Download PDF | Chris Wickham - The Donkey and the Boat_ Reinterpreting the Mediterranean Economy, 950-1180-Oxford University Press (2023).
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Acknowledgements
Many people have helped me materially with the writing of this book, across the six years, 2016-22, of the book project from start to finish. I hope that I have named them all here; I have anyway tried to, helped by my email files, and I can only apologize to anyone whom I have missed out. To start with, several people read chapters or sections of this book and gave me essential critiques: Lucia Arcifa, Pamela Armstrong, Giovanna Bianchi, Lorenzo Bondioli, Leslie Brubaker (who read all of it), Sandro Carocci, Wendy Davies, Lisa Fentress, Alison Gascoigne, Sauro Gelichi, Caroline Goodson, Paolo Grillo, John Haldon, Patrizia Mainoni, Eduardo Manzano, Alessandra Molinari, Annliese Nef, Sheilagh Ogilvie, Rob Portass, Elena Salinas (who also gave me a four-hour tutorial on Andalusi ceramics which was indispensable for Chapter 5), and Stefanie Schmidt.
I am also very grateful to the people who invited me to give papers during these years, in which I had the opportunity to try out drafts, less or more finished, and got in every case very useful (often crucial) feedback in return: first of all Peter Gray and the Wiles Trust, who invited me to give the Wiles Lectures in November 2021, and the invited guests whom I brought, who turned the discussions afterwards into a brainstorming meeting, Lorenzo Bondioli, Leslie Brubaker, Sandro Carocci, Caroline Goodson, Eduardo Manzano, Alessandra Molinari, plus Bruce Campbell, who was on the spot; and, for other invitations, Maria Joao Branco, Maria Elena Cortese and Paola Guglielmotti, Jean-Pierre Devroey, Hugh Doherty, Stefano Gasparri, Jessica Goldberg, Stefan Heidemann, Marek Jankowiak, Rutger Kramer, Cristina La Rocca, Ifaki Martin, Elvira Migliario, Maureen Miller, Cecilia Palombo, Steffen Patzold, Pino Petralia, Walter Pohl, Sebastian Richter, Marina Rustow, Diego Santos, Jana Schulman for the Kalamazoo congress committee, Tamas Kiss, Alexis Wilkin, Simon Yarrow, and Luca Zavagno.
Particular thanks are owed to the people who helped me with the geniza material: Maayan Ravid and Netta Cohen, who translated for me many of Moshe Gil’s translations into Hebrew; Lorenzo Bondioli, who followed up several queries on the originals, Jessica Goldberg for an array of good ideas and advice, and Marina Rustow for more advice and for giving me the run of the database behind the marvellous Princeton Geniza Project website. And, in addition to that, I thank Andreas Kaplony and his team, who run and develop the equally marvellous Arabic Papyrology Database, which makes Arabic-script documentary texts unusually accessible. Without the people in this paragraph, I could not have written Chapter 2 of this book, and the book would have been very different (and much shorter).
And I relied on very many more people for more specific help, in sending me texts (often unpublished ones), locating particularly difficult-to-find material (including photos—see the picture credits), talking to me about problems I was finding, and answering questions I sent them, often out of the blue. Again in alphabetical order, they are (or include) Paul Arthur, Rafael Azuar, Denise Bezzina, John Bintliff, David Bramoullé, Rebecca Bridgman, Federico Cantini, Claudio Capelli, Mayte Casal, Alexandra Chavarria, Ann Christys, Francesca Colangeli, Simone Collavini, Adele Curness, Koen De Groote, Federico Del Tredici, Mariette de Vos, Carolina Doménech, Laurent Feller, James Fentress, Alberto Garcia Porras, Roland-Pierre Gayraud, Roger Gill, Sophie Gilotte, Susana Gomez, Sonia Gutiérrez, Catherine Holmes, Dario Internullo, Jeremy Johns, Anna Kelley, Fotini Kondyli, Eve Krakowski, Philippe Lefeuvre, Marie Legendre, Francisco Lopez-Santos, Elisa Maccadanza, Tom McCaskie, Nicola Mancassola, Cristina Menghini, Antonino Meo and Paola Orecchioni and the rest of the SicTransit team, Alex Metcalfe, Nicolas Michel, Antonio Musarra, Alessandra Nardini, Elisabetta Neri, Hagit Nol, James Norrie, Elisabeth O'Connell, Vivien Prigent, Natalia Poulou, Juan Antonio Quirds, Riccardo Rao, Yossi Rapoport, Paul Reynolds, Catherine Richarté, Ana Rodriguez, Alessia Rovelli, Lucie Ryzova, Viva Sacco, Fabio Saggioro, Marco Sannazaro, Nadine Schibille, Phillipp Schofield, Valerie Scott, Simone Sestito, Petra Sijpesteijn, Andrew Small, Julia Smith, Alessandro Soddu, Lorenzo Tabarrini, Catarina Tente, Paolo Tomei, Francesca Trivellato, Marco Valenti, Anastasia Vassiliou, Joanita Vroom, Mark Whittow, Gregory Williams; and from OUP Stephanie Ireland, who encouraged this project from the start, and Cathryn Steele, Emma Slaughter, and Donald Watt, who guided it into port. Finally, I am indebted to Clare Whitton for the index.
This is over a hundred people, friends and colleagues, who were all happy to help push this project along and save me from gaps and errors. They did so without any visible concern that I might not agree with their own views. Thank you all. This is what research should be like: generous and collaborative. I shall be only too happy to repay it all in kind, now and into the future.
I have tried to keep up to date with all the regions of this book, up to at least the middle of 2021; I have not tried very hard to incorporate material from after the end of that year. I will have missed things, but from the start of 2022 onwards I wont feel guilty about it.
Introduction
This book began with the intense dissatisfaction I felt with the traditional narratives of the ‘commercial revolution’ of the central middle ages in Europe and the Mediterranean, and above all of its origins. There is at least no doubt that a major economic change occurred. The period 950/1000-1300/1350 saw a considerable increase in agricultural production, in commercial exchange and markets, and in urbanization and urban production, both in north-west Europe and around the Mediterranean Sea, whether in Christian- or Muslim-ruled lands. (It did for that matter in some other parts of the world too, most obviously China, though the reasons for that coincidence in time are essentially chance.*) But what caused it, and what its very nature was in different places, seem to me to be widely misunderstood, even in its most basic elements. Hence my dissatisfaction. What follows is an attempt to resolve the problems I found, as they relate, specifically, to the Mediterranean and the regions bordering it, in the period of the origins of that ‘revolution, up to 1180 or so.
