Download PDF | (Cambridge Medieval Textbooks) Adriaan Verhulst - The Carolingian Economy-Cambridge University Press (2002).
173 Pages
The Carolingian Economy
This book is about the economy of the Carolingian empire (753–877), which extended from the Pyrenees and the northern shores of the Mediterranean to the North Sea, and from the Atlantic coast to the Elbe and Saale rivers. It is the first comprehensive evaluation of the topic in English in over twenty years. The study of the Carolingian empire as an economic rather than a political entity can be justified both because of the major interference of political authority in the economy, and because of the distinctive economic characteristic of growth; and while some regions within the empire had a much more developed economy than others, the whole period is basically one of economic expansion, in parallel with the cultural upheaval of the ‘Carolingian Renaissance’.
This economic and cultural flowering raises the question of its causes – and of its limits. Moreover, this positive evaluation contrasts with the generally accepted idea of the Carolingian period as lacking in commerce and dominated by a purely agrarian economy. By contrast, this book aims to show not only the diversified agrarian roots of Carolingian society, but also their significance for manufacture, industry and commerce.
Adriaan verhulst is Emeritus Professor of Medieval Economic History, University of Ghent. His publications include The Rise of Cities in North-West Europe (Cambridge, 1999).
INTRODUCTION
The title of this book needs some explanation. ‘Carolingian economy’ has to be understood here as ‘the economy of the Carolingian empire’. The ‘economy of the Carolingian period’ would be too broad, not being limited to the empire within its borders under Charlemagne, which is the point of view adopted here. Countries and regions outside the empire, such as England, Scandinavia, the Islamic empire (including the bigger part of Spain), the Byzantine empire and eastern Europe, will be considered only in so far as their commercial relations with the Carolingian empire are at stake. The chronological terms, from the middle of the eighth century to the end of the ninth, are necessarily political, but they coincide by chance with the beginning and the end of an economic period, as will be demonstrated in Chapter 10.
Carolingian economy’ can also be understood as an economy directed by the Carolingian rulers. I do not reject this interpretation altogether, but it will be elucidated in Chapter 9 on ‘The economy and the state’. ‘Economy’ is used in its singular form although the Carolingian empire was not an economically homogeneous area. Several regional ‘economies’ can be defined, each having different characteristics regarding population, the use of money, the presence of towns, the intensity of trade, etc. The territories between the Loire and the Rhine, between the Rhine and the frontier of the empire on the Elbe river and northern Italy are the most striking examples. Nevertheless an inquiry into the specificity of the Carolingian economy as a whole, compared with regions outside the empire or to economic situations before and after the Carolingian period, makes sense and is possible. Was it, to quote Chris Wickham,1 ‘a network of subsistence-based exchange’, where consumption commanded production, or was it an economy producing surpluses brought to the market?
This alternative comes near to that of Pirenne, for whom the Carolingian economy was a closed agrarian-based economy without towns, merchants or trade. His views, most strikingly expressed in his book Mahomet et Charlemagne (completed after his death in 1935 and published, with documentary evidence by his pupil Fernand Vercauteren, in 1937),2 were essentially a reaction to ideas advanced by Alfons Dopsch in the second edition (1921–2) of his two-volume book, written between 1911 and 1913, on the economic evolution of the Carolingian period (Die Wirtschaftsentwicklung der Karolingerzeit).3 In this book Dopsch had reacted against the conceptions of what he calls the old nineteenth-century school of von Inama-Sternegg and Karl Lamprecht, who had proclaimed the primacy of the manor (‘Grundherrschaft’) in Carolingian economic life. Opposing their views on an agrarian-based economy, Dopsch stressed the role of towns, money and trade. This point of view might have been expected from Pirenne but he, paradoxically, just took the side of the old school, where Lamprecht, before the First World War, had been his model and closest friend. It is however not the place here to enter into the genesis of Pirenne’s Mahomet et Charlemagne, 4 but rather to review the historiography since Pirenne on the economic evolution under the Carolingians. The first phase of this historiography, from the late 1930s through to the 1950s, was driven by an attack on Pirenne’s work and, in particular, his thesis about the role of the Arabs.
