Framing the Early
Middle Ages
Europe and the Mediterranean
400–800
C H R I S W I C K H A M
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Ihave beenworking on this book for nearly seven years, and have discussed issues relating to it with nearly every late Romanist and early medievalist I have met during that time; I have gained insights from too many people to list. First of all, I should like to thank those who commented on sections of the book: Leslie Brubaker, who read almost the whole text; Paul Fouracre, John Haldon, Hugh Kennedy, and Eduardo Manzano, who read sections of Chapter3; Mayke de Jong, Paul Fouracre, John Haldon, Guy Halsall, Peter Heather, Eduardo Manzano, and Peter Sarris, who read sections of Chapter4; Jean-Pierre Devroey and Domenico Vera, who read sections of Chapter5; Steven Bassett, Nicholas Brooks, Wendy Davies, Simon Esmonde-Cleary, and Patrick Wormald, who read Chapter6; Steven Bassett, Matt Innes, and Peter Sarris, who read sections of Chapter7; Sonia Gutie´rrez, Helena Hamerow, Simon Loseby, and Mark Whittow, who read sections of Chapter8; Domenico Vera and Chris Dyer, who read Chapter9; Simon Loseby, who read all of, and Lisa Fentress and John Haldon, who read sections of, Chapter10; Paul Arthur, Lisa Fentress, Jodi Magness, Olga Magoula, Eduardo Manzano, Paul Van Ossel, and Bryan Ward-Perkins, who read some or all of Chapter 11. They were often sharp critics, and I gained immensely from their insights, suggestions, and bibliographical references; I know they do not all agree with my conclusions.
Another group of people, partially overlapping, consists of friends with whom I started when I needed to get a sense of the bibliography of a given region: people I could not do without as guides to one area or another. These include Steven Bassett, Julio Escalona, Simon Esmonde-Cleary, Lisa Fentress, Riccardo Francovich, Hugh Kennedy, Eduardo Manzano, Ulf Na¨sman, Pierre Ouzoulias, Claude Raynaud, Peter Sarris, and Paul Van Ossel. I must also here express my great debt to Rosamond McKitterick, Ghislaine Noye´, and Pierre Toubert, who invited me to teach in, respectively, the University of Cambridge (to give the2003Trevelyan Lectures), the E´cole des Chartes, and the Colle`ge de France; the lectures I gave there are all, in more or less revised form, in this book and I gained enormously from the conversations and library access—and the time to research and write—that I had both in Cambridge and in Paris.
Trement, Marco Valenti, Alan Walmsley, Mark Whyman, Ian Wood, and Enrico Zanini. A particular thanks is owed to Sue Bowen, who has spent what amounts to years typing this book, and to Harry Buglass, who drew the maps. The index was compiled by Alicia Correˆa. Here the list is certainly incomplete, but can be added to with some of the more specific acknowledgements in footnotes; I am also very grateful to the wide range of people who sent me their books and articles, many unpublished, including doctoral theses; I could not have written this book without you. I have tried to restrict this list to those who, knowingly or unknowingly, had a direct effect on the book; if I was to include the rest of the people with whom I have dealt fruitfully and intellectually since1997, the list would be at least twice as long. I must finally thank three institutions: the University of Birmingham Main Library, and the Ashmolean (now Sackler) Library in Oxford, where I did most of my research—I could not have written without the latter in particular; and the British Academy, whose granting of a Research Readership in1997–9enabled me to start this project in the first place. This book is the (delayed) result of that Readership.
Birmingham C.J.W.
List of maps x
Abbreviations xi
Notes on terminology xiv
1. Introduction 1
Part I. States
2. Geography and politics 17 3. The form of the state 56
Part II. Aristocratic power-structures
4. Aristocracies 153 5. Managing the land 259 6. Political breakdown and state-building in the North 303
Part III. Peasantries
7. Peasants and local societies: case studies 383 8. Rural settlement and village societies 442 9. Peasant society and its problems 519
Part IV. Networks
10. Cities 591
11. Systems of exchange 693 12. General conclusions 825
Bibliography 832
1. Primary sources 832 2. Secondary sources 845
1. The regions discussed in this book and other placenames xvi
2. The Roman empire in400 xvii
3. Africa xviii
4. Egypt xix
5. Syria and Palestine xx
6. The Byzantine heartland xxi
7. Italy xxii
8. Spain and Mauretania xxiii
9. Central and southern Gaul xxiv
10. Northern Gaul xxv
11. Britain xxvi
12. Ireland xxvii
13. Denmark xxviii
In Maps3–10:
. BENEVENTO Roman city
AA Auctores antiquissimi
AEA Archivo espan˜ol de arqueologı´a
Æthelberht The laws of the earliest English kings, pp.4–16
Aistulf Leges Aistulfi
Alfred The laws of the earliest English kings, pp.62–92
AM Archeologia medievale
APEL Arabic papyri in the Egyptian library
ARS African Red Slip ware b. ibn
BAR British archaeological reports
BCS Cartularium saxonicum Cap. Capitularia
CB Breviarium ecclesiae Ravennatis (Codice Bavaro) CDL Codice diplomatico longobardo
ChLA Chartae latinae antiquiores
CJ Codex Iustinianus
CPR Corpus papyrorum Raineri CTh Theodosiani libri XVI
Dip. Diplomata
Dip. Kar. Diplomata Karolinorum
Dip. Merov. Diplomata regum francorum e stirpe merovingica
DSP derive´es des sigille´es pale´ochre´tiennes
Ep.,Epp. Epistula(orEpistola),Epistulae(orEpistolae) ERS Egyptian Red Slip ware
Form. Formulae
Form. Wis. Formulae Wisigothicae
GC Gregory of Tours,Liber in gloria confessorum GM Gregory of Tours,Liber in gloria martyrum
GWW Glazed White ware
HE Bede,Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum HGL Histoire ge´ne´rale de Languedoc
HL Paul the Deacon,Historia Langobardorum
Hlothhere The laws of the earliest English kings, pp.18–22
Ine The laws of the earliest English kings, pp.36–60
JRA Journal of Roman archaeology
LH Gregory of Tours,Decem libri historiarum
Liutprand Leges Liutprandi
LRA Late Roman amphora (see Ch.11, n.24)
LRE A. H. M. Jones,The later Roman empire
LV Leges Visigothorum
MDL Memorie e documenti per servire all’istoria di Lucca MEFR Me´langes de l’E´cole franc¸aise de Rome
MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica
NJ Novellae Iustiniani
Nov. Maj. Novellae Maioriani Nov. Val. Novellae Valentiniani P. Ant. The Antinoopolis papyri P. Apoll. Papyrus grecs d’Apolloˆnos Anoˆ
P. Bad. Vero¨ffentlichungen aus den badischen Papyrus-Sammlungen
P. Cair. Masp. Papyrus grecs d’e´poque byzantine P. Flor. Papiri greco-egizii, III
P. Ital. Die nichtliterarischer lateinischen Papyri Italiens aus der Zeit445–700
P. Laur. Dai papiri della Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana P. Lond. Greek papyri in the British museum
