Download PDF | Byzantine Trade, 4th-12th Centuries, ed. Marlia Mundell Mango, (Publications of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies 14), 2009.
509 Pages
Acknowledgements
The Thirty-eighth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies was held in St John’s College, Oxford in March 2004 on behalf of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies. Generous financial support was given by the A.G. Leventis Foundation, the British Academy, the Committee for Byzantine Studies Oxford, the British Academy Black Sea Initiative, the Hellenic Foundation, St John’s College Oxford, the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies (Hugh Last and Donald Atkinson Fund), Astor Travel Fund Oxford, the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, the History Faculty Oxford, the Meyerstein Committee Oxford, the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, the Seven Pillars of Wisdom Trust, the School of Archaeology Oxford, and Ashgate Publishing.
The symposiarch Marlia Mango depended on the organizational skills of the symposium administrator, Lukas Schachner, and the kind help of Jackie Couling and the Domestic Office of St John’s College. During the symposium further help was provided by Simon Davies, Eleni Lianta, loanna Dimopoulos, Anthusa Papagiannaki, James George, Theodore Papaioannou, Judith Gililand, Meredith Riedel and Natalija Ristovska. For advice offered in preparation of the symposium, thanks are extended to Cyril Mango, Jonathan Shepard, James Howard-Johnston, Leslie Brubaker, Averil Cameron, Jim Crow, Fergus Millar, Chris Wickham and Liz Strange. Lukas Schachner, Priscilla Lange, Theodore Papaioannou, Alison Wilkins and Cyril Mango helped with the preparation of the papers for publication.
My gratitude is also expressed here to Cyril Mango for the transliteration of Russian used in three papers; readers may note that different systems have been used in other papers. Finally, I should like to thank Elizabeth Jeffreys, SPBS series editor, and John Smedley with his staff at Ashgate Pubhshing, for their part in seeing this volume through publication.
List of Contributors
Dr Irina Andreescu-Treadgold has since 1975 surveyed mosaics from scaffoldings, using the format she designed as Field Director for campaigns in San Marco for the Corpus for Wall Mosaics in the North Adriatic area. She has directed and advised other mosaic projects, identifying chronological sequences, workshop profiles and medieval repairs at Torcello and San Vitale, and discovering that the Berlin mosaics allegedly from San Michele in Africisco, Ravenna are copies from 1850-51.
Pamela Armstrong is Research Member of Common Room, Wolfson College, Oxford. She is an experienced excavator and landscape archaeologist, publishing ceramics dating from AD 300 to 1800 from a range of regions in Greece and Turkey, the Greek islands and Cyprus, as well as historical interpretations of the evidence of material culture.
Dr Christopher Bowles is Archaeology Officer, Scottish Borders Council. His publications include Rebuilding the Britons: the postcolomal archaeology of culture and identity in the late antique Bristol Channel region, BAR British Series (Oxford, 2007).
Dr Ewan Campbell is Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8QQ, Scotland, UK. He has published widely on trade in early medieval north-west Europe, and the role of material culture in the development of the early medieval identities.
Dr Michael Decker is Maroulis Professor of Byzantine History and Orthodox Religion at the University of South Florida. His publications include Economy and Exchange in the Eastern Mediterranean during Late Antiquity, ed. with S. Kingsley (Oxford, 2000), and Tilling the Hateful Earth (Oxford, 2009).
Dr Ioanna Dimopoulos (DPhil, Oxon) specializes in glazed pottery of the Middle Byzantine period. Her publications include: ‘Byzantine Sgraffito Wares from Sparta, 12'*-13" centuries’, in B. Bohlendorf-Arslan, A.O. Uysal and J. WitteOrr, eds., Byzas 7: Late Antique and Medieval Pottery and Tiles in Mediterranean Archaeological Contexts (Istanbul, 2008).
Prof. Nergis Giinsenin is Professor at Istanbul University’s Vocational School of Technical Sciences, and Chair of its Underwater Technology Program. Research interests include: late Byzantine amphorae, their kilns, and monastic wine commerce in the Sea of Marmara. She has conducted land and underwater surveys and excavations. Having authored approximately 50 articles, she is currently preparing publication of her Camalt: Burnu I shipwreck excavation and is consultant to the Yenikapt excavations at the portus Theodosiacus in Istanbul.