Obviously, the book has become much more substantial than that. I had decided to start my research with Egypt, where the challenges of the geniza documentation, which will figure large in this book, drew me in from the beginning, influenced as I was (and am) by Jessica Goldberg’s work; I did not want the material to remain as the black box which it often seems to be to outsiders to geniza studies, owing to the linguistic challenges it offers. And I knew that there was also Egyptian material in Arabic script, which intrigued me, as I had become convinced of the potential of the documentation for the Nile valley as a result of earlier work. I did not realize quite how much there was, however, and how much it could help me; and I did not realize how little it had been studied. My Egypt chapter rapidly became quite long as a result. And then so did every other chapter, for it turned out that in each section of the Mediterranean there was exciting and under-used material, and more and more archaeology, which needed to be set out properly, so that the experiences of each region could be properly compared with others.
I did not know what I would find anywhere, even in Italy, which I knew best. But I came to see that there were indeed enough flaws in the accepted paradigms for economic change in the central middle ages that it would be necessary to reshape it—or to attempt to reshape it—on the basis of a new look at all the sources, without relying on the interpretations and the choices of others. These choices indeed in many cases go back to the beginnings of systematic medieval socio-economic history, whose pioneers—Marc Bloch, Henri Pirenne, Eileen Power, Roberto Lopez, Cinzio Violante, Georges Duby, to name only a few—set out compelling hypotheses based on sample explorations of empirical data, which they presumed would be tested as well as filled out by later work, but which in many cases have simply been taken as axiomatic, paradigms in the Kuhnian sense, ever since. That testing sometimes confirms their intuitions, as one would expect, for these pioneers could be brilliant historians, but sometimes radically undermines them; what we have to do is simply to go back and look properly. Hence the scale of the book, even though it only discusses a small sector of the paradigms they created.
The most approachable and influential narrative of the ‘commercial revolution remains that of Lopez back in 1971, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages. Unlike Pirenne’s Mahomet et Charlemagne for the early middle ages, a similar work in its wide influence, it did not create the picture in itself; but it summed one up, in a footnote-free account of under 200 pages, written with considerable narrative verve, and it is still regularly cited.” One could see it as, in a sense, the distillation of the medieval commercial chapters of the Cambridge economic history of Europe, which were still relatively recent then and had similar arguments—and which included an important contribution by Lopez himself, dating to 1952; Lopez had also, before the war, written major work on thirteenthcentury Genoa, which underpinned his thought ever after. But the essentials of the story he told went back to the work of Wilhelm Heyd in 1879 and Adolf Schaube in 1906 on Mediterranean trade, now well over a century old—path-breaking in their time, but inevitably based on published sources, which were then relatively few—plus (among others) that of Raymond de Roover, the historian of banking and credit, who actually coined the term ‘commercial revolution’ in 1942, although he located it late in the thirteenth century.’
For Lopez, the ‘commercial revolution’ (I cut his capitals, and prefer scare quotes) was based on European demographic growth, and consequential agricultural expansion which outpaced that growth. This created surplus which could be traded, and the leaders of that trading enterprise were the Italian port cities, Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, with some prior Amalfi trade. (Lopez paid due attention to northern Europe, particularly Flanders, as one would expect, but his mental focus was always the Italian cities.) He was above all interested in the process of that trading: contracts, accounting, commercial handbooks, sea routes. He was vaguer about what was actually traded. He stated that ‘agricultural progress was an essential prerequisite of the Commercial Revolution; which thus ‘took off from the manor, implying clearly that agricultural products were the core of that commerce; but he also said that ‘luxury products and the custom of the rich tend[ed] to play a more important role than commodities for mass consumption, and then, later, that it was iron and timber, and after that industrial products like arms and cloth, which ‘Europe (he meant Italy) exported to the east in return for silk, spices, and pepper. He had not, that is to say, thought this through; this was largely because he belonged to the wing of economic historians who focus on the organization of commerce as their major guide to economic change and complexity, rather than to those who focus on production and consumption. But one thing was clear: Italy was the prime mover here. In Italy, unlike the Islamic world, towns had the ‘freedom and power that was indispensable for their progress’; Islamic towns were hobbled by not having this autonomy. Italian towns thus dominated the ‘commercial revolution, even though the luxuries which supposedly were its most important element came from or through the Islamic lands.* Lopez was not unaware that one actually did also have to consider local trade, not least between towns and the countryside, if one wanted to develop a picture of commerce as a whole, but, although he occasionally said this explicitly, he did not develop the point.® One is left with the rosy image of the wharves of Venice and Genoa groaning with silks and spices taken off the argosies from the east, which is then used as a proxy for the whole economy; I exaggerate, but only a little.
Of course, there have been fifty years of economic history since Lopez, which have produced a great deal—even if the medieval economy as a historical research area is less studied than it was, and in some countries has gone out of fashion in the last generation. Monographic studies abound in every region for the rural economy, and also, after 1200 in particular, for urban production and exchange. From then on too, when the ‘revolution’ was fully under way, trading systems have some powerful Europe-wide surveys, such as Peter Spufford’s Power and profit: the merchant in medieval Europe (2002), which generalizes from his earlier work on coin production to produce a rich (and richly illustrated) analysis of the world of merchants, in a very long fourteenth century. By that time, there is much more evidence for how that world worked in Europe, and its main features are not controversial, with the major north-south routes linking northern Italy and Flanders, and steadily extending eastwards too, to connect with late medieval south German urbanization and Bohemian silver; the account books and occasionally letter collections of major international merchant entrepreneurs and bankers are by now easily available for inspection and study.° There are still major holes in our paradigm (Why was Paris so big after 1200, for example? How was it fed, what did it produce, and for whom?’), but historians, I think, simply assume that these holes will be filled in in the end.
More problematic for us is that both monographs and syntheses for the period after 1200 tend to take for granted the prior existence of the ‘commercial revolution. Given that it had started by the time the period of their research begins, they simply analyse its inner workings, or celebrate its results, as with many works on Italy’s active urban societies. The problem of how to explain its origins seldom poses itself, except in some work on England, where the density of high-quality economic history has remained higher than for many parts of Europe.* Furthermore, little attention is generally given to what was happening on the southern side of the Mediterranean. One important synthesis, Janet Abu-Lughod’s Before European hegemony (1986), does that, and in fact aims to show that European medieval commerce in the period 1250-1350 was only part of a set of interlocking networks stretching from Flanders to China, and not the largest-scale of them either. She entirely convinces, but the book is based on secondary literature, and, as with many others, mostly concerns long-distance commerce, not the regional and local economic structures which lay beneath it and determined it.” Otherwise, in general, the Mediterranean is seen from the standpoint of the Venetians and Genoese in these books; the dominance of the sea by their ships is taken for granted, and often the assumption remains, as for Lopez, that Mediterraneanwide commerce pretty much began with them.”
