Roman Africa was undoubtedly rich, but the single greatest boost to its economic growth came through the direct intervention of the Roman state. In the late second century, the emperor Septimius Severus formalized a massive state requisitioning programme whereby a substantial proportion of North Africa’s land taxes were paid in the form of grain and olive oil. These goods (conventionally referred to as the annona) were shipped north through the harbours of Carthage in order to feed the populace of Rome and the thousands of soldiers, bureaucrats and state functionaries upon whom the empire depended.16 Like the fertile islands of Sardinia and Sicily, Africa had long been a producer of agricultural surplus, but the demands of an omnivorous state saw these efforts multiplied. From the later second century until well into the fourth, much of the North African countryside witnessed an intensification of production, a process most visible to archaeologists in the olive-processing plants and urbanized production centres or ‘agrovilles’ of the Proconsular province and Byzacena. The redistribution of this grain and oil also hastened the development of a bureaucratic and physical infrastructure, which may well have included the enhancement and maintenance of harbours.17 Some suggestion of the scale of this investment is provided by the circular harbour in Carthage, where excavations have revealed storage depots, administrative centres and (probably) warehouses, as well as a number of written records on ceramic ostraka that hint at a whole network of collection and redistribution nodes inland and along the coast.18 The sophistication of the classical Mediterranean economy was at its peak in the fourth century, and North Africa had a central position within it.
This state redistribution certainly accounted for a substantial proportion of agricultural production in the third, fourth and early fifth centuries, but it also had a catalytic effect upon African commerce.19 The transportation of the annona was undertaken by nominated shippers of the corpus naviculariorum, who enjoyed a variety of privileges, including exemption from tariffs for a whole sailing season once they had done their duty to the state.20 As a result, these shippers found themselves at a huge commercial advantage over shippers from other regions, and eagerly crammed their holds with oil, grain, fish products and fineware for sale across the Mediterranean.21 This ‘piggy-backing’ of goods also proved beneficial to producers; with few transport overheads to be borne, the landholders and entrepreneurs of North Africa found themselves in a
Position to exploit a far wider array of extra-provincial markets than might otherwise have been the case. Anxious to exploit the commercial opportunities on offer, many of the estates of North Africa expanded and diversified. This is most clearly visible in the case of African sigillata or ‘Red slipped ware’ (ARS), the highly desirable tablewares produced on the estates of Africa Proconsularis and Byzacena. Most regions of the Mediterranean produced fine tablewares of their own, and continued to do so, but it was the African variety - or varieties - which came to monopolize the central Italian market by the mid-second century and was dominant elsewhere in the western empire by the mid-third. ARS was never officially transported as a part of the annona, but subsidized shipping provided a huge commercial benefit to African workshops, and continuous investment and diversification doubtless helped to press home this advantage.22
Olive oil, wine and fish-sauce production within Africa enjoyed similar advantages, and here economies of scale may also have played a part. This is most apparent from the evidence for oil processing and shipping throughout the region, but comparable patterns have also been assumed for viticulture and fish salting, neither of which has been studied in anything like the same detail.23 Surveys in Central Tunisia have revealed the presence of vast oil-pressing centres, which could scarcely have developed without the constant demand represented by the annona, but which would have been well placed to exploit commercial opportunities once established.24 Rather less is known about the sites on which wine was produced and fish processed, but the wide distribution of amphora sherds allows us to state with confidence that both were important until the Byzantine period at the earliest.
A change occurs
The connection between Carthage and Rome formed the backbone of the Mediterranean economy, but was put under severe strain during the political crises of the later fourth and early fifth century. The rebellion of the Numidian princeling Gildo in 397-8 temporarily halted the shipment of grain to Rome, provoking a spasm of imperial legislation in response, and later contributing to severe food shortages in the capital.25 A decade later, the comes Africae Heraclian withheld supplies in an effort to unseat the Gothic puppet Attalus at Rome, and in ad 413 reverted to the same strategy in support of his own usurpation.26 It was possibly fear of precisely this situation that led Aetius and Placidia to respond so forcefully to the threat of Boniface’s rumoured rebellion in the mid-420s.