Prof. Julian Henderson is Professor of Archaeological Science, Nottingham University. His research has focused on the relationships between archaeology, technology and science, and on glass of all ancient periods (and ceramics). He directs the Raqga (Syria) ancient industry project, the first interdisciplinary investigation of an Islamic industrial complex, which seeks to provenance glass geologically. He has published extensively in archaeological and scientific journals and a number of books, including The Science and Archaeology of Materials (London, 2000).
Dr Mark PC. Jackson is Lecturer in Archaeology, School of Historical Studies, Newcastle University. He directs the excavations of the Byzantine levels at Kilise Tepe in southern Turkey and is currently working on finds from Alahan and ceramics from the Géksu Archaeological Project.
Prof. David Jacoby is Emeritus Professor of History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. His research and publications focus on Byzantium and its former territories; the Crusader states of the Levant, Cyprus and Egypt; and intercultural exchange between the West and the eastern Mediterranean in the 9~15" centuries. He is currently writing a book on medieval silk production and trade in the Mediterranean region.
Dr Olga Karagiorgou (D.Phil., Oxon) is Researcher, Academy of Athens, Research Centre for Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Art. Her main research interests are urbanism and economy in late antiquity; Middle Byzantine architecture; prosopography; andsigillography. See: http://www.academyo fathens.gr/ecportal.asp?id=64&nt-L09&lang=2, http://www.amoriumex cavations.org/Team.htm; kragiorgou@academyofathens.gr, olga.kara giorgou@gmx.net
Dr Philip M. Kenrick Abingdon, Oxfordshire, UK. Freelance pottery specialist, President of the Rei Cretariae Romanae Fautores. Currently involved in the study of pottery from excavations at Vagnari (Gravina-inPuglia, Italy). Principal publications: Excavations at Sidi Khrebish, Benghazi (Berenice) iii.1, The fine pottery (Tripoli, 1985). Excavations at Sabratha 1948—1951 (London, 1986). A. Oxé & H. Comfort , Corpus Vasorum Arretinorum, 2nd ed., completely revised and enlarged by PMK (Bonn, 2000).
Dr Sean Kingsley is Visiting Fellow at the Research Centre for Late Antique and Byzantine Studies, University of Reading. He has authored six books, most recently Shipwreck Archaeology of the Holy Land (London, 2004) and Barbarian Seas: Late Rome to Islam (London, 2004).
Dr Hiromi Kinoshita is Assistant Curator of Chinese Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and consulting curator for The First Emperor exhibition at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. She has contributed to The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army (London, 2007); Gilded Splendor: treasures of China’s Liao Empire (907-1125) (New York, 2006); China: the Three Emperors (1662— 1795) (London, 2005); and Recarving China’s Past (Princeton, 2005).
Prof. Rossina Kostova (Ph.D. in Medieval Studies) is Associate Professor in Medieval Bulgarian Archaeology and Medieval Archaeology of the Balkans, SS Cyril and Methodius University of Veliko Turnovo. Herresearch interests include: medieval Bulgarian archaeology, Byzantine archaeology, monastic archaeology, medieval graffiti, medieval archaeology of the west Black Sea coast. She is director and deputy director of excavations of medieval monastic sites in Preslav, Varna and Sozopol, and has published over 40 articles.
Dr Anne McCabe is Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents, Oxford. She works on the Agora Excavations of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and with the Oxford team at Al-Andarin in Syria. She has authored A Byzantine Encyclopaedia of Horse Medicine: the sources, compilation, and transmission of the Hippiatrica (Oxford, 2007).
Dr Nikolaj Makarov is a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Science and Director of the Institute of Archaeology, Russian Academy of Science. He specializes in medieval archaeology and history of Russia. Additional research interests are the culture of Iron Age and medieval Eastern Europe, and that of medieval Slavs, Finns and Scandinavians. He leads various field research projects on medieval sites in Russia and is author of more than 180 published works including four monographs. Among them: Medieval Settlement in Beloozero Region (Moscow, 2001); The Archaeology of the Rural Areas of Northern Rus’ 900-1300, V.1 (Moscow, 2007).
Dr Hallie Meredith is Lecturer at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She has published on cultural differences in Roman and Sasanian late antique glassware, and on late antique art and texts inherited from the Greek and Roman world. Her three current projects are: Re-Viewing Open-work Vessels in Context; Art in Ancient Texts: layered objects, layered meanings; and an edited volume of symposium papers, Objects in Motion: the circulation of religion and sacred objects in the late antique and early medieval world.