But, actually, when Lopez rounded off his career with that synthesis, it was already out of date. Cairo only appears once in its index, but in 1967 Shelomo Goitein had already published the first volume of his A Mediterranean society, about the commercial activities of the communities of Jews in Fustat, twin city to Cairo, whose Judaeo-Arabic letters and documents, above all from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, were thrown into the geniza—not an archive, but a huge wastepaper bin, hundreds of thousands of bits of paper—of the Ben Ezra synagogue, one of the three main synagogues of Fustat in our period. Geniza scholarship has been active ever since, in the hands of Goitein’s pupils and their pupils; in recent years, by far the most significant book on geniza economic issues in our period has been Jessica Goldberg's Trade and institutions in the medieval Mediterranean (2012)."* From all this work, a clear picture of a Mediterraneanwide trade by Jewish (and, by implication in Goitein’s work—in my view rightly— also Muslim) merchants could be established. It started by the late tenth century, well before the Italian cities got a look in, and was focussed on selling Egyptian flax to Muslim-ruled Sicily and Tunisia to be made into linen cloth and sold on, whether inside those two regions or back to Egypt (among other commodities, olive oil came back from Tunisia to Egypt too). It was also linked to the Levant and Spain to a lesser extent, as well as to a largely luxury trade connecting China and India with the Mediterranean, which has long been known about. This Fustat-centred and textile-focussed trade was the dominant exchange network on the inland sea until 1100 at the earliest, and shared with that promoted by the Italian cities for some time after.
The importance of the evidence from the geniza has several elements which are of direct relevance for us, and which will recur throughout this book. Here, I list four. First, empirically, it shows that the Mediterranean was not just an empty space before the eleventh century, waiting for the Italians to fill, a position which has been generalized very effectively by Christophe Picard’s La mer des califes (2015). Some historians are still capable of supposing that the Egyptian flax traders simply represented a sort of prehistory to the major period of the second great Mediterranean trade cycle (the first being that of the Roman Empire), extending from the late tenth century to the late middle ages, which could thus still be seen as dominated by the Italians; but we have to recognize that the basic sea-trading patterns of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Mediterranean were by no means a creation of the Italians alone. We can now better see that the Genoese and Pisans and (to a lesser extent) Venetians simply added themselves to this network by force, much as the Vikings did in the ninth-century North Sea, or as the Portuguese did in the sixteenth-century Indian Ocean.” Historians have shown that the Italians did indeed take over much of the trans-Mediterranean carrying trade by 1150-1200, shifting much of it northwards,’* and it stayed that way until the Ottoman reunification of three-quarters of the Mediterranean in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; but the whole configuration of the trade cycle changes once one knows the geniza evidence. Indeed, as we shall see, Lopez and the others had the whole narrative backwards, to a large extent; notwithstanding the maritime importance of its port cities, north-central Italy not only did not have the leading economy in the Mediterranean in our period, but was actually among the last regions to develop an internally integrated production and exchange system. This is a paradox which will be explored in Chapters 6 and 7.
The other points can be set out more rapidly. Second, the geniza makes clear that one could develop a major-scale Mediterranean exchange network dominated, not by luxuries, but by bulk goods, bales of raw flax, bales of linen or cotton cloth, skins full of olive oil. Lopez explicitly doubted this, because transport costs were too high—even if it is hard to see how he could have said so, given his knowledge of the Genoese cloth and alum trade in the thirteenth century—but, in fact, bulk goods can be shown empirically to have been the main element of the second trade cycle throughout, and luxuries were no more than an adjunct to them. I will come back to the point later in this chapter, and throughout the book.” Third, it shows that any discussion of the origins of the ‘commercial revolution cannot just be about Europe; in fact, it is unlikely that they were really about Europe at all, and I shall argue that they were not. ‘Europe’ will not reappear here as a point of reference, in fact. It is undoubtedly true that a north-west European take-off, centred on Flanders and the region around it, began perhaps a century earlier than that of northern Italy, and that there were links between them; but these links were not causal, and in fact I would see the two developments in themselves as having partly different causes. My focus here will only be the Mediterranean as a result, and I will not privilege any particular region of the Mediterranean for a priori reasons. Fourth, the different perspective of the geniza also poses basic questions about how we can theorize economic causes in the medieval period. What were the economy’s prime movers? How far can we generalize about them? What, indeed, was the economic logic that characterized the medieval period? I have discussed this last issue elsewhere,’’ and I shall return to it at the end of this chapter and at the end of the book.
My focus here is a long eleventh century, very long in fact, going from c.950 to c.1180. The first date marks the rough point at which the Mediterranean trade cycle began. The second, by when it was mostly in full swing, requires more comment, because it should not be taken as over-precise. It does not matter for most of my regions whether I chose a final date of 1180 or 1200, and I have been fairly flexible about how I have treated the data for the end of the twelfth century; active internal exchange had by now visibly begun in all but one of them. It is Italy which causes problems here. I initially thought, following the assumptions of the historiography, that it would be relatively straightforward to pin down the moment when the internal productive and commercial economy of north-central Italy took a decisive upturn, to sometime in the early twelfth century at the latest, and that it would then not be necessary to go much later, as the issue of its origins would already be clear. As I researched the issue further, however, that date has receded. First, 1150 seemed like a new plausible turning point; it is, probably, for Milan and Piacenza, although the evidence is poor and indirect even for there, plus, without any doubt, the port cities. For most of the rest of the Italian north, however, we do not yet have any indication that we could say the same, so I decided to push the end date later, to 1180; even then, as we shall see in Chapter 6, it was probably later still for much of the region. But I gave up chasing it in 1180. This is because I wanted to be able to study all available documentation, documentary, literary, and archaeological alike, for the regions I was focussing on; I needed to study it all directly, as the use made of it by too much of the historiography has been distorted by prior assumptions about what the historian ought to be finding. Inside Italy, however, after 1150 the documentation in some cities increases exponentially, decade by decade. In Genoa, for example, there is more documentation for the period 1180-1200 than there is for the previous 250 years, and the same is nearly true for Venice as well—although Genoa and Venice, actually, are not the problem, for their commercial commitment was among the earliest and strongest in Italy, and is unusually easy to track. 1180 can stand as an end point for Italy, then, although in some parts of it, here too, I have looked later; and it is not a misleading end point for any other region either. At least, in the case of Byzantium, it allows me to sidestep the issue, which is marginal for the arguments of this book but crucial for Byzantinists, of what effect the disaster of the Fourth Crusade had on the economy of the empire after 1204.