P. Mich. The Aphrodite papyri in the University of Michigan papyrus collection
P. Ness. Excavations at Nessana, III
P. Oxy. The Oxyrhynchus papyri P. Petra The Petra papyri
P. Ross.-Georg. Papyri russischer und georgischer Sammlungen P. Ryl. Ar. Catalogue of the Arabic papyri in the John Rylands
library, Manchester
P. Ryl. Copt. Catalogue of the Coptic manuscripts in the collection of the John Rylands library, Manchester
P. Vatic. Aphrod. I papiri vaticani greci di Aphrodito
PBE J. R. Martindale (ed.),Prosopography of the Byzan-tine empire
PBSR Papers of the British School at Rome
PERF Papyrus Erzherzog Rainer. Fu¨hrer durch die Ausstel-lung
PG Patrologiae cursus completus, series latina PL Patrologiae cursus completus, series graeca
PLRE J. R. Martindale,et al. (eds.),Prosopography of the later Roman empire
PO Patrologia orientalis
PSR Papyri Schott-Reinhardt
Ratchis Leges Ratchis
RF Regesto di Farfa
Rothari Edictus Rothari
RS Red Slip ware
S P. H. Sawyer,Anglo-Saxon charters SRG Scriptores rerum germanicarum
SRL Scriptores rerum langobardicarum et italicarum, saec. VI–IX
SRM Scriptores rerum merovingicarum
SS Scriptores
Trad. Wiz. Traditiones Wizenburgenses
TSHT terra sigillata hispa´nica tardı´a
Ub. Urkundenbuch
VM Gregory of Tours,De virtutibus sancti Martini VP Gregory of Tours,Liber vitae patrum
Wihtred The laws of the earliest English kings, pp.24–30
Placenames
I have done my best to refer to placenames in their modern, not ancient or medieval, spellings, so Me´rida not Emerita, Bologna not Bononia, only using English spellings (generally in fact borrowed from French) for places like Milan, Athens, or Cologne, where Milano, Athe¯nai, Ko¨ln would seem precious. In the West this creates few problems, for most medieval historians do the same (ancient historians often use classical forms, however). For regions of the Roman empire now in Arab-speaking countries, and sometimes in Turkey and the Balkans, historians frequently use ancient or medieval names to the exclusion of modern ones, particularly when they are very different. Here I have used both, putting the modern one in brackets without an initial article, so Arsinoe¨ (Madı¯nat al-Fayyu¯m); only where the ancient name (or an Anglicization of it) is so well known that to use the modern one genuinely contributes nothing, like Constantinople or Antioch, have I left it. So also I have left well-known ancient names where there is no modern settlement, as with Caesa-rea in modern Israel. CaesaCaesa-rea is also one of a handful of ancient Greek names that have been left in Latinized versions (others are Nicaea and Phocaea), on the grounds that they are so well known in this form that consistency would confuse. In Egypt, where Coptic texts often provide a third name, I have put in all three when using Coptic sources, so Sioout (Greek Lykopolis, modern Asyu¯t.). Arabic transliterations are also very variable; when I have been able to pin down a classical Arabic form I have normally used it, except in the Maghreb, where I have used the Francicized transliterations current in the countries themselves, so Kairouan not Qayrawa¯n.
Personal names
used English, not the less familiar Greek, so Prokopios’Buildings, notDe aedificiisor Peri ktismato¯n.
Geographical terminology
The ten geographical units discussed in this book will normally be called ‘regions’, although, when they coincided with political units, I shall also use the names of these units for variation, as in the period, after the620s, when the Visigothic kingdom roughly coincided with ‘Spain’. How to name larger and smaller subdivisions of these regions caused me some difficulty, not least because the word ‘region’ is used for relatively small units in many countries, both in official usage and popular speech (theregioneof Lazio, for example). I have had to choose, and stick by, one termino-logical system, to avoid confusion, even if it sometimes looks odd. Accordingly, formal subdivisions of my regions will be referred to by their then-used names, provinces, duchies, themes, and so on; but the major subdivisions will be referred to in general as ‘sub-regions’, a suitably imprecise and therefore neutral term that makes comparison between, say, the Lombard kingdom of northern Italy and Tus-cany, the papal patrimonium S. Petri(i.e. Lazio), and the duchy of Benevento a linguistically more straightforward process. Smaller units will be called areas, zones, (city) territories—as well as, sometimes, counties or dioceses where this would be a technically exact usage. The smallest blocks, small river-valleys or groups of villages, will be called ‘microregions’.
On villas
0 500 1000
WijsterF r i s OdoornWarendorf i a
SPAIN region discussed in this book
Scotland region not discussed in this book
placename not on other maps
Map 1. The regions discussed in this book and other placenames.
ANTIOCH
NICOPOLIS
Map 6. The Byzantine heartland.
Maps
Basque Country
Map 8. Spain and Mauretania.
Maps
V e x i n
Åhus
Uppåkra
Sorte Muld
Bornholm Skåne
Lundeborg
Neble Stevns Bellingegård Tissø LejreCopenhagen
Sjælland Jutland
Stavad
Stentinget
Bejsebakken
Århus
Samsø Nørre Snede
Jelling Mørup
Vorbasse
Dankirke
Glavendrup
Fyn
Angeln
Gudme
Schleswig
Hedeby
Danevirke Hjemsted Ribe Dejbjerg Omgård
N
0
kilometres
50 100
Map 13. Denmark.
iii
Introduction
In t h e l a s t three decades the study of the early middle ages has been transformed. Far more people write about its documentary history; what we can say about its archaeology has multiplied tenfold—in some countries, a hundredfold. The sorts of questions asked about the material have changed radically too, with far more sophisticated analyses of political process and cultural change being now offered than ever existed before. This develop-ment is, of course, common to the historical profession as a whole; all the same, in some areas—the analysis of the construction of sanctity, for ex-ample—the period400–800is a trendsetter. The community of scholars is also more international than it was: this is an ongoing process, started for early medievalists above all by the Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Med-ioevo and their Spoleto conferences from 1953 onwards, and in the last decade channelled, in highly stimulating ways, by the European Science Foundation’s Transformation of the Roman World project of1993–8.
McCormick’s major survey,The origins of the European economy, of2001. The very recent inclusion of early medieval western society in the topics for study for the French agre´gationhas also generated several excellent over-views.1But if one wants to go further, in social history in particular, one has
to go back to Dopsch.
