There was always a tension between the fiscal interests ofthe east Roman or Byzantine state and the private sector of merchants, bankers, shippers and so on. The state represented a set of ways and means of regulating the extraction, distribution and consumption of resources, determined by the need to balance consumption of wealth and agricultural and other forms of production. Three key factors determined the export of finished goods, the flow of internal commerce between provincial centres, or between the provinces and Constantinople, and the movement of raw materials and livestock. These were: the needs of the army and treasury for raw and finished materials and provisions; the state’s need for cash revenues to support mercenary forces and the imperial court; and the demands of the imperial capital itself, which dominated regional trade in the western Black Sea and north-western Asia Minor, north Aegean and south Balkans.
Evidence from a wide range of sources shows a decline in inter-regional trade and exchange from the middle of the seventh century, with a nadir in the first quarter of the eighth and a plateau thereafter until a slow recovery - regionally accented and with a number of false starts - setting in from the 750s and 760s. The ceramic evidence provides some information about trade and exchange, and although the archaeological record is still so patchy that it is difficult to generalise, it appears that pottery production had, by the end of the seventh century, become highly localised. The distribution of finds of the various coarse and fine wares produced at Constantinople, in the southern Balkans and eastern Peloponnese, and in the Aegean and Crete provides good evidence for the maintenance of a considerable degree of maritime commerce or exchange which
Map 6.12 Resources, industry and trade routes c. 900-1050.
Was limited to the territories within the political boundaries of the empire. At the same time, there is little evidence at present for much commercial activity extending far inland. Thus the pattern in the Byzantine world is much the same as the pattern in the rest of the Mediterranean world at this period, with a strong tendency towards localisation of production and regionalisation of patterns of exchange. This evidence tells us little or nothing, however, about either the levels of production within each locality, nor about local patterns of consumption of locally-produced goods, nor again about the relative wealth of the provinces and sub-regions.
As noted in previous sections, the pattern of supply and demand was heavily slanted towards Constantinople. Trade within the empire was largely from the provinces or the empire’s neighbours to Constantinople, or between the provinces, although there was always some movement from the empire to adjacent neighbouring territories - trade agreements and evidence for commerce between Byzantium and the Bulgars in the early eighth and ninth centuries, for example, between the Kiev Rus’ and the empire in the tenth century, or between the empire and various Muslim lands to the east illustrate this clearly. And after a low-point in the period c. 680-750, both internal and international trade began to be more significant. An expansion of imperial coin production in the 820s and after reflected an increase in exchange activity not just related to state needs, although these certainly played a role. From this time on, the relationship between the government’s coinage, with its strongly fiscal emphasis and function, and non-state enterprise and exchange, into which the state coinage was inevitably drawn, becomes increasingly complex, so that government minting policy had necessarily to take some aspects of market demand and commercial use into account.
From the 840s and 850s there were the beginnings of a real and permanent recovery, often with new routes, reflecting very different economic and political circumstances in the west and east from those of the late Roman centuries, dominating the pattern of international exchange. The evidence from the later ninth century suggests that internal exchange and commerce were flourishing, and large numbers of traders and entrepreneurs were associated with them. Apart from the capital, entrepots such as Corinth, Thebes, Adrianople, Thessalonica, Kherson, Smyrna, Ephesos, Sinope, Trebizond, Mehtene, Attaleia, centres which lay on key crossroads, or possessed good port facilities, or served as centres of local production for goods which would travel (or all three), played an important role in international exchange. State-dominated movement of goods in bulk (grain, for example, to Constantinople) may also have encouraged trade and commerce along the routes most exploited by the state itself, as in the late Roman period, since private entrepreneurial activity could take advantage of state shipping and transportation. In view of the number of trading ports around the Black Sea, from which the Byzantine government deliberately excluded Italian merchant shipping before the Fourth Crusade, long-distance trade by Byzantine merchants before 1204 may well have been substantial. But the real beneficiaries of the opening stage of greater stability and growth in the ninth to eleventh centuries were the state, on the one hand, and private or institutional landowners, such as the church and some monasteries, on the other. Only in the later eleventh century do commercial and external pressures exert sufficient influence to destabilise the imperial monetary system.
The picture which emerges for this period is therefore of an economy - or set of overlapping economic sub-systems - which experienced radical contraction and localisation of production and exchange during the later seventh and eighth centuries but which, partly as a result of the key role of the state, began from the later eighth century to expand both in terms of productive potential and in respect of the extension of exchange networks from the intra-regional to inter-regional and international levels. This is not to say that international exchange died out. Indeed, quite the reverse was the case, for continuous trade in certain luxury commodities with the Indian Ocean and, via the central Asian steppe zone, with China, was maintained without a break, although with fluctuating fortunes. By the end of this period Constantinople was at the centre of an international network which reached westwards to southern and western Europe, northwards via the Black Sea into Russia and Scandinavia; and eastwards into the Islamic world, especially to Egypt and Syria and, beyond them, into the Indian Ocean, on the one hand, and the central Asian steppe, on the other.
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