This gallery contains 6 photos.
Despite my sudden swerve into contemporary relevance, the reporting on the blog proper is still sadly thirteen months behind and leaves me still in my favourite Catalan hang-out, the city of Vic, taking photographs. These are all probably photographs I … Continue reading
It is a time of weighty decisions in this part of the world right now. I don’t just mean in the Academy, although today and tomorrow much of the UK one is on strike because of pay that has not kept pace with inflation for some years and personally I am in the middle of quite a lot of marking, some of which will affect people’s fates in ways I can’t foresee but can still worry about. No, I mean that on June 23rd the UK will be turning out to express its opinion about whether it should be in the European Union any longer, even on the rather specialised terms we currently enjoy. As with every political issue these days this has become a matter of men in suits insulting each other and making up random stuff to frighten their electorates, and in some cases other people’s electorates: the President of the USA and the Prime Minister of Canada have both weighed in effectively to threaten Britain, apparently not realising how much of the ‘Leave’ campaign is being driven exactly by a resentment at other countries seemingly intervening in Britain’s decisions. Perhaps they’re actually trying to make sure the ‘Leave’ vote wins. In any case, it all has me wondering what perspective a historian can take on it all. Sheffield’s excellent History Matters blog has a Brexit category but so far only one post under it, and I feel as if more can be said.
Map of the Carolingian Empire under Charlemagne
It seems to me that this is one of the rare episodes where the most relevant parallels are from the early Middle Ages, because there is really only one point prior to the twentieth century when Europe could be considered a single political entity and, importantly, its ruler had not declared an intent to add the British Isles to that (as in the times of Carausius, Napoleon or the guy with the moustache and the painting qualification). That time is the period of the Carolingian Empire, albeit with some pre-echoes under the Carolingians’ Merovingian predecessors, and actually there are some thought-provoking parallels. There’s nothing really new in what follows except its application to now, but I still think that’s worth doing.1
Obverse of a silver penny of King Offa of Mercia, struck in London by Ethelwald around 785
For a start, we can look at English-European relations in a time of breakdown here and see what happened. In around 796 Charlemagne, King of the Franks and Lombards and Patrician of the Romans, had a letter sent to King Offa of Mercia.2 At this point in time Offa was pretty much number one king in England; not only did his Midland kingdom stretch from the Welsh border and the Hwicce (around Gloucestershire) to Lindsey (modern Lincolnshire) but he also held control over Essex, East Anglia (just about), the south-eastern Home Counties and the city of London and had marriage alliances with both King Beorhtric of Wessex and King Æthelred of Northumbria.3 This put him in charge of quite a chunk of the Channel coast and its ports, and whether either side liked it or not that put him in contact with Charlemagne.
A Mayen quernstone, of the sort that Charlemagne probably refers to in his letter to Offa
In that letter Charlemagne was responding to one of Offa’s that we no longer have, and had a number of queries to answer. The letter is thus very revealing about the kind of things that kings dealt with in this era: the free movement of pilgrims from England through Francia, and how to distinguish them from merchants who disguised themselves as pilgrims to escape paying toll; the proper treatment of merchants who admitted as much, and should be protected by the Frankish king according to an old agreement; a renegade priest whom Offa feared had come to Charlemagne to spread accusations about Offa at the Frankish court, but whom Charlemagne had sent on to the pope at Rome; and black quernstones which had until recently been imported into England and which would now be again, as long as Offa would make sure that those exporting English wool cloaks to Francia made them at the old, full length rather than a new shorter one that the Franks didn’t like.4 Charlemagne also sent ceremonial clothing to both Offa and Æthelred with which their churchmen could hold memorial services for the recently-deceased Pope Hadrian I, whose death had, we know, grieved Charlemagne deeply.5
More black stone, Charlemagne’s epitaph for Pope Hadrian I, still on display in San Pietro di Roma
A lot of this doesn’t seem too far from the modern day, suggesting that some issues keep coming up: we have a kind of Schengen Agreement for certain kinds of travellers, but not those with goods to declare; a certain sort of acceptance of responsibility for foreign nationals; some controversy over appeals to the European court system (here manifest as the king and the pope, but still); and fine-detailed specifications of goods with which, just like the fabled EU regulations on the curvature of certain vegetables, one is surprised and even dismayed to see the European world’s top legislators wasting their time when warfare, migrants and agricultural crisis all needed dealing with.6 We know from other letters that Offa and Charlemagne had at one point been sufficiently at odds for Charlemagne actually to close the Frankish Channel ports to traders from Offa’s territories, which will hopefully remain unparalleled whatever happens but reminds us that access is not guaranteed, and Offa was also persistently bothered about Charlemagne playing host to powerful exiles from England, either from Kent or from Northumbria (where King Æthelred would be killed later in 796, making Charlemagne extremely cross with the Northumbrians).7 Offa himself would die later that year, indeed, which reminds us that the people who make such treaties tend not to last as long as the consequences, but if you remember the furore about Julian Assange taking refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London you can probably understand that people being protected from vengeance by foreign powers is not a phenomenon that’s stopped nowadays.