The Mediterranean is too large, and the evidence for this period too substantial, for all its constituent regions to be properly studied in depth for this period, without creating a book of absurd length. About half of the regions around it are discussed here. I chose six as case studies, which offer complementary particularities. In order of presentation, they are Egypt; the central section of North Africa, centred on what is now Tunisia, then called Ifriqiya; Sicily; the Byzantine Empire, particularly its Aegean heartland; al-Andalus, that is to say, Islamic Spain and Portugal; and north-central Italy, particularly the central and eastern Po plain and Tuscany. (See Map 1. Note that, throughout this book, I mean by ‘regions’ relatively big geographical blocks such as these; it is a convenient generalizing term, since such regions seldom coincide with single polities, ancient or modern.) The evidence, whether documentary or archaeological or both, for nearly all these regions is good enough to justify a focussed study; the exception here is Ifriqiya, but it was too closely linked to Sicily to exclude it easily, and in fact I present the two regions together. Given the quantity of data for Italy, city by city, I have had to be more selective there, and have again gone for case studies, Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Milan, and to a lesser extent Padua, Lucca, Florence, Cremona, and Piacenza— and referring briefly to Rome as a comparator, since I had already worked on it, and since its role in the period, as a large but relatively isolated city, raises interesting questions in itself.
The main regions I have left out are Morocco, the Catalan and south French coast, Sardinia, southern mainland Italy, Croatia, and the Levant—that is to say, Syria and Palestine. These varied quite substantially in the degree to which they were integrated, either internally or externally, by exchange networks; the data for them across the period of this book are also for the most part poorer. The data for Catalonia are rich, but it was slow to move economically; the opposite is true for the Levant; only southern Italy would have matched up with the regions I chose in the evidence for its active production and exchange, but it seemed to me that the patterns it showed were sufficiently similar to those of other regions to allow me not to include it. I regret all these omissions (particularly Sardinia, terribly documented as it is for our period, but fascinatingly strange in its socio-economic structure), but they seemed to me necessary. They mean that this book is not about the Mediterranean as a whole, but, rather, the development and interconnections of a subset of the regions around the sea. But, to repeat, this imperfection seemed to me justifiable heuristically, for we will find a large amount of variation anyway. Each region has a long chapter (with one, as noted, for Ifriqiya plus Sicily); there is then a chapter summing up how our understanding of the way the Mediterranean fitted together commercially can, or should, be refigured as a result of the empirical discussions offered here. A final chapter explores the issue of how the logic of the medieval economy worked, again in the light of these discussions.
I must confess here that the book got out of hand anyway. I thought that I would be able to rely, to a considerable extent, on previous work in the field, balanced against targeted critical investigations of specific sectors of the evidence. But I discovered at the start, as stated earlier, that this was not the case for Egypt; and in fact it was untrue elsewhere as well. Not one of the regions discussed here (or indeed any of the others) has a reliable overall economic analysis for our period, except the Byzantine Empire—even Italy, which has had by far the densest sets of discussions. Archaeological syntheses are also lacking, except for Sicily and again Byzantium. Every region also has its own historiographical idées fixes, which do not match up with—and in some cases are directly challenged by—the debates on other regions. That is to say, as indeed I have found for other periods, historians and archaeologists do not as a rule read enough outside the region they study, so they can get caught up in local solipsistic discussions, which are in this period very often about grand narratives of nationhood (in Italy or Spain) or of supposed regional failure (in Ifriqiya, Sicily, Egypt, or Byzantium), and which never, in any case discussed here, actually help our understanding.*® Indeed, many commonly held assumptions, which recur in discussions of the period, are entirely mistaken, making even good work at times unreliable.
So I found that I had to begin again, with both the documentary and the archaeological evidence, all of which needed to be contextualized, plus the added task of explaining why local debates had come to be how they are. Each chapter, therefore, has a substantial historiographical section which tries to do so. The work was in every case fascinating and rewarding; but the chapters mushroomed as a result. Should individual chapters in any book be over 50,000 words long? No, but all the substantive ones here are, and the Italian chapter is longer still. I have to apologize for this, in a general way at least; but the chapters are also quite synthetic, given that they are characterizations of the changing economic structures of whole modern countries or sets of countries across almost a quarter of a millennium, and could in nearly every case have been twice the length. I anyway seek in each to be as clear and exact as one can be, given that new research, particularly by archaeologists, can change our knowledge so rapidly. I also hope that the regional chapters will show experts on other regions that there are important features of all those discussed here which cannot be ignored in any holistic account of the medieval economy; some of them, inexplicably, have hardly featured in wider surveys before at all. You could see each of the regional analyses as aiming at being a contribution to understanding, and reinterpreting, the economic development of each of my six case studies, and, as that, they can each be read on their own. They have for that reason been written so that each is self-explanatory, even if this involves occasional repetitions—which is also aimed at helping non-experts on each region to get more easily into the evidence and the debates. This is also why I have included in most of the regional chapters some quite detailed critiques of specific arguments which seem to me mistaken, and which might mislead outsiders: among others, about the supposed trade in potters’ clay along the Nile, or the economic role of the Venetians in the twelfthcentury Aegean, or the absence of amphorae in al-Andalus. But these chapters furnish, as well, the basic empirical material that underpins the final two, shorter chapters, which aim to rethink our wider paradigms for the period: in the first, for Mediterranean economic change and its drivers; in the second, for the structures of the medieval economy as a whole.
I have used, systematically, both written and archaeological sources, and they come together in individual sections of the book. It is ever clearer that one cannot write medieval economic history (as also that of the ancient world) without the evidence from archaeology. But it needs to be recognized that the two disciplines are different epistemologically: the conventions for truth criteria in each do not always match up. How they should do has not been my concern here, but it does make working with each body of data a distinct process. Added to this is the fact that archaeologists, in particular, sometimes have a habit of using documentbased assumptions to develop hypotheses about their own archaeological data, which are then used to reinforce the documentary assumptions, in a circular argument: ‘historians tell us that this city was destroyed in 1150, so we must date our deposits to before that moment; the fact that there are now no deposits after that moment confirms the destruction. (If historians do not do the same in reverse, it is only because they do not read enough archaeology.) I have, therefore, sought, in nearly every case, to set up each archaeology-based argument separately from the parallel argument based on documentary or, more rarely, literary sources. Only when each is developed on its own in this way does it seem to me methodologically permissible to compare, and seek to reconcile, the results, and this has been my practice in nearly every part of the book.’”