One reason for this is that the internationalism of scholarship is even now only skin deep. The early middle ages is a visceral period: it is the period when the polities first formed that are the genealogical ancestors of the nation states of today. The importance of these foundations continues to matter greatly to historians, whether consciously or unconsciously. All the sharpest debates about the period have always been about what are per-ceived as the major elements in national genealogies—the formation of unitary kingdoms in Denmark or England, their absence in Italy or Ireland, the reality and nature of the Arab break in Spanish or Palestinian history, the division on linguistic lines between France and Germany, and, all through every country of western Europe, the old issue of the exact role that ‘Ger-manic’ immigrants into the Roman empire had in the creation of those elements of national identity that are locally regarded as most significant. This latter issue remained important even in a decade like the 1990s, in which the pendulum moved resolutely in a Romanist direction, and against an overemphasis on the Germanic influence in any Roman province, a development which has some internationalist implications, as we shall see. The problem about all these debates is that, in their national forms, they make most sense only to scholars from one country, and sometimes no sense at all outside its borders—if indeed they are known about at all to other scholars, caged inside their own country-specific preoccupations. I called this situation ‘cultural solipsism’ when I lamented it a decade ago,2 and,
although the situation has eased slightly, as more people go to conferences abroad, it has by no means gone away: everybody who has done so has had the experience of finding in at least some international conferences that people from other countries were in reality talking about wholly different things, even when they were apparently using the same scientific language. Another development that could also potentially dissolve the national cul-tural traditions that dominate the field, the existence of a sizeable and
1 Dopsch,Economic and social foundations; idem,Die Wirtschaftsentwicklung; Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne; Duby,Early growth(the English translation ofGuerriers et paysans); Hodges and Whitehouse,Mohammed, Charlemagne; McCormick,Origins; Depreux, Les socie´te´s occidentales; Le Jan,La socie´te´; Devroey,E´conomie rurale. See further the com-parative social history of war in Halsall,Warfare. Pirenne, but not Dopsch, has been the focus of some historiographical interest recently, largely in Italian—perhaps paradoxically, given his relative lack of interest in Italy: Petralia, ‘A proposito dell’immortalita`’; Delogu, ‘Reading Pirenne again’; Violante,Uno storico europeo. Note that throughout this book citations are given in short-title form, to save space.
increasing contingent of scholars who study another country, has mostly up to now not had that effect either: by and large, such scholars have the choice between being absorbed into the national debates of the country they study, or else keeping a distance from them, but only because they have remained attached to the debates of their country of origin. In the latter situation they can add a critical element, and sometimes do, but in that case they have often been ignored by the historians in the country they study.
The other de´marche chosen by recent scholars to get around these traps is continuity. A genuine arena for relatively neutral international scholarship is the Roman empire, given the size, the transnational scale, of its political system. Indeed, the Roman empire is toooftenseen as a whole, tooseldom
as a collection of provinces. This is a position that I shall argue against on occasion in the pages that follow; but at least the solipsism of the early middle ages is less often felt in its study, and people argue about issues covering wide geographical areas, often using a wide variety of foreign languages as they do so. The history of the Byzantine empire has carried on this international tradition, for the obvious reason that it can be regarded as the most direct heir of Rome. (I leave aside the issue of Orientalism here, the western European construction of the East as the history-less Other, which is these days less serious an issue for Byzantine than for Islamic studies.3 There is, anyway, Greek scholarship on Byzantium—though less
Turkish scholarship—which is integrated into the international network.) It cannot be said, unfortunately, that the study of Byzantium has had much impact on the West; only a handful of scholars, such as Dietrich Claude or Michael McCormick, have ever studied both with equal attention. All the same, it seems to me significant that one of the contexts in which inter-nationally orientated scholarship of the post-Roman western world, too, has felt most at ease is the study of Roman continuity. In a sense, if the sixth-century West is refigured as still-Roman, and the seventh for that matter— indeed, even the Carolingians for some people—then national history-writ-ing can be put off till later. This is fully legitimate in some areas—intellectual culture, most notably; religious history, perhaps; political practice, with more difficulty. But it comes at a price. Much of the most fruitful inter-national debate has been achieved in the framework of the illusion that nothing of major importance had changed in the post-Roman world at all. This is further emphasized, I think, by the impact of two separate cultural traditions in ‘late late Roman’ studies. One is the by now considerable volume of British scholarship on continental European topics, for there is a strong strand of British (particularly English) national culture that seeks to stress historical continuities at all costs, and to play down any breaks, as can be seen in, for example, much recent English writing on the English/British Civil War, or the French Revolution. The second is a Catholic tradition,
largely French in recent years, which sees the real caesura as the Christian-ization of the Roman empire, and the religious continuity between the late empire and the early middle ages as more important than any political/ institutional break (and even this latter has recently been denied by some). These two elements are very different, and have little influence on each other; nor do they by any means encompass all such scholarship on the period. But they contribute to continuitist readings in the samesortof ways, all the more because they are in general unconscious. This is why, perhaps, there are so few overviews, even in the framework of what one could call the ‘Romanist paradigm’: because it is so unconscious that it has not even reached paradigmatic status. It is not like this that we will substitute for Pirenne.
(largely historical) scholarship, already referred to, fully matched by the catastrophe theories of other scholars, largely archaeologists, which are equally unclear in their articulation as real historical phenomena, in oper-ation on the ground. It is that rooting, or anchoring, that we could usefully attempt in the immediate future, before we get near to shifting our para-digms; and this will only come, it seems to me, through more systematic regional comparison.
I have argued for more comparison in early medieval studies before, and I have attempted it in analyses of the central middle ages.4So it seemed to me
appropriate to follow my own precepts and try the same for the earlier period. This book is focused on the period400–800, long enough to include the Roman empire before its crisis period, and to explore the changes that derived from that crisis for some time thereafter. The cut-off date of800is arbitrary, but it means that I do not have to consider the effects of the Carolingian and ‘Abba¯sid takeovers, which introduce several new problems; the Carolingian period in Francia and Italy also coincides with a substantial increase in documentary evidence, which I have for the most part avoided using—in Francia this book in part stops in 751. The area covered by the book is western Europe and the Mediterranean, or, in other terms, the former Roman empire and some of its northern outliers. From North to South and West to East, the regions I have focused on, for comparative purposes, are: Denmark, Ireland, England and Wales, Gaul/Francia, Spain, Italy, North Africa, the Byzantine heartland of the Aegean and western Anatolia, Syria and Palestine, and Egypt.5 Of these, only Denmark and
Ireland were not once Roman. I chose Denmark as my major non-Roman parallel because, unlike the other Scandinavian countries, it was close enough to continental political and economic networks to accumulate quite a lot of diagnostic archaeological material; and because its state-building process, unlike those in the otherwise ecologically similar regions of Frisia and Saxony, was not interrupted by the Franks. Ireland, for its part, simply has so much early medieval documentation that it would have been wrong to exclude it, although its development was sufficientlysui generis
that incorporating it has not been as easy as I hoped (see below, pp.354–64). I excluded the Slav lands, both in the Roman empire (in the Balkans) and outside it, because of my own linguistic weaknesses. Armenia was excluded for the same reason, and also because its development ran along such
