that wouldn’t entirely negate my point. After all the Holy
Apostles (Peter and Paul) had headed westwards. At around the same time,
Procopius wrote his history of Justinian’s wars, the bulk of which concerns the
western Mediterranean. What strikes me about Procopius’ work is just how
remarkably badly informed about and/or interested in the west he is. His
ignorance about the geography of Gaul makes this abundantly clear. Even
educated easterners who had been in Italy knew or cared very little about
regions to the west. One might argue that Procopius, unlike, say, Ammianus,
never went further than Italy but my point is hardly altered by that fact. I
don’t think Ammianus ever went to Britain but the information he acquired
enabled him to write fairly reliable accounts of what happened there. Procopius’
comments about Brittia (History of the Wars 8.20), by contrast, resemble
traditional Graeco-Roman ethnography about the outermost regions of the world
rather than things that relate to a former imperial province. Even he thought
it sounded more like the sort of thing that you might dream and, for this
reason, he seems to have decided that they must relate to a different island
completely (Brittia, rather than Britannia[[1]]).
Procopius’ ignorance or lack of interest is part of a trend that is only
amplified in the Byzantine historians that follow him. While western writers
(like Fredegar for example) show an interest in news from the east, however
garbled it had become, there seems to be no reciprocation in historical works
written in the eastern empire.
Unsurprisingly, if you have been following my thoughts on
this stuff over the years, the crucial change seems to have been the new
ideology that emerged in Constantinople in around the 520s, usually associated
with Justinian (even if it appears earliest under his uncle and predecessor
Justin I). Possibly building – to a greater extent than I had realised (see
Blockley’s point about fifth-century vocabulary, above) – on attitudes that had
developed during the fifth-century, Justin or Justinian added the new – and significantly
different – point that the west was no longer even a part of the western
Empire, and (by the 530s) needed to be ‘reconquered’ by the Roman Empire. As I
have repeatedly argued, this cut away the bases of almost every traditional
idea about legitimate power or authority and caused people in the west to try
to find new bases of authority. As I see it, this put the cap on over a century
of shifting attitudes. Especially from Justinian’s reign, the West became lands
of barbarism and heresy, or at least of insufficiently rigorous orthodox
religious thinking. It’s a common mistake, however, to think that the West
somehow looked up to the eastern Empire in imitatio imperii.[2]
After Justinian, in the late sixth to eighth centuries at least, this seems
fundamentally mistaken. The west certainly reciprocated the east’s view of the other
as sullied by heresy. In Spain, Visigothic writers seem, if anything, to have
adopted an attitude of translatio [rather than imitatio] imperii
(see Jamie Wood’s work on this, in particular): a diametrically different
attitude. Chilperic of Neustria seems to have had a similar idea (Gregory, Histories
6.1). Otherwise, and probably most commonly, the touchstones used to justify
various aspects of social organisation unsurprisingly moved away from Rome,
especially towards the Old Testament, even if some of the general virtues etc
remained the same. By the early seventh century the old trading patterns between
the Mediterranean and the Irish Sea had died out, to be replaced by new ones
connecting the European Mainland, whether the Rhineland or the Bay of Biscay,
with lowland Britain as well as the western highlands, now both shores of the
Irish Sea, and the Scottish/Pictish north. Major changes were also under way in
the Mediterranean itself. We’ll return to this.
What conclusions can we draw about the end of Mediterranean
unity by about 600? (Here there will be a little repetition from the last
article.) It seems to me to be important to note that, viewed from c.600, it
looks like the culmination of a process that, in social, political, and
economic terms, had begun as early as the 3rd century, had picked up
pace in the 4th, and taken on new cultural aspects in the 5th.
Justinian’s ideology and – especially – his wars can be said to have brought
this process to an end. As I said last time, however, it’s important to tread
carefully here. On the one hand, I think it’s probably a mistake to see this
development as ‘natural’ or ‘inevitable’ and to cite the point that, in
long-term perspective, the period of Mediterranean unity is rather more unusual
than periods when the east and west form generally separate spheres. Similarly,
Chris Wickham made the very good point that long-distance trade round the
Mediterranean shouldn’t be assumed to be natural, especially given that
most regions around the Mediterranean produce the same principal tradable
commodities (grain, oil, wine: the ‘Mediterranean trilogy’). While the
difficulties posed to communications or travel by physical geography shouldn’t
be underestimated, the idea that, somehow inevitably, they would eventually
undermine the features that had brought about unity seems to me to be too
crude. After all, the aspects of physical geography that facilitated ‘natural’
connectivity and communication (the sea, rivers, etc) remained just as much as
the ones that presented ‘natural’ barriers to the same (mountains – or indeed
rivers and the sea…).
Second, and again this is a point that will surprise no one
who’s followed my thinking over the past 15 years or so, looking back from
c.600 gives a misleading sense of unidirectionality and teleology to the series
of events and their final outcome. All of the events I have talked about could
have been reversed; none was the only possible response to the situation
pertaining at the time; some of the political changes – as noted in the last
part of these thoughts – had beneficial aspects as well as, at least with
hindsight, negative ones in terms of Mediterranean unity; many had effects,
negative or positive, that were not deliberately intended. The narrative arc
mentioned at the start of the previous paragraph can be deconstructed (in the
proper sense) at every turn.[3]
The main point I want to stress, though this will really be
discussed in Part 4, is the importance of ideas, attitudes, and political
culture. With that in mind, I return to the core of the Pirenne Thesis:
economics. He generally rated Mediterranean unity according to the continuity
of the trading patterns that existed in the Roman period and so thought that
when (as he thought) Arab conquests and seaborne raids and piracy killed off
east-to-west trade that ruptured the unity of the Middle Sea.
Decades of sophisticated study of forms of evidence that
weren’t available to Pirenne (principally archaeological evidence of various
types) and of more refined study of the evidence that was available to
him, has modified some important aspects of his ‘thesis’ while leaving others
broadly in place. As we saw in Part 1 of these thoughts, the north-west of
Europe formed an economic sphere largely separate from the Roman Mediterranean
by the fourth century; on the other hand, the final demise of the eastern
Mediterranean economic sphere appears to take place at about the time of the
Arab conquests.
A brief summary of my understanding of recent/ish thinking
on this might be helpful. There are very good discussions of the problems of
this evidence in Simon Loseby’s chapter on the Mediterranean economy in The
New Cambridge Medieval History Vol.2 (ed. Fouracre) and in the relevant
chapter of Chris Wickham’s The Framing of the Early Middle Ages. One
point I would emphasise though concerns the implications of distribution maps.
We might find an African amphora in Cornwall, or some African tableware in
Marseille. The implication of those places in networks is complex, however.
Roman law envisaged that a ship might be away from its home port for at least
two years (it enacted that it had to come home within two years), plying
different routes perhaps in different ways with different forms of cargo.
Material might move from A to B via several shorter hops involving different
people rather than just via one long-haul voyage from a place close to the
material’s production to one near its consumption. Commodities might be being
moved in ships that have little connection to the place where those commodities
were produced. It’s possible then that our distributions give misleading
impressions of connectivity and mask the nature of the networks, and possibly
conceal even more change than they reveal. For example, the general
distribution of African finewares between modern Tunisia, Italy, and the south
of France might look broadly similar between the fifth and seventh centuries,
even if declining in absolute numbers. Theoretically, however, it’s possible
that the fifth-century African pottery in Provence came more or less directly
from Carthage, in ships that stopped off at various points on the way, whereas sixth-century
African wares came via various entrepôts, ultimately being delivered, in short-haul
hops, in the ships of Italian merchants. Or vice versa.
There had always been a difference between the eastern and
western halves of the Mediterranean (going back to the Bronze Age at least).
The Aegean is a sea of many islands facilitating a dense web of routes, while
Crete and Cyprus make handy staging posts for sailors travelling in several
directions. That said, in the late Roman period, the different regions formed
fairly distinct economic regions in many regards. A ‘tax-spine’ connected Egypt
and Constantinople. In the West, as intimated in Part 2, the west had also
fragmented into a number of economic regions, often quite large. This
fragmentation was related to the (generally cultural or socio-political) issues
that had eroded the unusual unity of the Mediterranean world by the third
century. The Carthage-to-Rome ‘tax spine’ mentioned earlier, certainly
dominated exchange between Africa and Italy, the far south of Gaul and the west
of the Iberian Peninsula, but it seems to have had rather less effect on other –
quite large – regions like central Hispania or the north of Gaul. There
were nevertheless general similarities between the two halves of the
Mediterranean world. The fundamental dominance of regional over interregional networks
is similar in both zones. The Egypt-to-Constantinople ‘tax spine’ shows some
similarities to the western Carthage-to-Rome spine, though it has been
suggested that it was less dominant (I think that this begs a number of
questions). Nonetheless, long-distance commerce around the Mediterranean
continued. African Red Slip (ARS) was found (in quantities that varied over
time) in the east, and Phocaean Red Slip (PRS) in the west. Other, less
archaeologically-visible commodities were also traded from east to west.
Differences seem to be more pronounced in the fifth and
sixth centuries. The east continued to be prosperous and the various links
between the regions remained. The connections between western regions decline
further. The extent of African commerce declines, though it continues to be the
most important axis of interregional commerce. On the other hand, as has
repeatedly been pointed out, African wares continue to reach the west of
Britain, possibly by more direct routes than before. These patterns continue
into the sixth century, but after the Eastern Roman reconquest there is a
revival of connections between Africa and the East. Trade nevertheless continues
between Africa and Italy, Provence and the regions further afield. What at
least seems to me to be under-appreciated is the preponderance, within the
sphere of African exports, of the imperial territories (not just in the east
but in Sicily, Rome, and other Italian regions). Stories suggest that in the
late sixth century, the west of Britain was still known in the east as a source
of tin. Some luxury products from the east continued to reach Gaul, via
Marseille (whether via intermediaries in Carthage and elsewhere is unknown).
All this changes in the seventh century. Some of the change
happens pretty quickly. The connections between the Mediterranean and the Irish
Sea generally fizzled out between the late sixth and early seventh century.
Analyses by Patrick Périn and Thomas Calligaro show that the supply of good
quality Sri Lankan garnets to the west also ended around 600. The demise of the
prosperous eastern Mediterranean regions and their interconnectivity collapsed
in a couple of generations in the mid-seventh century. African commerce to the
west struggled on to the end of the seventh century but not beyond. It cannot
be claimed that east-west commerce ended in absolute terms by 700 but it was
certainly only a shadow of its former self after that, reduced beyond
recognition in terms of quantity and the range of goods traded.
Explanations for these changes have understandably
concentrated upon issues such as production, supply and demand, and on
political change (the Vandals allegedly ending the Carthage-Rome ‘tax spine’;
the end of the imperial command economy; the Arab conquests). These have been
the result of close analysis and I certainly don’t intend to dismiss them. What
I want to ask, though, is whether they are the whole story. There are a number
of problems that arise in only looking at this issue either in economic terms
or in those of ‘high political’ events. I will look more at these in Part 4.
[1]
I open EoWA vol.1 (The Fates of the Late Antique State) with a
discussion of this.
[2]
I was once at a conference where a non-specialist asked a famous Byzantinist
about the relationship between Byzantine culture and the west, and the response
was that Byzantine culture was ‘a dominant culture’. This view seems widespread
even among some specialists on western European history, but it really lacks
any substantive empirical support, other than in the sense that that was indeed
what Byzantines thought. In this case I think it was one of those instances
where, in the same way that people say that people come to resemble their dogs,
historians come to resemble their subjects.
[3]
In the last part I promised that I would speculate on whether the circumstances
that had brought about Mediterranean unity in the later Republican period could
have been reproduced. I am going to break that promise. Maybe at some point I
will write some ideas about that but not now. It’s not quite, but it verges on,
‘what if’ history, which I think is mostly ahistorical and intellectually no
more than an entertaining parlour game.