The written sources I have used are above all in three languages, Latin, Greek, and Arabic (occasional Coptic and Hebrew texts appear too). Latin is not a problem. My Greek is less good, and it would be disingenuous to pretend that I have not been helped by translations, where there are any; but I will stand by my interpretations of texts, which I have checked in the original at every crux. My Arabic is no longer non-existent, but it is still very poor, and dealing with the geniza is that much harder because the texts from it were written in Judaeo-Arabic, Arabic written in Hebrew script. Here I have openly used, and also cited, translations of literary texts; where there are linguistic cruxes in them which I could not resolve, I have sought help, and in that case acknowledge it explicitly. Arabic (including Judaeo-Arabic) and Coptic documents and letters for the most part already have line-by-line translations, which have helped me to identify the cruxes and resolve them myself. Where those translations are into modern Hebrew I have again usually sought help, and, when I have done, again acknowledge it. You cannot write any book without the help of friends and colleagues, and certainly not one like this, where there is so much for anyone to learn. But my experience of asking for linguistic help here, although it takes time, and creates many debts of gratitude which, as noted in the Acknowledgements, I shall be only too happy to repay in kind, has another dimension too: it is for me a démarche which will have to be followed by others, if we want to succeed in creating a global medieval history which is actually based on primary research, rather than on—as it only too often seems—outdated cliché. Egypt is not geographically very far away from my fullest research experiences, which are Italy-based above all, but it is already sufficiently linguistically and culturally different in our period to be challenging to an outsider. Iran would present challenges of the same type. The evidence for India, China, and Japan is even harder to penetrate. All the same, with help and collaboration we can get a long way; and this is a path which others, I am glad to see, are also walking on.”* +
The rest of this introduction sets out some of the basic starting points and approaches I have used in this book, to give a clearer guide to some of my aims. This book focusses on the movement of goods, usually through commercial exchange, but I do not wish to propose that this is the essential feature of the medieval (or any) economy. On the contrary: production and demand, both agricultural and urban, comes first, even if exchange follows on fast, linking them together, and more and more so in any expanding economy. So, although I am describing some of the same sorts of phenomena which were studied by major historians of commerce such as Henri Pirenne, Roberto Lopez, Raymond de Roover, Maurice Lombard, Marco Tangheroni, or Peter Spufford, I do not make the assumption which many of them have made, more or less explicitly, that longdistance commercial and/or financial complexity is the principal element, even sometimes the prime mover, in economic historical analysis.’? It is in this context that my two main starting points, although they are much the same as in other works of mine on the economy (I insisted on them at some length in Framing the early middle ages), need to be set out here as well. They would be obvious to most economists, but not all historians think this way.
The first is that the development of regional economic complexity is above all internal, based on local demand, both of landowning or official elites and of peasants, for the development of sellable products, whether agrarian or artisanal, and on the consequent local and medium-distance exchange of these products.”° It is not based on trans-Mediterranean shipping—or, elsewhere in Eurasia, any other form of long-distance transport. Large-scale longer-distance systems could, of course, exist in the pre-industrial world. The Roman Empire was one, in that case supported by large-scale state demand; the flax export of eleventh-century Egypt was another, as we shall see in Chapters 2 and 3; later than our period, the urban economies of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century northern Italy and Flanders were also at the centre of European systems of a similar scale. But their origins were in no case driven by long-distance trade. Initially, at least, basic artisanal products such as clothing and iron tools are made close to the origin of their raw materials; then, local and regional exchange networks need to be established before one can sell goods anywhere. Even after this, one will not be able to both buy and sell interregionally on any scale unless some other region has developed a parallel set of trading goods and a similar network of regional exchange.
Furthermore, if one takes even contemporary parallels, long-distance trade recedes in importance. United States exports have only once exceeded 10 per cent of GDP in the last two centuries and have mostly been under 7 per cent; French and Italian exports only exceeded 20 per cent after 2000, and UK exports have never gone past 25 per cent (and doubtless never will again). Imports have followed very similar paths, except for a greater UK import reliance in the nineteenth century, at the high point of the Industrial Revolution. And, as late as the end of the eighteenth century, almost all European countries probably exported only around 4 per cent outside their borders. We could not reasonably expect most of the regional economies of the central middle ages to have exported anywhere near that—maybe 1 per cent, or 2 per cent for export-orientated economies?—but however much it was (no exact figures can even be contemplated), we cannot be dealing with more than extremely low levels of interregional exchange in our period, even in the most externally orientated economies. One of the clearest figures I have seen, for fifteenth-century Sicily, is 5 per cent for the scale of cloth imports to the island, when set against local production, and cloth was one of the most imported and exported commodities; that, as we can already see, was in fact very high for the period, and it is extremely unlikely that any region came anywhere near that before 1180.7’ One result of these figures, it is worth noting, is that world-systems theories concerning the major economic developments of the modern period, which put a great deal of stress on international connections, have no real explanatory traction; the debate about them concerns a period too late in time for us to need to deal with it, but I will come back briefly to the point at the end of the book (pp. 683-4).
The questions, therefore, have to be posed at the local and regional level. Who produces? Who sells? Who buys? Where does the motor of exchange start, and what keeps it going? These questions need to be asked every time, if we wish to give form to the local and regional infrastructure of exchange. The interregional maritime network depends entirely on that infrastructure; without it, goods will not even get to the coast. If one starts with the maritime network, as historians of, say, Venice and Genoa are prone to do, it is only too common to neglect the local, sometimes almost entirely; it is less sexy, more workaday. It gets mentioned casually and then moved on from; it is not analysed in any detail. But it is the core; we need to start from there if we want to understand the economic system as a whole.
And that brings us to the title of this book: we have to study the donkey as well as the boat. It is a cliché of ancient and medieval history that transport is far cheaper, perhaps by a ratio of 20:1, by boat than on land, and this was in general true (we indeed have occasional confirmation of it for our period).”” Longdistance trade was overwhelmingly carried out by boat, and not only in the Mediterranean—the so-called ‘silk roads’ of Central Asia were of tiny importance compared with the ocean route from and around India. But goods were, in every part of the Mediterranean, moved around by donkey first, before they ever reached boats—even river boats, for we, of course, have to recognize the importance of rivers as routes, whenever they were navigable. Arabic letters from Egypt have many references to donkeys, and rightly so; we can assume their presence elsewhere too.”* The point can be developed further if one looks at it from the perspective of towns. There has to be an agrarian surplus available, from either close by or farther away, for urban centres, cities or towns, to be fed.” That surplus may come into towns in rent or as a result of sales by country dwellers (whether larger landowners or cultivators), but it needs to be accessible for any kind of complex economy to begin to appear, and, again, in our period it came in above all by donkey.”* Urban-made artisanal goods in return, also carried by donkey, will be sold above all locally and subregionally, in return for agricultural goods; after that, the more complex a regional economy, the more such goods will be available across the region, rather than being restricted to single localities; and then, sometimes, they can go beyond it. Interregional sales in general, however, to repeat, only constituted a very small minority of transactions in the middle ages, or indeed later, right up to the twentieth century.
So the underpinning of a complex economy was never in our period longdistance maritime trade. This was true even in eleventh-century Egypt or Sicily, or thirteenth-century northern Italy, which were, for sure, parts of a large-scale interregional trading network. The exceptions were a handful of entrepdt cities such as Venice and Genoa, or Tinnis in Egypt (see Chapters 6 and 2 respectively); and even Venice used the medium-distance export of salt across northern Italy as a major basis for the accumulation of wealth throughout our period.”® A maritime trade in sets of bulk goods between two regions for the most part serves as a sign of something more important: that each of their economies was sufficiently complex internally to buy on a large scale abroad and to produce enough goods to pay for it. When we can see this occurring, then we can begin to talk of an economic system which is, at least up to a point, Mediterranean-wide. But when we are looking at scale, we have to think of the donkey first; only then do we need to consider the boat.