The absolute masters of the western Mediterranean since 711, they had, according to Pirenne, forced the western Christian world to retreat to the north from what until then had remained the centre of the civilised world, imposing a continental character on the Carolingian empire. In this way it put anend to the circulation, mostly by Syrian merchants, from the shores of the Mediterranean to the north, of goods such as papyrus, spices, oriental wines and olive oil. Different studies re-examined the references to these products in Merovingian and Carolingian texts and concluded that their disappearance from Carolingian texts had never been so complete nor so early as Pirenne had believed or had had other causes.5 More fundamental than the discussions on documentary evidence for the presence of these goods, was the argument about the causes of the adoption by the Carolingians of the silver penny and their abandonment of gold coins, which Pirenne had also related to the Arab conquest of the western Mediterranean and to the economic regression which in his opinion had been its consequence in the west. In the late 1940s and early 1950s Maurice Lombard developed a theory about the vast quantities of gold the Arabs had acquired through conquest in Persia and Africa and which they brought into circulation. With this gold, according to Lombard, they bought slaves, wood, furs and other wares in western Europe and vivified its economy.6 Sture Bolin supported these unorthodox views but through different ways, tracing trade links between the Arab lands and Scandinavia that would explain the hoards of Arab silver coins found in Scandinavia which finally reached western Europe.7 These theories did not stand firm: Grierson proved that no Arab gold coins circulated in western Europe in any significant quantities.8
Moreover most of the Arabic coins found in Birka (near Stockholm, Sweden) date from the end of the ninth century and the beginning of the tenth,9 although a hoard of several thousand Arabic silver coins, the latest dating from the mid-ninth century, was concealed at Ralswiek, on the island of Rugen, off the north-German Baltic coast. ¨ 10 This does not mean that there was no direct commerce between the Arab world and western Europe in Carolingian times, as Pirenne, not without admitting some exceptions, notably concerning the slave trade, contended. But their economic impact must not be exaggerated, even if Grierson himself and other numismatists suppose a link between the Carolingian monetary reform of the mid-eighth century and an earlier Arab reform at the end of the seventh century.11 Numismatic evidence, which in this case too is scanty, does not indeed, in the opinion of K. F. Morrison, tell anything certain about trade routes or about the volume of trade.12 On the basis of documentary evidence however, F.-L. Ganshof, himself a disciple of Pirenne, demonstrated the year after Mahomet et Charlemagne had appeared, that in the eighth century the relations between East and West continued through the ports of Provence, particularly in Marseilles, be it on a minimal level.13 H. L. Adelson has made Byzantium responsible for this state of affairs14 and other authors also tried to prove that relations between the West and Byzantium and the East, mainly through Italian ports under theoretical Byzantine authority, like Venice and Tyrrenean ports in southern Italy, particularly Amalfi, depended in the first place on the military relations between Byzantium and the Arabs in the eastern Mediterranean.
As the essential part of Pirenne’s thesis, the negative role of the Arabs, with as its consequences the absence of merchants, towns and trade in western Europe and the predominance of an agrarian economy based on the self-sufficiency of the big estate, has been rejected totally or partially by most of his critics, only the latter element, in a second phase of the historiography of Pirenne’s critics, has been the object of new studies. That the attention shifted from trade to agriculture may be explained by the satiation caused by the numerous critics during the first historiographical phase, all centred on trade, and the paradoxical situation that in his Mahomet et Charlemagne Pirenne himself had been very brief on the role of the manor, although he considered it the basis of the Carolingian economy.