Dr Marlia Mundell Mango is Research Lecturer in Byzantine Archaeology and Art, Oxford University. She directs the Oxford team’s Excavations and Survey at Al-Andarin/Androna in Syria. Her publications number approximately 100, including studies on northern Mesopotamia, Syria, metalware (Silver from Early Byzantium; with A. Bennett, The Sevso Treasure, 1) and the forthcoming Artistic Patronage: buildings, stlver plate and books in the Roman diocese of Oriens, AD 313-641.
Prof. David W. Phillipson retired in 2006 from the University of Cambridge, where he had been Professor of African Archaeology and Director of the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, an Emeritus Fellow of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, and a past-President of the British Institute in Eastern Africa. He directed major archaeological excavations at Aksum in the 1990s and has recently completed a study of early Ethiopian churches.
Natalija Ristovska is a D.Phil. student in Archaeology, University of Oxford. Her research interests include various aspects of Byzantine minor arts, such as: patronage, ownership and patterns of use; production centres and distribution patterns of medieval vessels, furnishings and jewellery made of metal and glass; exchange in crafted goods and skilled artisans between the Byzantine Empire and foreign polities; as well as the impact of such exchange on production and tastes of recipient societies.
Dr Elizabeth Rodziewicz is an historian of ancient Art and Archaeology, and researcher of ancient bone and ivory carvings in the Mediterranean. She is a member of Polish archaeological missions in Alexandria, of French archaeological missions, at Centre d’Etudes Alexandrines of CNRS, and at Fustat/Old Cairo, IFAO; and a member of German—Swiss missions on Elephantine. She has authored numerous archaeological publications, including the recent Bone and Ivory Carvings from Alexandria, [FAO (Cairo, 2007) and the forthcoming Bone Carvings from Fustat: French excavations.
Christopher]. Salteris Senior Analyst, BegbrokeNano/OMCS, Department of Materials, Oxford University. His research interests include ancient and historic iron production, artefacts, and metal production debris from all types of metals up until the early historic period. He is currently working on Byzantine Chersonesos, Crimea, with the University of Texas, Austin. Recent publications include: with B.G. Scott, R-R. Brown and A.G. Leacock, The Great Guns like Thunder, Derry City Council (2008), and Metalworking Debris in Late Saxon and Early Medieval Occupation at 26-27 Staples Gardens, Winchester, Winchester Studies (2008).
Dr Emilie Savage-Smith is Professor of the History of Islamic Science, Oriental Institute, and senior research fellow, St Cross College, both at Oxford University. Recent publications include: Magic and Divination in Early Islam (Aldershot, 2004); with E. Edson, Medieval Views of the Cosmos (Oxford, 2004); with PE. Pormann, Medieval Islamic Medicine (Edinburgh, 2007); and with Y. Rapoport, The Medieval Islamic Views of the Cosmos: the Book of Curiosities, available as of March 2007 .
Dr Jonathan Shepard specializes in the history of early medieval Russia and Byzantine diplomacy. For many years, he has been a lecturer in Russian history at Cambridge University. He has co-authored with Simon Franklin, The emergence of Rus 750-1200 (1996), and has edited The expansion of Orthodox Europe: Byzantium, the Balkans and Russia (2007) and The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire (2008).
Prof. Steven E. Sidebotham is Professor of Classical Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Delaware, USA. He has authored, coauthored, edited or co-edited 10 volumes, including six on excavations at Berenike, Arikamedu, India and Caesarea Maritima, Israel; Roman economic policy in the Erythra Thalassa; and The Red Land, in addition to some 80 articles and other publications. His 53 seasons of archaeological fieldwork since 1972 both on land and underwater have occurred in Italy, Greece, Tunisia, Libya, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Sudan and India.
Prof. Yoram Tsafrir is Emeritus Professor in the Institute of Archaeology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. His research and numerous publications focus on the archaeology and historical geography of Palestine and the East in the Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine and Early Islamic periods. He is Co-director of the Hebrew University’s excavations at Bet Shean-Scythopolis, Rehovot in the Negev, Sartaba-Alexandrion, Horvat Berachot, and other sites.
Dr Agnés Vokaer is Chargée de recherches du F.N.R-S., Université libre de Bruxelles. She has worked on several late Antique and early Islamic sites in Syria. She is Field Director and is in charge of the ceramic study at Apamea. Her research interests include common wares and amphorae, late antique economy, and ethno-archaeology.
Byzantine trade: local, regional, interregional and international
Marlia Mundell Mango
The purpose of the symposium whose papers are published here was to examine the nature and extent of Byzantine trade prior to and in the wake of the Arab Conquest of the Levant in the 7" century, and during subsequent centuries. Trade is taken broadly as monetized or bartered exchange, but alternative mechanisms of circulation suchas giftand pillage are also considered. The following papers focus on recent archaeological or other work related to local and international trade between the 4“ and 12 centuries, rather than to the interregional movement of basic staples within the Mediterranean.
Given the state management of much of this last type of circulation, it does not meet the criteria of a monetized trade, a reason in itself to omit it here. The role of the state features prominently in discussions of ancient productivity by Rostovtzeff, Finley, Polanyi, Hopkins and others, who have provided us with sophisticated models of the economy. These models are of course relevant to the late Romar/early Byzantine economy; however, since one may distinguish between economy and trade as subjects of study and speculation, these economic models will not be examined directly here. So often questions posed about the general economy set the agenda for discussions of trade. Instead, these symposium papers cover trade as distinct from the economy as a whole, and consider the concrete evidence of traded materials, locations of trade, and mechanisms of operation — to start from the bottom up, so to speak. Leaving aside the state and the economy, the papers concentrate mainly on local and international trade where state involvement was limited.
The Byzantine or Eastern Roman Empire conveniently (for us) encompassed both the period of late antiquity when the role of the state was overtly large, at least within the annona system that moved basic staples, and a period in the middle ages when the civil annona and the state’s role within it had ceased. This second period comprises a time during which Byzantine society is often described as being so little interested in trade that, left to its own devices (i.e. without a large state role), it had allowed merchant colonies from the West to take control of commercial transactions by the 12 century. One may ask how these two realities — early and later — can be reconciled, or whether they are in fact realities. Were the strategic skills and organizational resources deployed by the state until the 7 century lost thereafter, leaving Byzantine society incapable of lower-scale or individual management? Did Byzantine and Mediterranean trade virtually cease between the 7" and 10" centuries? If so, how does one explain the well-established activities of local and international trade recorded so soon after AD 900 in the Book of the Eparch and the Cairo Geniza documents?! Thus, the bridging period of the 8 to 9" centuries is particularly important here, as in other contexts. Altogether, ten papers here (5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 15, 17, 19, 24, 25) discuss the 8" century.
This analysis could have been carried out in the recent three-volume study edited by A. Laiou and published in 2002. Entitled The Economic History of Byzantium, it promised thorough coverage. Instead, the late antique/medieval dichotomy is perpetuated by focusing on the 7*to 15" centuries, thus failing to analyze at the same level the preceding period of formation that links Byzantium to the ancient world. The editor? simply explains that the earlier centuries — that is, late antiquity — have already been adequately examined by A.H.M. Jones.? However, not only did Jones make little use of archaeological evidence, but an abundance of excavated and surveyed material relevant to the study of trade and questions of economic history has been made available since his time. In The Economic History, late antiquity is allotted only 160 out of 1205 pages.* Excellent as this discussion is, an opportunity has clearly been missed to explore the two periods equally.
If The Economic History of Byzantium published in 2002 failed to bridge the perceived break between the ancient and medieval periods, Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse in their Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe (1983)° had already compounded the chronological with a geographical gap, namely the cessation of activity in the Mediterranean ° attributed to the Arab Conquest. However, this reiteration of Pirenne’s thesis provided new archaeological evidence for the development of a northern bypass between Bagdad and Aachen. Since the Hodges and Whitehouse publication, two others have re-examined the Mediterranean. In The Corrupting Sea, published in 2000, Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’ identified and analyzed the ecology of its microregions continuously engaged in small-scale activities such as cabotage, but occasionally externally stimulated to larger enterprise. They asserted furthermore that no qualitative distinction in economic life need be made between the ancient and medieval periods. The following year (2001), Michael McCormick’s Origins of the Medieval Economy, taking a macro-view, demonstrated that viable conditions for Mediterranean transport and trade continued to exist as documented by 828 instances of long-range movement on the Sea between AD 609 and 968.’ Travel within the Byzantine world was the subject of an earlier British Byzantine symposium, edited by Ruth Macrides and published in 2002.8 Since the Oxford symposium took place in 2004, Christopher Wickham’s study of Europe and the Mediterranean during 400-800 appeared, in 2005, and demonstrated how a detailed use of trading patterns, in particular those of fineware pottery, can elucidate economic realities within and between regions.”
So, several massive studies have set the stage for further work and publication, including this collection of papers taking a different and more modest perspective. Its objectives may be summed up as follows. First, it aims to examine trade, but not the economy per se. Second, to point up correspondences between the early and medieval periods, the papers concentrate mainly on local and international trade as two areas where state management, as distinct from state regulation and taxation, was minimal. The opposite approach — to consider comparatively areas statemanaged in the early period and free in the medieval — was also possible, but less appealing because, from an archaeological perspective, this is a subject relatively over-studied in the early period and largely neglected in the medieval. Third, the papers will focus in greater detail on specific items and places of trade, often looking beyond the Mediterranean itself to the West, East, South and North. Although the papers focus on trade that was presumably entirely or largely monetized, they do not — given limited space — discuss per se the monetary side of the subject — that is, coin finds, questions of control and profit, etc.
In principle, given the nature of trade (or its near equivalents), greater attention ought to be paid to the items traded in order to broaden understanding. Although the study of late antique transport amphorae has been refined as an analytical tool - and some papers here (e.g. 4, 10, 16, 20, 24) discuss the subject -, other material has been neglected, sometimes dismissed as elitist and marginal to the general economy — in other words, high-value and low-volume. However, this other material represents wants, not needs: it must have been market-driven and so should be considered. To draw an analogy, it is difficult to imagine a study of economy that takes account of copper but not gold coin.
How can this so-called elitist material be characterized? Does it include metal but not glass, or glass but not pottery? Looking at the material from the consumer’s end: what did people own, how valuable or elitist was it, and how did they acquire it? Diocletian’s Price Edict," of course, provides the most comprehensive idea of what was available and for how much. Inventories and related texts provide some notion of the range of possessions in a given household. At a socially modest end of the scale, an Egyptian will dated 583/4 states that an illiterate sailor (nautes) and his wife owned by purchase or inheritance ‘houses, objects of gold, silver, copper, brass, clothing, cloths and minor objects’, some at least therefore explicitly bought, not bartered or homemade." A document of 564 preserved at Ravenna lists the possessions of one Stephan that were evaluated for resale. These include some valuables (fibulae, spoons etc.), furniture (chairs etc.), soft furnishings (tapestries, etc.), four copper objects (barrel, pitcher, cooking pot, lamp), clothing (silk and cotton shirt, linen trousers), agricultural equipment (tools, mortars, trough, barrels, vats, etc.), and a female slave." Both medieval Byzantine domestic inventories of the 11" to 14" centuries (1017-1401) and Jewish trousseau lists of the 10" to 12" centuries preserved at Fustat are similar.’ Excavation contexts, particularly domestic and commercial, provide further information. Some individual preserved or excavated items record that they were bought and the amount paid. In 622, John bar Sergius of the village of Haluga in Osrhoene bought a codex of Pauline Epistles for 14 carats, apparently for his own use; in 624, an unnamed woman bought an Acts of the Apostles for 12 carats, which she gave to the village church at Gadalta; both books are now in London." Inscriptions record the cost of panels of mosaic pavement given to a synagogue in Gadara; one panel refers to payment made in ‘cloth’ as well as 3-5 (?) solidi. At Beth Alpha, another pavement was paid for by the sale of 100 modii (bushels) of wheat.%
The other end of the social spectrum, the genuinely elitist, is thought to be represented by items imported from the East, the most important of which are considered to have been spices, silk, precious stones, and ivory. But even here, the status of imports could be broadly based. Detailed study of the materials of this trade by Warmington and more recently Raschke’ reveals economic complexity within this market. Raschke stresses the nonelitist use of silk in both China and the Roman Empire.” Goitein remarks inasimilar vein about the remarkable popularity of silk in medieval trade: ‘this strong, clean and fine yarn probably answered many needs now fulfilled by modern synthetic fabrics’."® Stephan in 6"-century Ravenna, as we have seen, had a silk and cotton shirt. Late antique imported silk has been excavated in more marginal areas, such as the villages of Nessana and Oboda in the Negev, and at Zenobia on the Euphrates.” Warmington points out that pepper, of which three grades (black, white, long) were available, was not elitist, but widely used in Roman society, in medicine as well as seasoning.”
Many things were produced and acquired locally, in cities and even villages. A 6"-century tax list demonstrates that the village of Aphrodito in Egypt was well supplied with craftsmen. In addition to its 100 peasant proprietors, a notary, letter-writer and barber, bakers, butchers, greengrocers, millers and beekeepers, it had one dyer, eight fullers, four to five linen-weavers, wool-weavers, three tailors, shoemakers, one potter, three carpenters, two boatbuilders, coppersmiths, and five goldsmiths.” However, many things were obviously made in quantity for export from production centres. The range of goods brought into late antique Anazarbus, capital of Cilicia Secunda, numbered at least 42 items on a fragmentary tariff list, of which the surviving 15 items include rope, nets, sill, tm, lead and slaves, as well as wine, salt, garlic, garum, saffron, fenugreek, gourds, vegetables, other plants, and cattle.” Mixed cargoes of higher-value goods are recorded in horoscopes cast in 475 and 479 for delayed ships travelling from Alexandria to Athens and Smyrna respectively. The first carried camels from Cyrenaica, high-grade textiles (kortinas phrontalia kai akoubetalia), and items of silver (litters: argyra basternia). The second carried (live) small birds (pierota tina, strouthia), books or leaves of papyrus (biblin tina e chartas, charten liton), objects of bronze and kitchen utensils (skeue chalka, skewe mageirika), and a chest full of medicines (iatrika skeue, pharmakotheken pepleromenen).* Comparable cargoes were said to have been carried into the Adriatic by the 13 or more ships of the patriarchal fleet of Alexandria nearly 150 years later (AD 61020), namely dried goods (xerophorta), clothing (himatia), silver (argyros) and ‘other objects of high value’ (pragmata anagkain) with a total value of 34 kentenaria (3400|bs gold).™ This would amount to a value of c. 16,000 solidi per ship® as against the value of 70 solidi for the wine carried on the Yass1 Ada ship (AD c. 626).
The complex nature of trade is marked by choice and imitation. Although wine apparently formed part of the annona system, and was thus considered a basic staple, certain varieties were popular and travelled great distances, sometimes to other wine-producing areas. Gaza wine was praised by Sidonius Apollinaris (Poems 17.15) and Gregory of Tours (History 7.29) in Gaul, Cassiodorus (Variae 12.12.3) in Italy, and Corripus (In laudem Iustini 3.88) at Constantinople. Pottery lamps of North Africa and Asia Minor were copied, one might say counterfeited, at Athens and Corinth.” The Cairo Geniza documents reveal that Byzantine brocade covers and bridal chests often appear in 11"- to 12"-century Jewish trousseau lists in the Islamic world, although alternatives were available locally.?* These documents also reveal] that 22 types of Egyptian flax were traded around the medieval Mediterranean, of which the most popular in Sicily was Barrani.”
Once exported, an object could assume new meaning and value in a different society. One example is provided by the royal Saxon burial] excavated in 2003 at Prittlewell in Essex, which includes a common Byzantine copper flask and bronze basin® (perhaps deposited for their utility rather than their economic or aesthetic value). In Byzantium, the regulations for provisioning the imperial baggage train for military campaign show that social status required that silver vessels be given to the emperor and tinned copper to officers.”!
In order to focus on traded materials, papers published here discuss consumables such as wine and materia medica (papers 10, 16, 19), raw materials suchas gold from Africa, silver from Asia Minor, tin from Britain, ivory via Africa, and fur from northern Russia (papers 15, 21, 23-24, 28), as well as alum from Egypt and ship-building timber from Dalmatia and Asia Minor (paper 25), the latter two materials traded by Venice via Byzantium. Other papers (6, 11-15) are also based on finished manufactured products of ivory and bone, metal, glass, and pottery. In some cases, these products were traded abroad ~ namely, glassware excavated in Afghanistan, Russia and China, and mosaic tesserae of recycled Levantine glass used at Torcello (papers 13-14, 17, 26-27); metalware excavated in northern Europe and Africa (paper 15); and silk exported particularly to Europe (paper 25).