My second, linked, starting point has already been mentioned: it is that the indicators of exchange complexity are not luxury goods, but, rather, goods that are transported in bulk. In our period, these were, among foodstuffs, wheat, wine, olive oil, and cheese (and not spices); among primary products, flax, cotton, wool, timber, and skins; among artisanal products, cloth, ironwork, leatherwork, paper, and ceramics (and not goldwork or jewellery). Only bulk goods are really significant to any economy. Luxuries always exist in stratified societies, whether simple or complex, essentially to mark elite status; expensive to make and/or hard to get, they are a small minority of commodities by definition. One can indeed say, as a rule of thumb, that if a luxury is important for an economic system, taken as a whole, then it has ceased to be a luxury. (We must again, of course, set aside single entrepét cites such as Venice, which could grow rich on largely luxury transport.) We have to focus on bulk goods if we want to understand how the economy worked, whether internally or interregionally; as a result, I will systematically set aside luxury trade in what follows. There were semi-luxuries as well, such as silk, which was bought by a much wider elite and was made on a considerable scale in Spain, Byzantium, and Sicily, or silver, which, although a precious metal, was a basic currency for most people and widely available; we will look at these too. But neither of them could, or did, create exchange systems on their own, except for the individual cities or mining areas which produced them. Rather, as we shall see, silk weaving, in particular, is at best an unusually welldocumented proxy for quantitatively more important types of cloth production, such as linen and cotton.”
On the basis of these observations, I want, as set out earlier, to create a picture of how the Mediterranean exchange economies worked and changed and interlinked, across the period covered by this book. It needs to be clear at the outset that, however they did work, they did not resemble the structural dynamics of what has been called the first long trade cycle, that of the Roman Empire. That, as it developed, was structured by state (fiscal) demand, for army supply and for feeding the huge Roman capitals—Rome’s own million or so inhabitants in the first century AD were not matched again in Europe and the Mediterranean until the nineteenth.”* Wheat moved north from Africa and Egypt in taxation, so did olive oil from Spain and, later, Africa again, and these, and other products like them, taken in tax or (in the case of armaments) made or bought by the state, constituted a state-backed movement of some bulk goods which underpinned the interregional commerce of others, cloth, wine, or mass-produced good-quality ceramics, the last two identifiable archaeologically (as is the oil transport—both wine and oil travelled in ceramic amphorae), as well as any number of other commodities. And when the state disintegrated from the fifth century onwards in the western Roman Empire, or, in the case of the eastern empire, was broken in two by the seventh-century Islamic conquests, the trade cycle broke down as well.””
The second long trade cycle, that of the ‘commercial revolution, may not have matched the scale of the first. After all, wheat and wine were grown all around the Mediterranean; they did not need to be moved much outside regions for strictly commercial purposes, except in times of local famines. The direct involvement of the state in the movement of goods, which was so much a feature of the Roman world, was also never repeated in medieval times (see pp. 628-9 below). And only complex regional economies had much use for large-scale bulk trade at all, as just noted. But, all the same, that trade did develop again, not least because, by the twelfth century, many of the regions of the Mediterranean—Egypt and alAndalus in particular, and northern Italy coming up fast at the very end of our period—were more complex economically than they were under the Romans, with most of the others at least matching Roman levels. This time manufactured goods, and the raw materials for them, were the main drivers of commerce, although the wine trade, visible archaeologically inside some of our regions, in particular Byzantium and Sicily, could still be highly active. From the tenth century onwards, good-quality ceramics become again, as under Rome, one proxy for these goods (although, as they consisted of hand-decorated glazed wares, not the red-slipped wares of the Roman Empire, they were less mass-produced); but we have better evidence than in the ancient world for the movement of cloth, and we will indeed find, in several regions, that the evidence for each, ceramics and cloth, matches the other. So our period saw regional economies which were often more complex internally than in the ancient world, even though the trade which linked them together was often less large-scale. That is a further empirical reason, in addition to the basic starting points just discussed, to concentrate on internal exchange developments.
My essential focus in this book is on exchange, of all types of goods. Most of the transport of bulk goods was commercial, although I do not wish to exclude the fiscal movement of goods, which did still occur, at least inside regions. This, of course, must lead us to look at urban production, and I do so, in as much detail as is possible on the basis of our data. It also means, however, that we cannot exclude agricultural production, and the general question of the extraction, and scale of distribution, of agricultural surplus, whenever there is any evidence about it. Agriculture constituted the largest part of the economy in every period and region in the world before the eighteenth century at the earliest, after all, so it cannot be sensibly excluded. It tends to be discussed by different sorts of economic historian from those who are most interested in towns and trade—there is a whole historiography on the changes in the organization and management of landed estates, which in many cases hardly alludes to how, or if, surpluses were sold; just as there is a historiography focussed on ‘the merchant, which says little about where the goods merchants sold actually came from.*® But what happened to these agricultural surpluses is of crucial importance for the arguments of this book, as towns could not exist without food supplies, and some of those rural surpluses, as with wool and flax, were the direct underpinning of urban production.
In addition, we need to look not just at urban and merchant-run exchange, but at that of the peasants themselves, the overwhelming majority of the population in every medieval region, which archaeology is beginning to tell us more about. We will find that increasingly, in most of our regions, peasants themselves had in many cases enough surplus, over and above rent, tax, and subsistence, to sell produce on their own account, and buy their own urban products, which can indeed be found increasingly widely in village-level field surveys and excavations. That contributed very directly to the breadth of urban production, and thus to the development of products which were large-scale enough to be sold elsewhere too. Knowledge of the existence of this stratum of peasants, who were prosperous enough to participate directly in commercial exchange, is a recent development in the literature for our period, moving away from the automatic assumption, normal into the 1970s at least, that peasants were so grindingly poor, so close to the boundaries of survival, that buying and selling, over the minimum necessary to pay rents or taxes in money, was beyond them, and that trade and its development hardly concerned them at all. The implications of this will underpin most of my empirical chapters, and will be discussed further as a theoretical issue in Chapter 8, when I look at how the economy of this period can be conceived as a whole. It also means that I will be less uneasy about using the word ‘development, which has quite a positive ring, when discussing the increases in regional economic complexity we see in this book, than I have been in previous work.*’ That work mostly focussed on the pre-1000 period, when greater economic complexity did indeed correlate well with higher levels of surplus extraction, and thus lower levels of prosperity for the peasant majority. But after 950/1000 the situation changed, and some of the most important parameters for economic ‘development’ changed with it. I shall argue this further in Chapter 8 as well.
One issue that this book does not discuss is economic failure. There is a metanarrative of failure underpinning the historiography of nearly every region discussed in this book; the only exception is north-central Italy, whose medieval high point for economic complexity was reached after the period discussed here ended. This metanarrative has at least two main underpinnings. One is the implicit belief that every active economy ‘fails’ if its exchange activity does not develop into capitalism, which, of course, empirically, the great majority of active medieval economies did not; Italy itself would later get hit by this storyline, at some point in the late middle ages or early modern period (in the fifteenth century, it often used to be thought; now, the early seventeenth).** So would the Mediterranean as a whole, maybe also in the seventeenth, when it was supposedly eclipsed by the larger exchange networks which the Atlantic and the eastwards route around Africa offered. This story is not interesting to me. Economies in the medieval period operated by largely different rules from today, as we shall also see at the end of the book, and the nature of their dynamics regularly changed; if elite investment moved into agriculture for a time rather than urban production, as often occurred, this would certainly affect that production, but it was a normal, not a ‘failing’ response to an economic logic which would stay feudal, not capitalist, for centuries. (See pp. 673-6, below for my definition of ‘feudal’ here.)
The second element of the metanarrative of failure is more explicit, and as a result more egregious. It concerns the supposed ‘failure’ of Islamic societies to build on their economic position in the early middle ages, when Egypt and the Levant were certainly far more complex economically than were any of the Mediterranean Christian lands, even Byzantium.** This ‘failure’ has been mistakenly attached to all sorts of elements, such as the absence of formal institutions such as guilds and city councils in the Islamic world, or the trend to ‘feudalism’ supposedly represented by giving tax-farming concessions in iqfa‘ to military figures, which are (wrongly) seen as similar to fiefs—a really perplexing argument, given that fiefs, of course, precisely characterized Latin Europe, where such a ‘failure’ did not occur. Eliyahu Ashtor was particularly guilty of this sort of imagery in his general survey of the economies of the medieval Islamic world (1976), which unfortunately, notwithstanding his out-of-date categorizations, a moralistic teleology which by now just looks strange, and a range of factual errors, has not been replaced.** What lies behind this sort of explanation is simply Orientalism, in Edward Said’s sense: the construction of the ‘East’ as an invented exotic land with no real history, just meaningless coups and court intrigue—or, in economic terms, no real development, just siqs full of spices and silks and merchants drinking sherbet. But the imagery persists, and is implicit even in some recent scientific work. I reject it out of hand. In empirical terms, most Islamic regions became more economically complex across our period, not less. One, al-Andalus, for long outpaced Italy, as we shall see in Chapter 5; as for Egypt, it was as much the powerhouse of Mediterranean trade in 1180 as it was in 950/1000. Political crises hit regions, but in this period they were usually recovered from; and there was no difference between Christian- and Muslim-ruled regions in this respect. So, in general, regional economies did not ‘fail’ They did, certainly, sometimes lose complexity, but, even if they did not regain it later, what matters to us is to follow the structural explanations for each change, and not either to be triumphalist about upturns or moralistic about downturns. To do that is, simply, bad history.
In this book, as elsewhere, I aim to be comparative; each region studied here is better understood if it is set against the similar, or differing, experiences of other regions. Without the comparative method, we cannot usefully explain; it is often very easy to falsify single-region explanations, once they are set against those other experiences.** Three bodies of evidence are particularly valuable here, as the information they provide is not restricted to a single region, so we can see how much incidence each has from one place to another; they act as controls for such comparisons, in the same way as Weberian ideal types do. The first is the geniza, which gives us a guide to the complexities and values of the interpersonal relationships underpinning regional and interregional trade in much of the Islamic Mediterranean across our period, and also to the scale of goods transported; among the regions studied here, it illuminates Egypt, Ifriqiya, and Sicily in particular, and al-Andalus to a lesser extent. The second is the sets of Venetian and Genoese commercial documents, which begin to be rich near the end of our period; they tell us little about values, but something about relationships and plenty about scale, in Italy and Egypt for both, plus Byzantium for Venice and Sicily for Genoa. Both bodies of evidence are, of course, well-known; the second has been very extensively analysed, the first not so fully, although what has been done on the geniza is often remarkable, as we shall see in Chapter 2. For many people now, what ‘the’ Mediterranean economy is in our period could simply be delineated by a study and a comparison of both sets. But they are problematic for us in one crucial sense: they focus, almost exclusively (the Italian documents above all), on long-distance trade. They tell us much less about internal buying and selling—even if, as we shall see, one important section of the geniza material, not so fully studied, does illuminate that for Egypt—which, as I have argued and will argue, is the most important aspect of exchange.
The third type of evidence, however, does tell us directly about internal exchange, and, furthermore, does it for every one of our regions: this is ceramics, the most diagnostic type of archaeological find. The geographical distribution of given pottery types, particularly fine wares and amphorae, inside smaller or larger areas, or whole regions, or several regions; the scale of their production; their availability on different kinds of site, particularly village sites: all these tell us directly about economic relationships, sometimes with considerable granularity. This sort of analysis has long been done for the Roman Empire, and there are people who doubt that it can be done as effectively in our period, but the work carried out for this book persuades me that this doubt is misplaced. On the contrary, these distributions are our best guides to economic relationships, taken as a whole. (In all the regions discussed here, there is only one exception to that statement, the central Po plain around Milan: see pp. 594-7 below.) The question of what productions and exchange relationships ceramics are a proxy for, of course, has always to be posed, for they were not in themselves the most important commodity produced anywhere. But, as noted earlier, fine-ware distributions can be matched in enough cases with that of cloth to allow us to be reasonably optimistic that we can use them as a proxy for those of cloth elsewhere. Amphorae, for their part, in the majority of cases tell us most about the wine trade in this period, and anyway always tell us directly about the existence of a trade in foodstuffs. So I shall use ceramics as much as I can in the chapters which follow, with no apology. They are discussed in detail, precisely because this book concentrates on exchange; and also because the necessary syntheses have only been carried out in Byzantium and Sicily, so there is more to explain. In my view, indeed, we cannot usefully study the topic of this book, anywhere, if we do not have in mind what such distributions can tell us. Archaeologists will agree already; it is for me to convince historians as well.