The prelude to the second historiographical phase in the 1950s and early 1960s, besides the roneotyped but important lectures by CharlesEdmond Perrin at the Sorbonne, was several fundamental studies by two German scholars, K. Verhein and W. Metz, on the sources for the study of the royal Carolingian estates, more particularly a capitulary of Charlemagne known as the Capitulare de Villis and inventories known as Brevium exempla. 15 To this phase belonged the 1965 ‘Settimana’ in Spoleto on agriculture in the early Middle Ages, where I presented a new thesis on the origin of the classical bipartite estate, so typical for the Carolingian period. Its development in the eighth to ninth centuries was on the model of the royal estates between the Seine and the Rhine.16 Although my views were widely accepted, the real start of manorial studies centred on the Carolingian period were three international colloquia respectively held in Xanten (1980), Ghent (1983) and Gottingen ( ¨ 1987).17
At Xanten I counted 109 studies published between 1965 and 1980 on that particular topic while Yoshiki Morimoto in 1988 numbered a hundred new titles between 1980 and 1986. 18 Meanwhile, at the Gottingen Academy, on the initiative of the ¨ archaeologist Herbert Jankuhn, a series of colloquia on the material and archaeological aspects of prehistoric and early medieval agriculture began in 1977. 19 In the 1980s, a ‘boom’ of critical editions put at the disposal of specialists the annotated texts of nearly all the preserved Carolingian polyptychs and inventories: those of the abbeys of Prum, Wissembourg (Weissenburg), Monti ¨ erender, St Maur-des- ´ Fosses and last but not least St Germain-des-Pr ´ es, mostly at the initia- ´ tive of Dieter Hagermann from Bremen University and all by German ¨ scholars.20 Before that Belgian scholars had published other famous Carolingian polyptychs and inventories, namely F.-L. Ganshof that of St Bertin, J.-P. Devroey those of Reims and Lobbes and I myself a fragment of a Carolingian inventory of St Bavo’s at Ghent.21
After this ‘boom’ of studies on Carolingian manorial organisation, which even touched Italy,22 there was a need for evaluation and synthesis, especially as Robert Fossier in a fuss-making pamphlet at the 1979 ‘Settimana’ in Spoleto had passed a very negative judgement on Carolingian economy.23 Nearly ten years later, in 1988, a confrontation with Fossier was organised at the abbey of Flaran under the presidency of Georges Duby, who himself in his book Warriors and Peasants in 1973 had made a similar judgement but who at Flaran did not commit himself. The major contribution to the Flaran meeting, which actually had as its central theme agricultural growth in the early Middle Ages, was that of Pierre Toubert on the role of the big manor in the ‘take off’ of the western economy during the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries. It is still the best analysis of the ‘minimalist’ views on Carolingian economy and at the same time a thorough refutation of them, based on recent scholarship and on primary sources alike.24
In the eyes of the minimalists the very low rentability of the big estate was one of the essential characteristics of the manorial production system. This statement was in the first place supported by demographic conjectures about the low population density of most regions, except where one cannot escape documentary evidence of the reverse, as in the Paris basin. Their interpretation of the vast average dimension of the mansus was also used as a demographic argument, again with the exception of the Paris basin. Low yield ratios and the reservation of a large part of the production for seed for the next year, for the army and for the supply of the king’s or the lord’s court, did not leave big grain surpluses for the market. ‘Autoconsumption’ was the rule and there was no incentive for reinvestment. Agricultural technique was primitive and agricultural instruments were scarce and made of wood.
This kind of statement, mostly made without the thorough support of texts or other evidence, will be refuted in Chapter 3, drawing on Toubert’s masterly contribution to the Flaran debate. After this long concern with Carolingian agriculture and manorial organisation, a subject somewhat neglected by Pirenne, scholarship in the 1980s – after a twenty-year gap – reverted, in a third phase of postPirenne historiography, to Pirenne’s favoured subject of trade and towns, now however from a totally new point of view hardly known during Pirenne’s lifetime and mostly ignored by him: archaeology.
Since the Second World War medieval archaeology had been emancipated from classical archaeology and was practised by archaeologists who were at the same time historians or at least had this ambition.25 Among them Richard Hodges is the most engaged in the economic and social history of the Carolingian period, more particularly in the problems initiated by Pirenne. Like Toubert and most specialists of the matter today, Hodges considers the age of Charlemagne a period of economic growth, about which he has written several controversial books.26 One important aspect of this controversy is his strong belief in the Carolingian origin of towns, more particularly those towns that around the middle of the ninth century succeeded as portus to the so-called emporia. Both types, in his opinion, contain the seed of urban development in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
This statement is more questionable concerning the emporia than with respect to the new portus of the ninth century. As contrasted with the former, most portus survived the Viking invasions without any significant break and gave birth, from the tenth century onwards, to important towns engaging in long-distance trade in the eleventh century. The emporia within the Carolingian empire, Dorestad, Quentovic and other minor ones (Medemblik, Witla), in contrast to places outside the empire, like London, Hamwic (Southampton) or Ribe, did not form the nucleus of a later town of some importance. This is our only point of discussion with Richard Hodges’s recent views as exposed in his book Towns and Trade in the Age of Charlemagne.27 Thus the recent new interest in towns, especially from the side of archaeologists like Hodges, Hill, Van Es and others, will surely reopen the debate on Mahomet et Charlemagne, which is still not closed and will perhaps never be. For my part I hope that some ideas put forward in this book will prove a valuable contribution to it.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق