Broad economic structures had once spanned the Mediterranean and
fostered Byzantine commercial interaction with the west. The sweeping
changes of the seventh century naturally affected communications between
the two former halves of the empire. The occasional western shipwreck and
growing ceramic evidence of imports confirm that, although dwindling,
economic links to Byzantine Africa and the easternMediterranean persisted
well into the seventh century, perhaps reinforced by supply efforts to the
last garrisons perched along the Ligurian coastline.34 But even the trickle of
sea communications between Constantinople and the west seems almost to
dry up towards 700.35 A high-status ecclesiastical community whose traces
have been recovered at Crypta Balbi in Rome was still importing some
luxury wares from Byzantine Africa and the IslamicMiddle East in the late
seventh century. But the imports practically ceased early in the eighth century,
if one can judge from their absence and a turn towards recycling and
away from Levantine raw materials in glass manufacture.36 Long-distance
shipping routes declined in importance, and regional shipping networks
emerged as characteristic.37
The reasons for all this remain controversial; certainly the causes were
multiple. Networks of easterners trading with the west may have withered
under the cyclical plagues, whose contagion contemporaries linked
with shipping. Declining economic fortunes presumably shrank western
purchasing power even before the Islamic conquests redistributed eastern
wealth and reorganised macro-economic structures, fanning demand in the
east. To grant Henri Pirenne his due, warfare around the Mediterranean
rim probably played a role. The final fall of Byzantine Carthage in 698 disrupted
a crucial pivot for shipping linking the eastern and westernMediterranean.
38 Even before it came to conflict, the rapid build-up of Arab and
Byzantine fleets will – initially at least – have competed with merchant ventures
for such sailors and ships aswere available.39 Greek and Coptic papyrus
archives of 698–711 from the inland town of Aphrodito on the Nile paint
an astonishing picture of how the new rulers mobilised local wealth and
conscripted landlubbers for sea raids (koursa) launched from Africa, Egypt
and the east.40 Land travel too was disrupted: Byzantine loss of control in
the Balkans blocked the old Roman overland routes to the west, essentially
cutting Italy off from Constantinople during the winter months.41 The
structure of exchange within the territories that remained Byzantine took
new shapes, as the shrunken fiscal component, formerly dominated by massive
northbound shipments from Egypt and Africa, sought new bases. And,
it has been argued, very differently administered economic zones emerged
in the capital and the provinces.42 Byzantium’s own long-distance trade in
the eighth century seems to have been reorientated along a new axis linking
the Aegean and the Black Sea.43
Direct documentary evidence of trade between Byzantium and the west
is slim, and complicated by the ambiguity of the notions of trade and
‘Byzantine’. Should we classify as ‘Byzantine’ middlemen the Venetian
merchants who recognised Byzantine sovereignty and sailed between Italy
and Africa, Egypt and Palestine? In any event, over the next two centuries
the old infrastructures of travel gradually recovered or were replaced. After
the nadir of the earlier eighth century, communications and also commerce
rebounded smartly in the final quarter of the century; they continued to
climb into the reign of Louis the Pious (814–40) and, after a period in which
they leveled out, growth resumed in the later ninth century.44 Although the
structures and volume of trade differed greatly from those of the late Roman
period, communications and commerce were again significant factors in
the relations between western Europe and the Middle East.
Practically in the shadowof the Alps, the more or less autonomousByzantine
outpost of Venice rose out of the Adriatic mists from insignificance to
embody this change. The ancient trunk route linking the Tyrrhenian coast
with theMiddle East via the straits ofMessina, around southernGreece and
across the Aegean had never ceased completely to function. Indeed, in 746–
7, it transmitted eastwards to the Byzantine capital the last major seaborne
outbreak of the bubonic plague (until 1347), even though the epidemic had
begun in the Levant.45 But over the next century, branch routes sprouted
again on the Adriatic or through the Gulf of Corinth, feeding piracy along
the coast. The old Balkan and Danubian overland routes, including the
Egnatian Way, returned to activity, even if the Hungarians were to make
the Danube corridor short-lived.46
The rare data on Venetian shipping between c. 750 and 850 point mostly
to trade between Italy and the Islamic world. Muslim traders show up
at Rome around 800. Slave trading ran along the west coast of Italy and
involved Rome and the shipment to Africa of enslaved Europeans by Venetian
andGreek merchants c. 750–75; and Emperor Leo V (813–20) was eager
to block Venetian commerce with the caliphate.47 Further west, it may be
more than coincidental that all four of the tenth-century shipwrecks discovered
off the French Riviera were carrying goods from the Islamic world.48
At the head of a reinvigorated Adriatic shipping route, Arab gold and silver
coins competed with Byzantine and Frankish money, to judge from the way
coins found in the earth converge with those mentioned in contemporary
records. They testify in their way to intensifying economic links between
the Islamic world and eighth-century Italy. That people involved in this
sort of contact also frequented at least Byzantine provincial centres is also
suggested by finds of Byzantine bronze coins. Although these coins never
served as a medium of international exchange, their presence in western
Europe nevertheless indicates that the people who lost them had direct or
indirect contacts with the Byzantine world.49
Merchants make only sporadic appearances in Carolingian sources, and
‘Greeks’ are rarest among them.Traders who do showup tend to be Frisians,
Anglo-Saxons, Jews or Italians, and only rarely can we discern the horizons
of their activities.50 Some Jews and Italians may have been subjects of the
Byzantine emperor; in any event commercial contacts with Byzantium may
have been realised through non-Greek intermediaries. Thus, in 885–6, an
astute observer in the caliphate described the trading patterns of Jewish
merchants who alternated their export voyages of eastern luxury wares,
travelling one year to Constantinople, and the next, to the Frankish court.
One of their main western routes probably ran through Venice.51
A few ‘Greek’ merchants do crop up in the eighth-century Tyrrhenian
Sea. Towards the tenth century, some Italo-Byzantines imitated their neighbours
in Amalfi, Naples and Gaeta, such as the Greek slave trader from
Armo near Reggio di Calabria who would not sacrifice his trade’s superior
profits for less reprehensible commercial ventures. A near-contemporary
life of a Sicilian saint compared his crossing from Africa back to Sicily c.
880 to ‘some huge ship filled with all kinds of merchandise’. Such hints
perhaps explain the concession of a landing for Greek merchants to the
church of Arles by one of the last Carolingians, Louis the Blind who, as
we shall see, had other connections with Constantinople.52 The account
of the North African crossing underscores that Greek merchants, like their
Venetian peers, might have found more profit linking western Europe with
the huge Islamic economy than with Constantinople. In other words, western
contacts with Byzantine merchants may have been an indirect result of
commercial relations with the Islamic world. But this does not diminish the
significance either of the intermediaries or of the overall growth in infrastructures
which permitted and channelled relations between Byzantium
and the west.
World History