4 Wickham,Mountains; idem,Community and clientele; idem, ‘La signoria rurale’.
5 These regional names deserve some comment. They are generally the easiest translations of
genuinely different lines; if it had been included, it would have been hard to exclude Iran, and then the book would really have got out of hand. There are other absences, but ten major regions are already hard to manipulate— adding each new one, I found, is quite like the qualitative leap in difficulty produced by adding each new ball while juggling.6
In the framework of that set of regions, I have concentrated on certain specific issues, each of which has a substantive chapter, or a group of chapters, to itself: the form of the state (in particular its financing), the aristocracy (in particular its wealth), the peasantry and the structures of local rural society, urban society and economy, and networks of exchange. In each case the regions have been treated as separate case studies, compared with each other in the course of presentation, and summed up in a com-parative analysis at the end of each chapter. This method of exposition is imperfect, and I chose it with some misgivings; it seemed to me that it risked simply being a wearisome set of too many examples, strung together with relatively weak links between them. The reader will have to decide how far those fears are justified. One could argue, however, that the alternatives would be worse. The book could have simply consisted of a set of giant regional analyses, all of England then all of Francia, and so on. Actually, this is how I did the research, and it would have been easier to write. But drawing out the comparative elements in what would simply have been a set of separate histories, in effect national histories of a partially traditional type, seemed hard to envisage: particularly as one of the things that interests me most is what happened to aristocracies as awhole(in their different regional experiences), cities as awhole(in their different regional experiences), not just the regions themselves. An alternative procedure, to have looked at, for example, ‘the city’ and its development as a single unit, would conversely have involved a melting down of the comparative element that was, pre-cisely, one of the main aims of this project.
Comparative analysis also requires a standard vocabulary. History, as is well known, uses an ‘ordinary-language’ vocabulary, with relatively little use of technical neologisms, unlike other social sciences or literary discip-lines. This means that it uses words that have developed their meanings and overtones in daily use, which are not always consistent even inside single countries, and which are often substantially divergent across different languages. History also, not being a very self-reflexive discipline, has some-times developed technical meanings for these words which vary greatly from one end of the discipline to the other, or else are fought over by practitioners, too often concerned as they are to lay claim to the ‘right’ meanings of words in technical historical language. (‘Feudal’ and ‘feudalism’
6 Three smaller absences which I regret are Scotland, Bavaria, and Cyrenaica; I left them out
are the most famously contested of such words, but there are plenty of others.) I do not believe that there are ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ examples of such usages—although some do seem to me unhelpful—and no policing is pos-sible, anyway. All that one can do, when one uses words, is to have a clear and consistent idea of what they mean, and to explain them to the reader if necessary. I shall do this, in different chapters, for the words ‘state’, ‘aris-tocracy’, ‘peasant’, ‘feudal’, ‘tribal’, ‘estate’, ‘village’, and ‘town/city’, among others. Not everyone will agree with the meanings used here (and the level of agreement will vary from country to country: my use of the term ‘feudal’ is closest to that common in Spanish, for example, while that of ‘town’ is closest to uses in English); but I hope that it will not be found that the usages here are internally inconsistent. Most of these words evoke a sufficiently complex pattern of meanings that it is best to think of them as Weberian ideal types, and they will be presented as that when they are discussed, in the relevant chapters.7
The themes chosen for the book are those of a fairly classic social and economic history. This book does not offer a political narrative, except a minimum outline for each region in Chapter2. Intellectual culture is cer-tainly not part of its remit. It is more difficult to exclude the wider concep-tion of culture that an anthropologist or cultural historian would mean by the word—values, attitudes, representations, discursive strategies, material culture, imagery—for these underpin all political and social action, and indeed give meaning to all our source material. Such cultural analysis will therefore appear in several chapters; but it is fair to warn the reader that a fully fledged cultural history of the period has simply been squeezed out by a feeling, as I wrote, that the book was already pretty long and should be tied down to its core themes. It will be treated more fully in a future work, volume2of thePenguin History of Europe.
My overall research procedure, as I went from region to region, was to treat each in the same way, and to ask the same questions of each, insofar as that was possible. This meant that I had to base my research on primary sources, whether written texts or archaeological reports, before engaging with the interpretations of modern historians/archaeologists, the premises of whom anyway often caused me difficulties, for reasons already outlined. In the end, of course, one learns whom to trust among modern scholars, and I hope I have properly recognized my great debts to them, in footnotes and acknowledgements—A. H. M. Jones’s explanations of why he cited so few scholars, set out in his preface to his still marvellous late Roman synthesis, do not appeal to me, any more than does his mystifying neglect of archae-ology.8Indeed, in this period secondary sources often overwhelm the scarce
7 For a discussion of ideal types and of the diversities of the usages of the word ‘feudalism’,
primary material they are commenting on, even when substantially pruned, as here. But I have tried to read all the texts myself which were actually written in the period (or which report archaeological finds datable to the period), at least all those that seemed relevant. There are too many, and I am sure there must be serious omissions. If there are, they are the result of my error, not of any predetermined research strategy; that strategy was restricted to excluding later sources, even if they recounted events from the period, with certain clear exceptions that could not easily be done without, such as theVita Eligiior al-Bala¯dhurı¯. I have not looked at every cemetery report, or every sermon, but I should have done, and if the information contained in them undermines an argument then it is my fault. My Greek and Anglo-Saxon are pretty imperfect, and my Arabic, Coptic, and Irish almost non-existent (here I have relied on translations), but I have taken advice over interpretative cruxes in each, and I will stand by them.
not mean that the exact details of fiscal corruption, or violence, or demonic possession actually ever happened at all, but it does mean that people thought they were possible: this is whatcould be said. This is a different procedure from ‘there’s no smoke without fire’, or from the belief, shared by surprisingly many historians, that a historical source must be ‘reliable’ if even one member of the presumed audience was an eyewitness to events, because in that case the writer would not have been able to get away with inaccuracy. As has been said often before, it should be enough to read a day’s newspapers to lose either of these illusions. But the image of the newspaper is a positive one, too: if you read the main stories, and even the editorials, of even the most irresponsible newspapers, across a decade, or else across different countries (say Belfast, Dublin, and London on Northern Irish issues, not to go farther afield), you will get a sense of the mindset and the reactions to daily events of significant sections of the population that you can (unfortunately) trust. So it is with Salvian, even if all his facts are wrong. A final warning: I have not found it easy to keep a balance between general overview and the detailedexplication des textesthat early medievalists love. This book is long enough, but it also treats a large amount of material, often at much more restricted length than the experts in any given country are used to reading. Those experts—you, the reader—often also know far more than I about a given set of material, and may well find my treatment superficial. I have, of course, elided much detail, while also trying to respect difference. As a result, my image of Italy may ignore the special case of Tuscany, my image of Tuscany may ignore the special case of Pisa, and so on down, for every one of my regions. I have here done my best, however. Michael Mann, in his magnum opus on historical sociology, said: ‘Having covered a large slice of recorded history, I have doubtless committed errors of fact, and probably a few howlers. I ask whether correcting them would invalidate the overall arguments.’9This book covers less ground than Mann’s, but the
question is still a fair one. If the errors do invalidate the arguments, however, that is another matter. I hope not; but I shall find out.