Map of England in the time of Offa’s rule, c. 795; I think we could argue about Sussex, but it gives you the idea…
There are also plenty of things that damage the comparison, of course. One of the other things that Offa and Charlemagne seem to have argued about was a possible marriage pact between their children, in which the problem was which side got the other’s daughter for their son.8 The UK still has its royalty, of course, but if one of them married into a European royal line (if they could find one with whom they aren’t already consanguineous) it would no longer make a massive difference to the UK’s relations with Europe. That should serve to remind us that whatever the things the early medieval situation shares with the current one, democracy was not one of them; not only would Offa and Charlemagne both have been bewildered by the concept of a referendum, but once you’d explained it they would have thought it subversive and dangerous, and maybe even illegal, and there the modern parallel is really elsewhere in Europe. There’s also important differences in the scale of trade revenue involved, which for our kings might have been significant but was still only a tiny part of their kingdoms’ economy.9 And finally, of course, among many other objections that could be raised, the England of Offa was a patchwork of uncomfortably allied rival kingdoms of varying size and strength, all of whom could negotiate with the Franks separately as our letters show, and so is almost more like the European Union of now in structure than like the unified, monarchic and hardly-devolved kingdom of Charlemagne, despite the rough territorial match.
So does the parallel I’ve set up actually tell us anything about the current situation? I think that it does, at least, bring some particular aspects of the situation out that are perhaps not as obvious as they should be. The first of these has already been mentioned, that whatever the outcome is on June 23rd it’s hard to believe the arrangement it sets up will last for long before being modified; all the people who made it will be out of power before very long, and the new lot will have a choice about how much continuity they want. The UK has tinkered with its relationship to Europe every few years for as long as I can remember, after all. The second thing we might take from all this is the reminder that even if the UK does leave the EU, relations with Europe will not just stop dead; the migrant crisis, the continuing importance of NATO, and the simple fact of Europe’s being right there and linked to the UK by a tunnel and high-speed rail link all mean that some kind of relationship between the UK and most of the Continental European states must continue. The referendum will help decide what kind of relationship that will be, but it won’t end it any more than Charlemagne closing the Channel ports ended trade relations between the two powers. That did, however, apparently make quernstones impossible to get for a few years and some parallel to that is very easy to imagine. What European foods do you currently eat you’d be sorry to go without?
My personal candidate: looks horrible, tastes magnificent. By Luigi Versaggi – Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=397091.
But the last thing we might not think of without this prompt is the rôle of Northumbria. Obviously, now that’s part of England, but Scotland is not, and while in Charlemagne’s time the Picts were a whole separate quantity (albeit also in contact with the Continent) now we might be reminded by Offa’s rival kings that Scotland may yet be in a position to reach its own agreements with Europe, when the current alliance falls apart as did that between Mercia and Northumbria and the campaign for secession heats up again.10 What would that mean? When Scotland looked like devolving properly last time many people talked about moving there to benefit from various more friendly aspects of its fiscal system and so on; if the UK left the EU and then a subsequently separated Scotland rejoined, I think a lot of businesses might look to relocate, and Scotland’s economic case for devolution start to look a lot more survivable. I can’t quite imagine it doing to England what Wessex eventually did to Mercia, but this, and the other points above, might all serve to remind the uncertain voter that there are more voices in this dispute than just UK voters and Brussels.11 Whatever your own priorities are, it might be worth thinking before you vote about Offa, Charlemagne, pilgrims, exiles and even quernstones, and considering just which bits of history we’re about to repeat.
1. There are two obvious books that cover this theme, Wilhelm Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century: the Ford Lectures, 1943 (Oxford 1946) and Joanna Story, Carolingian Connections: Anglo-Saxon England and Carolingian Francia, c. 750-870 (Aldershot 2003); both of them offer much more context for all of what follows than I can give here.
