If the late antique economy was so robust, why did it not ride out the
troubles of the seventh century?One answer would be that it was already in
difficulty by the mid-sixth century. The plague which hit theMediterranean
world in 541 cut the population by perhaps as much as half, and in a preindustrial
economy, the number of people is the basic factor which underlies
output and growth. Climate change may have been a factor, too, possibly
involving a shift to a warmer and drier phase. There is also evidence from
tree rings for a ‘dust-veil event’ – in other words an event sending dust into
the atmosphere sufficient to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the
earth – in 536–7, caused either by a massive volcanic eruption, or a comet
hitting the earth. The sources seem to suggest more frequent earthquakes
and famines in these years too.Military defeat by the Persians and Arabs may
therefore have simply been the factor tipping an already fragile economy
into profound recession.35
These arguments attract considerable support, but equal criticism.Many
familiar with the relevant evidence are not convinced that it shows an
economy in trouble after 550. In Syria, Jordan, Palestine and Egypt it is
easy to find evidence that suggests continuing prosperity right through the
sixth century and beyond. Coinage remains common and on sites such
as Pella and Gerasa in Jordan, or Caesarea Maritima and Scythopolis in
Israel, the ceramic record carries on unbroken through the sixth century
and through the seventh too. On the limestone massif in northern Syria
it appears that the building boom had halted after 550, but dated silver
treasures from the area imply no lack of resources, and the villages appear
to have been occupied much as before for centuries to come. Further south,
in theHawran and the Jordan valley, building-work continued. Investment
in fine mosaics and new churches could be seen as a fearful response to
a worsening world, but most historians would be happier to see these
buildings, more prosaically, as a sign of people with resources to spare.36
The plague is equally problematic. Assuming that its mortality was as
high as usually supposed, comparison with the impact of the Black Death
on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europe would not necessarily suggest
disastrous economic consequences. High mortality is likely to benefit survivors,
who can take advantage of higher wages and more available land.
Unless there is some other factor regulating numbers at a lower level –
as seems to have happened in fifteenth-century England for example –
populations will tend to bounce back to their previous level.37
The same sort of points can be made about earthquakes, famines and
dust-veil events. Things happen; and life goes on. If 536–7 was a ‘year
without summer’, then so too was 1816.38 Both Justinian and his critics saw
plague, famine and earthquake as events of cosmic significance. It is not
necessary that we should feel the same.
In many ways we know more about the late antique economy than we do
about that of the middle Byzantine period that followed. Yet the evidence
is still too patchy and imprecise to settle these arguments, and that is
particularly true for those territories of the late antique world that came to
form medieval Byzantium. We know more about areas such as the Levant
or Egypt, which in the seventh century were to pass under Muslim rule,
than we do about Asia Minor, the Balkans, or Constantinople itself. Even
the evidence from sites such as Aphrodisias, Sardis and Ephesos, which do
not have modern cities on top of them and which have undergone decades
of excavation, is ambiguous. On each of these sites, opinion is divided
as to whether the evidence shows continuity through the sixth and into
the early seventh century, or a down-turn after 550.39 And since everyone
would agree that a city needs to be seen as a single economic unit with
its rural hinterland, the lack of any survey looking at the hinterland of
these sites is a drawback. At Sagalassos, Marc Waelkens’ Belgian team is
pointing the way with an integrated programme of urban excavation and
rural survey, but even here the implications are debatable. If investment in
substantial new buildings seems to have stopped after 550, Sagalassos was
still occupied up to the seventh. Is this evidence of a widespread ‘crisis’ in
sixth-century Anatolia, or the local consequences of an earthquake in 518
that had deprived Sagalassos of a suitable water supply?40
Another approach to the late antique economy is to examine its relationship
with the state. It is beyond question that in pre-modern terms
the Roman empire was a powerful state, capable of having a major impact
upon its citizens’ lives. What effect did the state have on the economy? Did
the state’s collection of goods in kind through taxation and their transport
across the empire by means of subsidised shipping – in other words the
annona system (see above, p. 11) – subvert the market to such an extent that
when the state collapsed, the late antique economy went with it?Or should
we be looking at the economic impact of state salary payments, skewing
investment and development in peculiar ways? In any case, was the apparent
prosperity of the late antique world effectively a creation of the state
and hence vulnerable to the political and military crisis that unfolded in
the seventh century?