These warnings to the reader, partially apologetic in tone, are not insincere; but if I did not have confidence in the project I would not have embarked on it. Now does seem to be a good moment to write this book. The archaeo-logical advances of the last generation offer a particularly good framework for comparison, of like with like, for the technology of cutting stone or throwing pots has fewer cultural barriers than textual strategies do (not
none, but fewer). I shall be using pot-making technology and ceramic distribution as one of my main comparative elements, in fact. This proced-ure will be defended in Chapter11(pp.700–6), but it underpins many of the earlier chapters in the book as well—indeed, the realization of how much
one could now say about ceramic distributions (almost none of which could have been said in1970) was one of the major impetuses behind the concep-tion of the book in the first place. It is, equally, in the archaeological arena that the book’s conclusions risk being outdated earliest; it needs to be stated explicitly that the period in which evidence was collected for this book was
1997–2000, with less systematic updating thereafter. (The last moment the bibliography was updated was April 2004.) I believe, all the same, that the materials already in existence are a secure enough basis for at least some of my generalizations.
I want to propose here two basic points about the early middle ages. The first concerns break-up. The Roman empire was a coherent political and economic system, operating on a scale that has seldom since been matched in Europe and the Mediterranean, and never for so long. (The early caliphate matched its scale, but the period of full economic centralization of the caliphate was a century at most, c.770–870; the Roman empire lasted four times that and more.) However much the successor states managed to imitate Roman political and economic patterns, which they did in very varying degrees, they did not match that scale. Anything in their local infrastructure that depended on a wider geographical framework, like the supply of grain from Africa to Rome, or the huge wealth of some late Roman senators, could not survive political localization. Areas like the Aegean, which were particularly closely linked into a wider exchange network, would similarly suffer when that network broke down. In general, there were parts of the empire that were more linked into a Mediterranean world-system, like southern Italy, the Aegean, and Africa, and other parts that were relatively separate from it, like inland Spain and northern Gaul. Other things being equal, one would expect more continuities in the latter than the former, and indeed, to an extent, this can be shown. It may be added that, although the ‘fall of the Roman empire’ is such a potent symbol that it has had the ill luck to be reinterpreted through everyide´e fixeof every decade and every national group in the last two centuries or longer, it has become at least easier, recently, to make this sort of analysis with the fall of the Soviet Union in mind; the unprepossessing successor states, with their regional economies in greater or lesser degrees of chaos, fare better or worse depend-ing on how far from or how close to the former command economy they had been. The analogy cannot be pressed too far, for we actually at present have a clearer idea of the internal working of the post-Roman polities than of many of the post-Soviet ones, but it has been in my mind, so it is fair to make that fact explicit.
social change takes place if in any given region, each starting from an at least analogous starting-point, you have more urbanism (as in Egypt, in Palestine, and to an extent in Italy), more internal exchange (as in Egypt), richer aristocrats (as in Gaul), or a more centralized fiscal system (as in Byzan-tium)? Of course, many of these, and other, differences themselves go back to the Roman empire, and can also retrospectively illuminate regional identities there. More important for the arguments in this book is the recognition that some such differences also derive from the trauma of the break-up of the empire itself, which included in most cases the conquest of a given region by an external army and (partially) new ruling class. I would argue, however, that in each case the new elites essentially had to make the best of what they found; pre-existing differences were more important than the culture and economy of incoming groups in every case, even when we are dealing with situations of the most extreme change, as in Britain. This is to an extent a ‘Romanist’ reading, at least in the sense that it plays down the socio-economic effect of immigrant populations, who were always small minorities. It is not, however, a narrowly continuitist reading, for major social changes undoubtedly took place, nearly everywhere, across our period.
longer accepted except on the fringes of scholarship. (Such radical replace-ments of populations are actually logistically very hard to achieve before the technological advances of the last century, and are in most cases so pointless that only unusually organized and ideologically driven invaders would conceive of them—the Athenians on Melos, the Mongols at Hera¯t, the Europeans in the Americas. The average Germanic tribe looking for its place in the sun hardly fits.) Where population continuities can be assumed, so will continuities of daily practice: agriculture, much ritual, most elements of social exchange. These in themselves do not disprove the existence of crisis in other elements of a social system, state structures, or exchange networks. One has to put them all together, and assess them as a whole, if one wants to get a sense of how social change as a whole takes place.
It must be added that this is, of course, the sort of debate that historians have all the time. How much of a breakwas the English Civil War? The French Revolution? The Russian Revolution? These debates are often not much more sophisticated than those around the fall of the Roman empire, for they too are full of people seizing isolated strands of continuity or change and claiming that they are widely representative, just as our debates are. Perhaps the only advantage they have over early medieval ones is that the theorists who dominate their debates are still alive, or only recently dead. These homologies are a product of the lack of interest historians have in social theory, in the understanding of how societies work as systems. Here, it is illusory to hope that the problem will go away soon; but a recognition that our debates are close in their own structure to those in other periods is something that could usefully be more widely felt.
(and been labelled a catastrophist for it), and I would only slightly modify the picture, as can be seen in Chapter3, where the major Romano-Germanic kingdoms are set against the surviving—also changed, but to a far smaller extent—states of the eastern Mediterranean.10
In the other themes of this book, above all aristocracies, urbanism, and exchange (themselves all closely linked, as we shall see), the answer to questions of continuity and change lies much more in regional difference. Different provinces of the Roman empire had different experiences of each, and these experiences changed across time. I shall try to set these differences side by side and compare them, using them as guides to how similar and divergent developments took place, in all our regions, for such comparison is, as said above, one of the main aims of the book. It is worth noting, however, that I shall systematically in this book resist deus ex machina
disaster theories for any major changes. Cities get burnt by enemies, or hit by earthquakes, throughout history, but if they are not rebuiltafterwardsit is because of longer-term causes than one disaster encompasses on its own. This is so even when, conversely, the slow decline of such a city in previous centuries might have remained unnoticed, and maybe eventually have been reversed, had it not been for that crisis. The same sort of considerations can often be used for a polity defeated in war which then dissolves, or an aristocratic family that dies out (or is killed or expelled) whose local power is not replicated by another. These crises can best be seen as the flips in the ‘catastrophe theory’ of mathematicians, the modelling of when slow change finally reaches a situation where previous patterns cannot be sustained, and trends flip over into often precipitous crisis. Such patterns do not need external disasters to act as the catalyst, either; the sudden end of ceramic networks, for example, at different times between 500 and 700, often had nothing to do with immediate external crises—the catastrophe-flips happened on their own, as declining markets meant that, one day, transport and production costs made products just too expensive or too intermittent, and production plunged. The end of the Mediterranean Red Slip/terra sigillatanetworks, for example, seem often to have occurred like this: see below, pp. 712–13. Settlement change can take place in this way too.11I shall use the image of the catastrophe-flip in later pages, but it must
be distinguished from the catastrophism of writers who seek an external cause for all major change in plague, volcanic eruption, or the old mantras of war and destruction. Rapid change did sometimes occur; you can indeed call it catastrophic if you like (as I will in this mathematical sense); but each time
10For earlier discussions of the issues referred to in this paragraph and the next, see
Wickham,Land and power.
11For the mathematical image of catastrophe theory applied to settlement change, see
it had longer roots, which are more interesting and important to explore than the often contingent crisis.
This stress on regional difference is not intended to dissolve all general patterns into a mass of separate local experiences; far from it. The experi-ences of all the post-Roman regions—even their northern, un-Roman neigh-bours, like Denmark—can beparalleled. It is my aim to isolate the different trends in each region for each of my main themes, but then to put them together again, in generalizations that are rooted in the recognition of difference, rather than the pretence of uniformity, and in models of how societies work that are, whether right or wrong, at least more conscious than those often used by historians and archaeologists.12 This will produce a
series of generalizations that are too qualified for them simply to be able to replace the bolder paradigms of three generations ago, and in this respect the book is not, at all, aimed at a real paradigm shift; but it will, I hope, produce the raw material that will allow a better synthesist to do so in the future. Researching this book has been pure pleasure. Never in my life have I been paid (thanks to the generosity of the British Academy) to tread on so many other people’s territories. I discovered something excitingly new (to me) almost every day. I hope they do not become routinized and dull in my discussion of them here. I look forward to presenting here some of the things that surprised me most: the amazing documentation for some Egyptian villages, the startlingly well-preserved rural sites of Syria and Palestine, the real vigour of the late Visigothic state, the strangeness of Anglo-Saxon land tenure, the remarkable wealth of recent excavations in Denmark. These fit into wider patterns of parallelism and difference too, but they are interesting in themselves. Knowing that there is more like that to find in part makes up for the vertigo one feels in having taken on too much, with too much not accounted for.
12Two books which offer a standard to aim at when constructing coherent models for
Geography and politics
Th i s c h a p t e r, l i k e the last, is substantially introductory. In it, an overview of the geography and the political history (from400 to800) of each of the regions that this book will focus on will be set out as a point of reference. The regions are presented here in the form of a spiral, starting from North Africa, going anti-clockwise around the Mediterranean to Spain, then moving northwards to Denmark. The chapter is not intended to be particularly original, and will essentially be based on secondary litera-ture; the footnotes cite fairly obvious guides. But it does need to be here, for not every reader has a very detailed knowledge of every part of western Europe and the Mediterranean, and an orientation point thus seems useful. I shall also include brief characterizations of some of the historiographical problems that are a feature of each region. But it must be stressed that my aim is to be introductory—an analysis of political history is not one of the purposes of this book (there are plenty of alternative guides); and a proper discussion of national historiographies would require a complex, book-length, characterization of national cultures, and of the role of historians, and national images of the past, in each. That task is much needed, but it will have to be carried out elsewhere.
1. Africa
Roman Africa consisted of a strip of the Mediterranean coast and its usually mountainous hinterland, running from Tanger to the Gulf of Syrtis (see Maps
Egypt, and remained rich thereafter, past the end of the time period discussed in this book.
The lands to the east and west of ‘Tunisia’ were more marginal. Tripoli-tania, modern western Libya, was a grain producer on its northern fringes, and indeed there was settled agriculture in the seasonal wadis to the south of that coastal strip, much further into the fringes of the Sahara than there is now, as the recent Libyan Valleys Survey has explored in some detail.1To the
west, Numidia and Mauretania Sitifensis, together occupying the coast and the plateaux of modern eastern Algeria, were a slightly poorer and less market-orientated version of Proconsularis. From there to the Atlantic, however, in Mauretania Caesariensis and Tingitana, the percentage of high-land becomes higher, as we move into the Atlas ranges, and the percentage of fertile land lower. The Romans tended to rule militarily in these provinces, and the Arabs never really controlled them at all. In the far west there is a substantial lowland area, the triangle between Tanger, Fe`s, and Rabat in modern Morocco, looking to the Atlantic rather than the Mediterranean. The Romans controlled this triangle from their city of Volubilis, but aban-doned most of it as early as the late third century, for reasons that are unclear.2
The main feature that has dominated African history (and, indeed, Afri-can historiography) is the contrast between the settled agriculture of the coast and the nomadism of the Sahara. In historiographical terms, we owe the starkness of that opposition to Ibn Khaldu¯n in the fourteenth century, who regarded settled society as highly precarious, and only capable of being protected against nomadic conquerors by strong states.3But Ibn Khaldu¯n is
more important here in the sophistication of his formulations than in their originality; in turn the Romans, the Arabs, and the French (in their guise as a colonial power) saw their role as the standard-bearers of civilization against the desert world. To an extent, they were right: the Sahara does offer more of a challenge to Mediterranean agriculture than does the other desert fringe that will appear in this book, the Syrian desert, for the former is so much bigger, and has been so much less influenced by settled societies. (The Arabian desert which connects with that of Syria is another matter, but it is outside our remit.) Not that there is in reality a sharp division between desert and sown; there is a wide grey area between them, as one moves south, into areas with steadily less rain. Dry-farming areas (which include most of Proconsularis) give way to areas that can only yield crops if they are irrigated, and to areas where agriculturalists and pastoralists coexist, often uneasily, and to areas where settled agriculture is at best a part-time
1 Barker,Farming the desert; see in general Mattingly,Tripolitania, pp.194–217.
2 See e.g. Rebuffat, ‘Recherches sur le bassin du Sebou’. Villaverde,Tingitana, surveys (and
talks up) Roman finds from after300in central Morocco.
occupation, by pastoralists who grow a few crops at the only rainy moment of the year, perhaps at one end of a semi-nomadic cycle, before one reaches the true desert. But the wide extent of the grey area was in itself the reason why the relationship between the settled and the nomadic world was so fraught: it was precisely that area whose economy, and culture, they fought over. When the settled world was dominant, grain was grown in the north-ern Libyan desert; when the unsettled world was dominant, the inland plain of Byzacena and the Numidian plateau (though never Proconsularis) were the home of shepherds, in a cycle of ‘intensification’ and ‘abatement’, as Øystein LaBianca has called it in the context of his studies of central Jordan.4
These are simply cultural choices, although one need not be surprised that they have been moralized about so violently by two millennia of apologists for the settled (‘civilized’, literate) world, for the cultural/economic alterna-tives involved are very stark. The African provinces are the only ones in this book, apart from smaller sections of Syria and Palestine, where it was ever possible that settled agriculture could be abandoned. As a result of this reality, there is a certain edge to the modern historiography of Roman Africa, most of which is French, as the pioneer excavators of abandoned Roman cities (often apologists for the Roman—and French—mission civili-satrice) gave way to anti-colonial celebrators of la re´sistance africaine. Mutual accusations of neo-colonialism and Berber romanticism still appear in the literature.5 The late and post-Roman period, although less sharply
fought over, has been dominated, in an analogous way, by the metanarrative of the ‘failure’ of an urban/settled economy: when did that economy really begin to give way, to the relatively unagricultural world of the early modern period? In the late Roman period? with the Vandals? the Byzantines? the early Arabs? the Banu¯ Hı¯la¯l in the eleventh century? Every one of these has been canvassed by someone. It must be said at once that the answer almost certainly does not lie in simple invasion in any period, even by nomadic tribes like the Banu¯ Hı¯la¯l, whose devastations have been so written up in the past. (The force of invasion theories in part derives from a parallel belief, that tribal societies are inimical to settled economies, which is much more problematic, as will be seen in a moment.) But we do not have to solve the question in this book, at least. As we shall see in Chapters10and11, the evidence points to the involution of an agricultural export economy in the sixth and seventh centuries, with a low point in the eighth, but not to a major retreat of settled agriculture, at least for subsistence, until well after our period ended.
4 LaBianca,Hesban1, pp.12–19(see below, Ch.8, n.47); for desert versus sown areas, see
classically Braudel,The Mediterranean, pp.171–88.
5 The best introduction to African historiography is Mattingly and Hitchner, ‘Roman Africa’;
Africa was, as already said, one of the major sources of agricultural and artisanal products in the late Roman empire. Its grain and oil tax fed Rome, and extensive properties there made Roman senators rich; its pottery could in the fourth century be found on the tables of rich and poor alike through-out the western Mediterranean and into the East as well. It was lightly (and therefore cheaply) defended, for the tribal groups to its south were not considered much of a threat in the late empire. The world of the African Augustine of Hippo (354–430), by far the most prolific and original-minded intellectual in our period, was a violent, but essentially prosperous world.6
Even when the Visigoths sacked Rome in410, Augustine could be relatively uncatastrophist in his response to that unprecedented psychological blow: heretical Donatists were to him a more serious issue.7
The Vandals ended that. Not one of the major Germanic tribes, but by417
located in southern Spain after a decade of movement from central Ger-many, they crossed over to Africa in429under their king Geiseric (d.477), and by 430were in control of the whole of its western half. In 439 they moved again, and occupied Proconsularis and Byzacena for a century, until
534. The Vandal century in Africa was decisive for the western Roman empire, for the Vandals were an independent kingdom, and the taxes from the region would not go to Rome henceforth; it is indeed after439that we first find clear signs of fiscal crisis in texts from the west Roman government, and the beginning of the spiral of ineffectiveness that would result in the end of imperial rule in the West itself (see below, pp.87–92). The Vandals have a bad press as a consequence; and they had a worse press still from African authors, for they were fervent Arian Christians, fully prepared to persecute the Catholic Africans. Unfortunately, our main non-archaeological sources for the post-Augustine period are the Catholic apologists; there are no Vandal sources except a few praise-poems (by Roman poets), and no docu-ments except the Tablettes Albertini, a set of estate docudocu-ments of the490s from an economically marginal zone of southern Byzacena. But it is reason-ably clear from all of these that the Vandal state, notwithstanding its reli-gious policies, was very Roman in style, and a certain prosperity is visible in the archaeology, at least until500or so. When the ‘Vandal parenthesis’ was ended, in the rapid conquest of the kingdom by the east Roman general Belisarios in534, Africa was expected to return rapidly to its proper place as a major source of taxation for the empire, now focused on Constantinople.8
Africa under east Roman rule (it is universally called ‘Byzantine Africa’ to distinguish it from the pre-Vandal Roman period) is very badly documented, at least after the conquest period, which is described in detail by Prokopios
6 So above all Lepelley,Les cite´s, I, pp.29–36,293–330.
7 Brown,Augustine, pp.288–95.
8 Still basic is Courtois,Les Vandales; a good update is Cameron, ‘Vandal and Byzantine
and Corippus. It is clear that the hopes for its productivity were initially ill-founded, partly because the Vandals had apparently let taxation slip (below, p. 92), and partly because the east Romans had to keep a substantial army there, and to engage in extensive fortification, both of which were expensive. This military commitment was necessary in order to hold off native Berber tribes, which since the mid-fifth century dominated all the Mauretanias as independent political entities, and menaced the Vandal/ Byzantine-controlled territory from both the west and the south. By the second half of the sixth century Byzantine Africa had achieved a certain stability and showed moderate prosperity, which was sufficiently coherent that the exarch (governor) of Africa, Heraclius, could revolt and conquer Constantinople itself in 608–10, setting his son Heraclius in place as em-peror for over thirty years.9But from then on there was more trouble. In647
Arabs, raiding from Egypt, defeated and killed the exarch Gregorius, and from then on Tripolitania and Byzacena were lost to the empire. The Arabs were not yet acting as serious conquerors, but it was Berbers, not Romans, who filled the power vacuum in these southern lands—the empire by now only controlled Proconsularis. After670the Arabs returned, and in the next thirty years took over the core African provinces properly, resisted more by the Berbers than by the Romans. In the end they took Carthage too, in698.10
The first century of Arab rule in what they called, following Roman usage, Ifrı¯qiya, is obscure. Its archaeology has been badly studied, and reliable historical sources are very few. It is at least clear that Kairouan, a new city founded in inland Byzacena, was their capital, with Tunis (another new city founded to replace neighbouring Carthage, now in ruins) reduced to second place. Thewa¯lı¯(governor) of Ifrı¯qiya had a similar position to the exarch before him, of some autonomy but also of some political marginal-ity.11It was from here that Spain was conquered in711and onwards, with
the enthusiastic involvement of the Berbers of the western Maghreb, the former Mauretanias, whom the Arabs had managed to co-opt into thedar al-Isla¯m. But this co-operation did not last long, and the great Berber revolt of739–40severed Spain (temporarily) and Morocco (permanently) from the caliphate. Essentially, the core of Ifrı¯qiya was Tunisia, as it had been for the Vandals and Byzantines before. Eighth-century archaeology is, as noted, exiguous, but its simplicity implies that the confusion of the period 647–
98had done damage to African prosperity (see below, pp.726–8). All the same, the intrinsic agrarian potential of the Tunisian provinces was still great. After800the autonomy of Africa turned into effective independence,
9 See, in general, Cameron, ‘Vandal and Byzantine Africa’, with two basic monographic
surveys, Diehl,L’Afrique byzantine, and Pringle,The defence of Byzantine Africa; and see below, pp.641–2,723–6.