Pottery, which, in fact, has received far more scholarly attention than glass or metal, had a more restricted circulation abroad, in the form of fine wares, cooking and household wares, or glazed wall tiles (papers 7-9, 11-12, 18, 20). The circulation patterns of Byzantine fineware pottery were varied and complex. In late antiquity, African Red and other slip fine wares travelled widely, as John Hayes’s published maps demonstrate,” until at least the 7" century, and some probably later (paper 11), but it is not until the 12" to 13" centuries that we find shipwrecks — three of them — with a main cargo of fine wares (paper 12). By the 7" century, the Chinese had introduced porcelain; by the 8" century, it was traded into the Islamic world where apparently new glazing techniques, using tin opacifiers added to soda-lime glaze, were devised in imitation. Porcelain itself did not reach the Byzantine world, to judge from excavation records, but Islamic imitations did. These, imported in limited numbers, may have inspired the new Byzantine glazed polychrome ware, which, combining earlier Roman-style lead glazing and a new white fabric — the . . clay apparently available at Constantinople itself and at Preslav (paper 7) -, achieved a comparable effect without the Chinese and Islamic technology innovations. Chinese porcelain is not found in Constantinople until the 16" century.” Nevertheless, a single 10"-century porcelain vase is preserved at Venice among San Marco's prized vessels,** many of which are identified by their distinctive 10"-century mounts as being high-status Byzantine booty of the Fourth Crusade (paper 15). Was this porcelain vase once at Constantinople, perhaps arriving there as a diplomatic gift? Chinese sources record Byzantine embassies to China in 643, 667, 701, and possibly 719; the first of these brought Byzantine purple glass,* a good example of which is also preserved at San Marco. Could a later embassy have returned with porcelain? More surprising than the general absence of Chinese porcelain is the lack of imports from adjacent Sasanian Persia of pottery (paper 18), glass (paper 13), or metalware. Nor, apparently, has Byzantine pottery or metalware been found in Sasanian Persian contexts, although Byzantine glass has been found at two Sasanian sites.” Is this near lack of mutual exchange explained by political realities, preferences of taste, or an unidentified trade mechanism? Procopius refers to the revenues Persia gained through the Byzantine silk trade with the Far East. Thus, Persia did not prevent this trade (as so often stated), but profited from it. In contrast to the Sasanian and Chinese ceramics, pottery from the Islamic world did circulate in Byzantium (paper 12).
As stated earlier, the symposium looks beyond the Mediterranean to the West, East, South and North. The dust jacket of this publication shows the map of the world devised for the mid-6'-century text of Christian Topography of Cosmas Indicopleustes. This shows the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and the Caspian, all surrounded by the ocean. But Cosmas himself knew that the Far East lay beyond India and Taprobane (which he visited), and he knew what things were imported from all those lands. Exports from the late antique Mediterranean have been identified across three continents (fig. 1.1).
The papers published here consider, in turn, local, regional and interregional trade as a prelude to a longer look at international trade, in both its products and key regions. The introductory section of papers (2-4) discusses mapping trade, to discover the means (maps, shipwrecks, amphorae) whereby one can know where trade moved and how. Section II papers (5-7) cover local trade and commerce operating by means of shops and workshops (sometimes combined) in three cities — Scythopolis / Bet Shean (4-8" centuries), Alexandria (4"~9" centuries), and Preslav (9 11" centuries) —, examining specific production (glass, ivory/bone, glazed tiles, fine wares) from the point of view of its type, volume, duration, and its immediate or distant destination. Were these producer or consumer cities, and how were commercial activities organized within them on the ground?
Section IJ papers are region-based and consider, respectively, one regional market, in Syria (paper 8), for cooking wares (5'"-8" centuries); the range of pottery imported into another, smaller region of Isauria (possibly in the Dark Age) (paper 9); and one medieval supplier operating on a regional as well as a much wider basis (paper 10). This last type of supplier to Constantinople of a basic staple (wine) may have replaced the annona-style circulation of the early period. This wine was transported from Ganos to nearby Constantinople, from where it may have reached its wider market. Section IV papers (11-15) consider diachronically the circulation — local, regional, interregional and international — of general classes of fine and other wares, namely of pottery (papers 11-12), glass (papers 13-14), and metal (paper 15). Paper 11 demonstrates the continued production and trade of a Late Roman fine ware well beyond its accepted terminus in 700, possibly until the 9 century. Papers 12-14 consider innovative types of glass and pottery produced and traded in either late antiquity or middle Byzantium, while paper 15 covers metalwork of both periods.