Many of the points I have just raised were already raised in a book I finished nearly twenty years ago, Framing the early middle ages, which covered the years 400-800. Since this too is a comparative project, based on many of the same regions, using archaeology as much as documents, and beginning only a century and a half after that book ended (and readers will find flashbacks to 800 at several points in the book), it is worth posing the question of whether we are really dealing here with Framing 2. There is a sense in which this is partly true. I had so enjoyed ranging from region to region back then that I was looking forward to doing the same again, and indeed did so with equal enjoyment; this time, however—and this was part of the attraction—while discussing a period of economic upturn, unlike the downturn and sometimes full-on crisis at the end of the Roman Empire. In both cases I wanted to understand it differently, and I was (and am) sure that this was only possible if a properly comparative approach was taken. The structure of this book is, however, quite different—that was thematic; this goes region by region. This book is less wide-ranging, for it only focusses on exchange and its wider economic context and implications; it does not discuss the state, or either aristocratic or peasant society, except insofar as these tell us about wealth, and thus buying power. It is also less wide-ranging in that it only discusses the Mediterranean, and not all of it at that; northern Europe is virtually absent. There are, of course, as was stressed earlier, so many more data for the period 950-1180 than there are for 400-800 that these sorts of restriction were essential anyway. But the ultimate aim here is also quite different. In Framing I was, precisely, seeking to demonstrate the usefulness of the comparative method, and to explore what insights it could give us; that’s been done now, and does not need a whole book to do it again. Here, rather, I am trying to explain the nature of a major economic change, the ‘commercial revolution’ of the second Mediterranean trade cycle. And, through that, as we shall see in Chapter 8, I want to use the solutions to this problem as a way into what, for me, is the most crucial economic question of all: how the medieval economy actually worked as a whole, and how its economic logic operated.
And that question is, actually, hard to answer. We have empirical absences which cannot easily be filled out. We know much more about the countryside in the Christian parts of the Mediterranean than we know about most towns—even in Byzantium, where the documentary record is relatively thin, outside the capital at least; in the Islamic lands it is usually the other way round. We do not have, even with the range of recent work, enough data on climatic change—and enough data with sufficient granularity, given the very wide range of microclimates in the Mediterranean, each of them with different sorts of exposure to climatic shifts—to allow us, as yet, to use it as an explanatory factor (although, here at least, I do not doubt that in a decade or so we will be able to say more about it), so climate will be for the most part left out of this book. We do not know how, when, or (sometimes) even if demographic growth started in our period, or how it related to a growth in economic complexity, in any region.**° We cannot anyway give an accurate figure for the population of any city, let alone of any region; those offered by historians are all invented (that goes for those offered here too, although at least I am explicit about it).’” We do not know for sure when or how far regional buying power depended on elite, or peasant, demand (although I will systematically confront this issue, at least). We do not know in any detail before 1200 at the earliest what most cities produced for wider markets, and when they started to produce it—even if here, fortunately, there are some exceptions, as we shall see in each substantive chapter. We can only guess at how it was that Egyptian peasants came to be sufficiently aware that there was enough demand for raw flax half the Mediterranean away, in Sicily and Tunisia, that it was not only worthwhile but (more vital still) safe to begin to specialize in flax cultivation. And so on. There are big gaps here, which can only be filled by guesswork.
But even if we hypothesize constructively, and then put together what we have, we face difficulties. Much of the historiography has got the basic structures of economic processes wrong for our period, and for the pre-capitalist period as a whole. It tends, still today, to see pre-capitalist (or pre-industrial, or just ‘premodern) economies as basically primitive, ‘backward, as they are sometimes described, unable to take advantage of the technological breakthroughs that presented themselves; or else—or, sometimes, as well as—simply potentially modern societies, running by modern economic rules, but just undermined or blocked by institutional failures, or sometimes furthered by their efficiencies, as in much New Institutional Economic history.** Different regions get brownie points for being more like modern societies; the most active economies of the precapitalist world get seen as handing the torch on, one to another, as each in turn ‘failed’, until it finally ended up in its natural home, seventeenth- or eighteenthcentury England, ready for industrial society to be born. Writers here never consider properly the proposition that, in any feudal economy, such as those of the whole of central medieval Eurasia, except the remotest regions where permanent elites did not exist, economic rules for exchange and development might be differently constructed, and might not work like capitalist ones at all. It will here be argued that they were indeed differently constructed, and did indeed not work like capitalist ones.
In the empirical chapters that follow, I shall, therefore, not make any arguments which depend on assumptions about how economies work which assimilate them to those of the modern world, except the simplest ones, such as the relationship between supply, demand, and price—a relationship which was anyway demonstrably known about and acted on in our period, as the geniza amply shows.’? But I will, in the last chapter of the book, use the data set out here as a springboard for considering, briefly, how better to understand the basic workings of the Mediterranean economy, and, more generally, the feudal economy as a whole.
A Note on Language
In the chapters that follow, I use a variety of translation and transliteration conventions, which are not exactly inconsistent, but which point in different directions.
I normally use the modern form for place names, not any medieval name, if any modern name exists. The exception is the chapter on Byzantium, where, to be consistent across many modern countries and their differing national languages, I privilege medieval place names (with modern ones in brackets) and then use them by preference in the text, except when discussing the archaeology; I also anglicize some well-known place names, such as Constantinople, Corinth, Nicaea, and Cappadocia. In Egypt, I anglicize only Cairo, Alexandria, Damietta, and Luxor. In Syria and Palestine, not discussed in detail in this book, I also anglicize an array of major towns, such as Jerusalem, Damascus, and Acre. In Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, however, where a Francophone tradition is so strong, I use modern French spellings for place names, which are very generally used in the countries concerned, so Kairouan not Qayrawan, Sousse not Stisa. In what is now Portugal, Spain, and Italy, I use the normal run of anglicizations of major cities like Lisbon, Seville, Milan, Genoa, and Rome.
In my chapters on Islamic lands, for both place names and personal names, my transliterations are all into the standard UK conventions for Classical Arabic, although modern Arabic dialects have some quite different pronunciations, which matter for place names—Jiza, a district capital across the Nile from Cairo, is generally called Giza today, for example. I do not use the short transliterations of Arabic words, so Abt’l-Khayr is always Abu al-Khayr here; I also do not assimilate the ‘al-’ before Arabic sun letters, so an-Nasir is always al-Nasir here; and I omit hamzas at the start of Arabic words. I use Arabic plurals very rarely, as they are often not easy for outsiders to relate to the singular; I usually add, as in this paragraph, a roman-typeface ‘s’ to an italic Arabic singular. I leave out ‘al-’ at the start of place names (except al-Andalus, which is called this by everyone), but not at the start of nisbas or laqabs in personal names, such as al-Idrisi. Outside the modern Arabic-speaking lands, I keep Arabic for personal names in al-Andalus, and for Muslims in Sicily, but in mainland Italy and Norman-period Sicily I use Italian forms for the names of everyone else except emperors, kings, and popes, plus Norman/French incomers.
For personal names of Greek-speakers in our period, I use English, not Greek, for first names when there is an English equivalent, and Greek for surnames; so John Komnenos, not I6annés Komnénos (or John Comnenus: see below). In transliterations of Greek, kappa is k not c, upsilon is y not u except in diphthongs, and beta is b not v (except in modern place names in Greece); eta and omega are marked with macrons only in direct quotations from Greek. Latinisms, which seem to me weird, are systematically avoided except in book titles.
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