10Brett, ‘Arab conquest’, is the best introduction to the seventh and eighth centuries.
under the Aghlabid dynasty (800–909), and the economy of the region took an upward direction, to a new peak in the tenth century, after our period ends.12
As is clear from this brief account, the Berber tribes steadily increased their military strength and autonomy across our period. Already by500they were often organized in larger-scale alliances, like the Laguatan of what is now Libya, and some of them were ruled by kings with ambition.13(Exactly
how large their polities were is in dispute, however; see below, pp.335–7.) They left no written records, so can easily be constructed as the uncivilized Other, the main threat to the settled lands in our period. This, however, is misleading. There were settled Berber tribes, as much as there were nomadic ones; the development of tribal autonomies, which took more and more sections of Africa out of the power of the Carthage- (later, Kairouan-) based state, did not necessarily have any effect on agriculture at all, as is clear above all in the area covered by the best rural archaeology of Berber territories, the Libyan Valleys Survey. Indeed, some western Berber polities were even based on Roman cities, Altava and Volubilis. To Volubilis in788
came the ‘Alid exile Idrı¯s b. ‘Abd Alla¯h, who founded the first Muslim dynasty of Morocco, the Idrı¯sids; their polity acted as the independent source of the Islamization of the Berber tribes of the Maghreb. Idrı¯s moved to Fe`s in790, which is still the main centre of the settled plains of northern Morocco, in lineal succession to Volubilis.14 The development of Berber
autonomy will be discussed later in parallel with post-Roman Britain in Chapter6, these two being the clearest instances we have of the breakdown of Roman-style political structures without invasion. In my view, however, the opposition between state and tribe is a more useful way of understanding Africa in our period than that between the desert and the sown. Not least because of the continuing wealth of the sown land in the region, which is an abiding feature of our whole period.
2. Egypt
Egypt was similarly located on the desert edge, but was much less exposed than Africa: partly because its desert is so inhospitable that very few people can live there; partly because the Nile made it so rich, and so populous, that its internal stability was enormously enhanced. The Nile and its annual flood essentially created Egypt (the region has almost no rainfall, and almost no other natural water apart from the river); Egypt as concept in human
12For the economy see in particular Vanacker, ‘Ge´ographie e´conomique’.
13Mattingly,Tripolitania, pp.173–6; and now Mode´ran,Les Maures, the basic historical
geography is in effect nothing other than the thin, winding strip of the valley, the800km stretch of Middle and Upper Egypt from Cairo to Aswa¯n, plus the great triangle of the Delta, its base stretching between Alexandria and Pelousion on the Mediterranean and its apex at Cairo. (See Map4.) The Nile had two other effects on the region, however. First, its flood, and the alluvium that came with it, captured in our period by thousands of local irrigation networks, made it more than twice as fertile as any other part of the Mediterranean or the rest of Europe (see below, pp.65–6), which not only allowed it to produce a huge grain surplus for the eastern Roman empire and its Arab successors, but also fed an urban population which Roger Bagnall and Bruce Frier calculate as up to a third of the total popu-lation of Egypt, three times the standard estimate for most Mediterranean regions (see below, pp.609–12).15Second, the Nile was a cheap and secure
means of transport. This meant that Aswa¯n was structurally linked to Alexandria, even though it was physically further from the Mediterranean coast than anywhere else in the empire except Britain—Aswa¯n ceramics, indeed, dominate Egyptian sites in our period (below, pp. 761–3). It was possible for a complex economic network, both fiscal and commercial, to exist in Egypt even when interregional trade closed down, as it did at different times everywhere in our area of study. Egypt will thus always be the test case for what stability looks like in our period, when everything else changed—and when things changed even in Egypt, they certainly did so elsewhere.
Egypt, still more than Africa, was a core source of agricultural produce for the Roman state, and thus one of the mainstays of the east Roman fiscal network. The region was so straightforward to control, thanks to the Nile, that its political history is quiescent in the extreme in the late Roman period, which here extended to the610s, with little to disturb it except the occa-sional bout of urban (sometimes religious) violence in Alexandria. What we know a large amount about, on the other hand, is its social and economic history. Egyptian archaeology for our period is as yet fairly restricted, despite its considerable potential; nor are narratives very numerous, outside the framework of a strictly ecclesiastical politics. But papyri are very well represented in our period (with the exception of a relative scarcity in the fifth century), surviving in their thousands. Egypt is by far the best-documented of our regions as a result, between500and the late eighth century. In the latest Roman period the two main documentary foci are Oxyrhynchos and Aphrodito¯, both in Middle Egypt, the former a centre of great landowning, the latter of small and medium properties; but there are scatters of papyrus for many other centres too, excepting only the Delta. The worlds these sets of papyrus illuminate are not ‘typical’ of the Roman world, but only because
nothing ever is; they are, nonetheless, comparable to many other Roman local realities, and they will be used as guides in that framework.16
The Persians took Egypt in 618–19, in a break as sharp as the Vandal conquest of Africa; they held it for a decade, until Heraclius defeated them in Armenia and won the last great Roman–Persian war. But the 630s, an ill-documented period in Egypt in fact, was the last Roman decade; in639–42
the Arabs conquered the region, and it became (unlike Ifrı¯qiya) one of the central provinces of the caliphate. The Arabs did not settle in most of Egypt. They established themselves in a new capital, Fust.a¯t., the ancestor of modern Cairo—Alexandria survived, unlike Carthage, but principally as a naval base—leaving Egypt as a whole under the control of its pre-existing local elites, which changed very little for a century. Egyptians in c.550 wrote documents in Greek, although they mostly spoke Coptic. Under Arab rule, Arabic slowly replaced Greek as the language of central government (though even this took a century); local documents were more and more written in Coptic. A second set of Aphrodito¯ documents, from the700s and the710s, are in all three languages; the main later eighth-century collections, from Bala’ı¯za in Middle Egypt and Je¯me in western Thebes in Upper Egypt, are essentially in Coptic. Arabic only won out entirely after our period, in the ninth and tenth centuries, as Egypt began, very slowly, to go Muslim.17
Egypt’s local politics was for a long time no more dramatic under the Arabs than it had been under the Romans, and is as quickly told. Itsamirsat stably in Fust.a¯t., and used the same mechanisms of rule, even the same tax mechanisms, as had his Roman predecessor at Alexandria. Beingamir of Egypt was a high-ranking role: ‘Abd al- ‘Azı¯z, governor in685–704, was the brother of ‘Abd al-Malik, caliph in685–705. In part, this is because being
amir was arguably as profitable as being caliph. In the Umayyad period (661–750), the different provinces of the caliphate kept most of their tax-ation for themselves, to pay for local Arab armies. This was a practical, and politically necessary, solution in most cases, but it meant that the caliphate was for long much more fiscally decentralized than was the Roman empire.18
In the case of Egypt, furthermore, this decentralization meant that early Arab Egypt was in a position that it had not been in since Cleopatra, one analogous to the Africa of the Vandals: it could consume the great part of its surplus inside the region. (The other great productive area of the caliphate, Iraq, had been the political focus of Sassanian Persia, and had thus always consumed its surplus locally—there was less change here. Indeed, when the ‘Abba¯sids recentralized the caliphal fiscal system in the late eighth century they were by now based in Iraq too, at Baghdad.) In Africa, this fiscal
16See as introductory guides Bagnall,Egypt; Keenan, ‘Egypt’.
17McCoull, ‘Strange death’.
18For the political structures of Arab Egypt, the best guide is Kennedy, ‘Egypt as a province’;