The scale and archaeological visibility of the annona makes the first
an attractive argument. We know that Rome and Constantinople were
fed substantially on grain, wine and oil imported from Africa and Egypt.
More than a century’s work dating and identifying the amphorae that
carried the oil and wine, and the identifying of the huge harbour facilities
built to receive the annual grain fleets, combine with the evidence of the
Codex Theodosianus and the Codex Iustinianus to make this clear. The
annona’s impact on the wider economy is at first sight obvious enough too.
Throughout late antiquity, pottery types carried in the state-subsidised
ships that transported these foodstuffs appear to dominate Mediterranean
markets. Private shipping and alternative centres of production could not
compete. Such a system fed first Rome and then Constantinople effectively,
but it starved other centres of investment and diverted more natural patterns
of exchange. When crisis struck the annona system in the early seventh
century, there was no lively network of private and inter-regional trade to
take its place.41
Twenty years ago this was a more convincing argument. Since then, however
much remains obscure, it has become clear enough in the Levant and
Egypt that the late antique economy was much more various and complex
than once seemed the case. Whereas identifiable late antique pottery once
meant in effect imported red-slip wares and amphorae, now a number of
regional pottery types have come to light; and significantly, where the data
has been collected, it is these regional types that dominate the ceramic
assemblages. As usual, we know less about Anatolia and the Balkans, but
the identification of Sagalassos ware should serve as a warning that there
are likely to be many centres of regional and local late antique pottery production
still to be discovered. To talk of ‘an economy dominated by annona
transport’ may be overstating the case.42
The second and more recent suggestion, that we should be looking at the
economic impact of state salary payments, has been made by Jairus Banaji
and Peter Sarris and it fits more easily with the emerging picture of a complex
late antique economy, where inter-regional and local trade was as important
as what was carried on the annona trunk routes. Compared with its first- to
third-century predecessor, the late antique empire was characterised by far
greater numbers of official posts. The late antique aristocracy, particularly
in the east, were holders of imperial office. The monetary economy of the
earlier empire had been based on silver; that of the late antique empire was
based on gold, specifically the solidus, struck from 309 onwards at seventytwo
to the pound. It was a high-value and stable currency, and was used to
pay official salaries. A middle-ranking official in the praetorian prefecture
in Constantinople could earn 1,000 solidi a year and aristocratic fortunes
were calculated in tens of thousands of solidi.43
To put this in context, the number of copper folleis to the solidus varied
during the sixth century between 180 and 480, the former a short-term
revaluation in the wake of the plague, the latter being the mode.44 Bare
survival was possible on a couple of folleis a day; a workman might earn
between five and twelve folleis a day. A solidus might buy a pig, three solidi
a donkey, fifteen a camel, thirty a skilled slave. Forty solidi was the dowry
for the daughter of an army veteran living in a Palestinian village. It might
cost 400 solidi to build a village church.45
By the sixth century, the papyri evidence shows that much of the Nile
valley was organised into great estates owned by this gold-rich aristocracy,
who ran them as commercial enterprises, producing primarily for the market.
That in turn fuelled further commercial activity and economic growth.
All the indications are that late antique Egypt was highly monetarised and
market-oriented.46
The papyri are effectively unique to Egypt, but the archaeological evidence
cited above for late antique prosperity suggests that the Egyptian
pattern held true for the sixth-century east as a whole. If this interpretation
is right – and it seems to fit the evidence better than the alternatives
– the state’s contribution to the success of the late antique economy
was threefold. It provided a stable gold currency; it organised the fiscal
system that underpinned the stability of that currency; and through official
salaries it channelled wealth into the hands of the aristocracy, whose
activities in turn fuelled prosperity. Such an economy could have ridden
out climate change, dust-veil events and plagues – and the Egyptian evidence
suggests strongly that it did – but it would have been vulnerable
to political and military crisis, and that was what it faced in the seventh
century.
World History