But it was the Vandal occupation which finally severed the umbilical connection between Africa and Italy. After October 439, when Carthage fell to Geiseric, the annona fleet would have ceased to be a regular sight along the quays of Portus and Ostia. It is possible that the treaty of 442 reinstated the limited shipment of grain as a formal tribute to the western empire, but this seems unlikely, and in any case the merchant fleet can scarcely have been subsidized to the same degree as had previously been the case.27 Valentinian’s legislation of the following years hints at a major fiscal crisis in Ravenna, and his concern to maximize revenues in the lands still under his control following the loss of the African tax base.28 We know from the ceramic evidence that the merchant ships of Carthage continued to trade, but without the generous state subsidies this must have become a considerably more expensive business. The annona shipments had long provided a crutch for the Mediterranean economy, and once the Vandals had kicked it away, the system began to totter perceptibly. But when viewed from an African perspective, this narrative of economic collapse is rather more complex.
The implications of the change for Africa
To the farmers and merchants of North Africa, the collapse of the state redistribution system had a number of contrasting effects. On the one hand, the disappearance of the annona removed a stable and captive market for African oil and (especially) grain. Equally seriously, the ending of the state subsidies to African ship-owners removed a major commercial advantage to the farmers and merchants of this region: without a guaranteed market and preferential shipping rates, African producers were denied the safety net which had allowed their region to develop so quickly. On the other hand, the landowners of Africa now found themselves to be the producers of a large agricultural surplus which could be sold on the open market. Where Rome had once taken the bulk of the African harvest at a fixed price in the name of taxation, this grain and wine was now available to be sold. The presses, kilns and threshing floors which had been built at the height of imperial consumption remained in use, and while African navicularii may have lost their generous governmental grants, most of them retained their ships and the commercial contacts that they had developed in happier years.
All of the available evidence suggests that agricultural production continued with little interruption into the Vandal period. Procopius implies that African farms continued to produce, but the revenues simply went to Carthage, rather than to Rome or Ravenna:
Since the land [of the Vandals] was an especially good one, flourishing abundantly with the most useful crops, it came about that the revenue collected from the commodities produced there was not paid out to any other country in the purchase of food supply, but those who possessed the land always kept for themselves the income from it for the ninety-five years during which the Vandals ruled Libya.29
The majority of land in North Africa remained in the hands of its original owners, and the change of rulers in Carthage probably had little direct effect upon them. Even in Zeugitana, where the Vandals settled most intensively, there is little evidence for any substantial alteration in agricultural practice. Their estates continued to produce as they always had, and paid their surplus to their new landlords in the form of rent. Many landowners, whether Vandal or Romano-African, would have found themselves with surplus to sell, and would happily have availed themselves of the infrastructure to make this possible.
To judge from the ceramic record, African production did experience a slight recalibration during the middle of the fifth century, but this is best read as an illustration of the continued vibrancy of the region, rather than as a marker of decline.30 Zeugitana - previously the heartland of African fineware manufacture - produced less pottery that it had done in the early years of the century and witnessed a stagnation in the development of new vessel types between c. 430 and c. 480.31 At roughly the same time, Central Tunisian wares developed in sophistication and became relatively common throughout Mediterranean.32 By the end of the fifth century or the beginning of the sixth, a balance between the two types of wares seems to have been restored and both were widely exported. It is hard to know whether this disjuncture in ceramic manufacture reflected a wider economic recession at the time of the Vandal conquest. Our other evidence suggests not: amphorae exports remained relatively high, and field surveys indicate strong continuity of occupation throughout Zeugitana. Instead it might be better to interpret the mid-fifth-century shift positively, as a reflection of the increased diversity of manufacture in Byzacena as landowners in that region sought to exploit the new opportunities open to them. If the producers of Zeugitana found themselves unable to compete with their nearneighbours in the brief hiatus after the Vandal invasion, the resumption of pottery production at the end of the century showed that this was only a temporary setback.