The remaining two sections are devoted to international trade that was controlled in the early period by commerciarii who imposed a 12.5 per cent duty on the goods brought into the Empire through designated entry points at Clysma and lotabe in the Red Sea; Callinicum, Nisibis, Dara and Dvin in the east; and Hieron on the Bosphoros and the Danube in the north.** The lead seals of the commerciarii were apparently affixed to the goods, and the duty collected funded the local military as stated in Anastasius’s Edict posted in several locales.” By the 7 century, much of what had been interregional trade becomes international, thanks to regime change in so many areas. The shift from one to the other is neatly illustrated by the remains and evidence of cargoes and crews of two wellknown shipwrecks both off the southern coast of Asia Minor, that of the 7% century at Yassi Ada and that of the 11" century at Serge Liman.”
Sections V—VI on international trade begin with four papers (16-19) discussing selected types of exports out of the Empire, namely wine (to the Iberian and Arabian peninsulas) and glass (to China), followed by one type of import, materia medica, and the observed absence of another (Sasanian or other eastern pottery). Section VI looks at four regions, starting with three papers (20-22) on the West, namely 5'"- to 6"-century Britain as reached by way of the Atlantic (rather than the Rhine); these papers consider, respectively, types of ships used, a prime raw material available (tin), and evidence of Mediterranean contact.
The next two papers (23-24) look both to the South and the East to consider the Red Sea as the principal gateway in exploring the continuity of the trade described in the 1*-century AD Periplus Maris Erythraei."" Was trade between the Mediterranean, East Africa and the Far East stopped before the 4" century by economic inertia; or in the 6" century by the Persians or the plague; or in the 7" century by the Umayyad Arabs; or in the 8" century by the Abbasids? Or did it continue? If it was interrupted, when did it revive? Literary evidence relates to the 6"-century phase of trade: Cosmas Indicopleustes, author of the Christian Topography and merchant of Alexandria, refers to fellow traders operating in Aksum and, himself included, travelling to Sri Larika; the pilgrim from Piacenza recounts eating bright green nuts obtained from ships from India docked at Clysma in c. 570. Roberta Tomber reports that sherds of at least four types of Late Roman amphorae have now been identified at several sites in India and Sri Lanka.” These sites occur in the main areas of West-East trade discussed by Cosmas, especially Gujurat and Sri Lanka (where on fig. 1.1 all relevant dots also refer to coin finds).* Paper 23 examines Red Sea ports and linked sites for evidence of late antique activity, finding the most promising at Berenike where a range of imports was uncovered. Paper 24 examines the Kingdom of Aksum, principal entrepot between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, finding locally carved ivory that recalls work known within the Empire.
Papers 25-26 return to the medieval Mediterranean, to East and West. Paper 25 examines a triangular system of trade networks linking the Adriatic with Constantinople and Alexandria, as developed by Venice between the 8" and 11" centuries. Trade goods varied according to local demands and included alum, timber and Cretan cheese, as well as silk. Paper 26 makes a scientific case study of related contacts, namely the use in 11"-century mosaic decoration at Torcello of glass chemically similar to that of Levantine glass found as cargo on the contemporary ship wrecked at Serge Limani and probably bound for Constantinople.
The two final papers look to the North, as viewed from Cons tantinople, to the Black Sea and beyond. Paper 27 considers the Crimea as the trading gateway to the North, in particular at the evidence of exchange at Cherson and Tmutarakan. Paper 28 takes the subject further into northern Russia, tracing the links between new rural settlement and trade from the 10! century, based on survey and excavation.
At the centre of the commercial network of Byzantine trade lies Constantinople, the subject covered at the symposium by Cyril Mango. He will publish his discussion of the capital as consumer or producer in his forthcoming study of the urban history of the city. Extensive excavations, begun in 2004," of its largest harbour (that of Theodosius at Yenikap1 summarized by Nergis Giinsenin in paper 10; see Figure A) promise to change the chronological profile of trade at Constantinople.
Other papers delivered at the symposium, held at Oxford in 2004, have been or are to be published elsewhere, namely those of Franck Goddio and Jonathan Cole on excavations in the Canopic region and port of Alexandria; of Mark Horton on Zanzibar and Shanga; and of John Hayes on pottery in late 12"-century Cyprus.
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