New markets in the Western Mediterranean
Merchants continued to ply the shipping lanes of the Mediterranean during the fifth century, but there were probably fewer of them than there had been at the height of late imperial trade. Merchants certainly remain a relatively constant presence in the literary sources throughout the Vandal century. Fulgentius of Ruspe readily found a berth on ships between Carthage, Sicily, Sardinia and Rome, and was confident of passage to Alexandria and beyond. The bishop was so closely associated with fifth-century maritime life that a sermon attributed to him compares the happy promise of the resurrection to the bustling of a port:
How happy the port seems, when it is full with cargoes and bustling with merchants! Bundles of various goods are displayed about the ships, many rejoice in the joyfulness of the sailors’ songs.33
Procopius, too, was aware of the continued commercial prosperity of the Vandal kingdom. The final preparations for Belisarius’ campaign against Africa were made with the help of a merchant in Syracuse - one evidently familiar with the topography of the realm.34 Procopius also describes the political influence of the merchants within Carthage, both before and after Belisarius’ conquest.35 His intended point may have been that the Byzantine occupation helped to revive African commerce, but it was scarcely moribund at the time of the invasion.
The disappearance of the great axial link between Carthage and Rome opened up a variety of new trading routes throughout the Mediterranean. No longer bound to Rome, African shippers increasingly turned elsewhere in their search for markets. Simultaneously, eastern merchants, no longer priced out of the region by the African monopoly, carried their goods further and further west. The principal evidence for these changes is provided by the distribution patterns of amphorae and ARS between the mid-fifth century and the early decades of the sixth.36 Whilst these data need to be interpreted with some care, broad patterns may be traced with some confidence. The first and most obvious feature of the period is a perceptible shift of trade away from Portus, Ostia and central Italy, and towards the other regions of the Mediterranean. From around ad 450, finds of both African amphorae and ARS decline substantially along the Italian coast, and begin to disappear almost completely from inland sites.37 This contrasts sharply with the evidence from sites along the eastern coast of Spain and in the Vandal-controlled islands of Sicily and Sardinia (and to a lesser extent Corsica and the
Balearics). Throughout these regions, African ceramic imports either remained at a relatively constant level, or increased in the second half of the fifth century.38 The reasons for this seem clear: while African merchants had previously been constrained by their responsibilities to the state, the ending of annona allowed them a freer rein in the sale of their cargoes. In some cases, of course, the Italian market may well have remained attractive - the demand for foodstuffs in Rome, for example, is unlikely to have diminished substantially. But consumption of African goods elsewhere in Italy can only have reduced with the removal of the state subsidy.
Eastern merchants also turned their attention westwards in the fifth century. The ceramic record of the period in Carthage, Italy and southern Gaul includes an increasing proportion of imports of eastern origin.39 In part, this probably reflects a resurgent eastern economy, which benefited from the political and financial eclipse of the western capital, and from the ending of the African monopoly: as the shippers of Carthage turned away from Italy, their Levantine colleagues swooped in. But eastern goods could also be transported in western ships, and it need not be assumed that this expansion was necessarily at the expense of African trade. In many cases, these Levantine ceramics may represent the cargoes brought back to Carthage by African shippers plying the profitable eastern trade routes, and distributed from there around the western Mediterranean. Like Rome, Constantinople was a hungry city, and much of the African grain surplus may have been shipped eastwards for sale. Frustratingly, the trade in grain leaves little trace in the archaeological record, but the wide distribution of ARS throughout the eastern Mediterranean in the Vandal period shows that African goods found a market in the region and perishable produce may well have done too. Wheat and barley could have been taken east in either African or Levantine ships, and eastern amphorae brought back in the empty holds. That the inhabitants of Africa enjoyed a fruitful (and by no means one-sided) commerce with the eastern empire is also demonstrated by the large quantity of eastern gold which circulated in the Vandal kingdom (as discussed more fully below).
Taken as a whole, the ceramic evidence suggests that the production capacity of North Africa suffered only a slight decline throughout the Vandal period. Patterns of distribution certainly changed over the course of the fifth century - the ending of the annona saw African oil, wine and tablewares (and presumably also African grain) sold far more widely throughout the Mediterranean, in both eastern and western markets - but the overall demand for African goods seems to have remained relatively high. This pattern of continuity with some slight recalibration may also be detected within North Africa itself.
World History