2. The letter was probably written by the Northumbrian cleric and teacher Alcuin, since it survives in collections of his other letters, but it went out in Charlemagne’s name. It is printed in Ernst Dümmler (ed.), “Alcuini sive Albini Epistolae” in Dümmler (ed.), Epistolae Ævi Karolini II, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Epistolae in quarto) IV (Berlin 1895, repr. Hannover 1994), online here, pp. 1-481 at no. 100, and translated in Steven Allott (transl.), Alcuin of York, c. A. D. 732 to 804: his life and letters (York 1974), ep. 100, and in Dorothy Whitelock (transl.), English Historical Documents, vol. 1: c. 500-1042, 2nd edn. (London 1979), doc. no. 197.
3. For background on Offa see most quickly Simon Keynes, “The kingdom of the Mercians in the eighth century” in David Hill & Margaret Worthington (edd.), Aethelbald and Offa: two eighth-century kings of Mercia. Papers from a conference held in Manchester in 2000, Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon studies, British Archaeological Reports (British Series) 383 (Oxford 2005), pp. 1-26.
4. On the black stones, see Meinrad Pohl, “Quern-Stones and Tuff as Indicators of Medieval European Trade Patterns” in Papers from the Institute of Archaeology Vol. 20 (London 2010), pp. 148-153, DOI: 10.5334/pia.348, whence the illustration (fig. 1).
5. Charlemagne’s biographer Einhard tells us of the king’s grief at this event in his Vita Karoli, ed. Oswald Holder-Egger as Einhardi Vita Karoli Magni, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi) XXV (Hannover 1911, repr. 1965), online here, trans. David Ganz in idem (ed.), Two Lives of Charlemagne: Einhard and Notker the Stammerer (London 2009), pp. 17-44, III.19. I’m not sure where the memorial is edited, but it is translated in Paul Edward Dutton (transl.), Carolingian Civilization: a reader, 2nd edn. (Peterborough ON 2005), no. 9.4.
6. Admittedly, the obvious migrants, the Vikings, hadn’t really started migrating as yet, though as we have seen here they were a danger; as to the agricultural crisis, 792 and 793 had been famine years in the Carolingian Empire, as is recorded in the Royal Frankish Annals, printed as Friedrich Kurze (ed.), Annales regni Francorum inde ab a. 741 usque ad a. 829, qui dicuntur Annales Laurissenses maiores et Einhardi, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Scriptores Rerum Germanicum) VI (Hannover 1895; repr. 1950), online here, transl. in Bernard Scholz & Barbara Rogers (transl.), Carolingian Chronicles: Royal Frankish Annals and Nithard’s Histories (Michigan 1972), online here, pp. 35-125, with commentary pp. 2-21, s. aa 792 & 793.
7. In addition to the works in n. 1 above see here Janet L. Nelson, “Carolingian Contacts” in Michelle P. Brown and Carol Ann Farr (edd.), Mercia: an Anglo-Saxon kingdom in Europe (London 2001), pp. 126-143.
8. The source here is the Gesta Abbatum Fontellanensium, printed as Fernand Lohier & Jean Laporte (edd.), Gesta sanctorum patrum Fontanellensis coenobii (Rouen 1936), but I don’t have a detailed cite, only the knowledge that the relevant extract is translated in Whitelock, English Historical Documents doc. no. 20.
9. Opinions differ here, of course: see Chris Wickham, “Overview: production, distribution and demand” in Inge Lyse Hansen & Wickham (edd.), The Long Eighth Century: production, distribution and demand, The Transformation of the Roman World 11 (Leiden 2000), pp. 345-377.
10. On Scotland’s connections to Europe in this era see Patrick Wormald, “The emergence of the ‘Regnum Scottorum’: a Carolingian hegemony?” in Barbara Crawford (ed.), Scotland in Dark Age Britain: the proceedings of a day conference held on 18 February 1995, St John’s House Papers 5 (St Andrews 1996), pp. 131-160; Edward James, “The Continental Context” in Sally M. Foster (ed.), The St. Andrews sarcophagus: a Pictish masterpiece and its international connections (Dublin 1998), pp. 240-249.
11. Simon Keynes, “Mercia and Wessex in the ninth century” in Brown & Farr, Mercia, pp. 310-328.
Posted in Anglo-Saxons, Carolingians
Tagged Alcuin, Charlemagne, historians and politics, impact, letters, medieval trade, Offa, politics
Screenshot of the History News Network magazine website
Long-term readers may know that I used to be a contributor to a group blog at the Humanities News Network site, which was called Cliopatria. Cliopatria was kind of a lead singer and his backing band; Ralph Luker, the editor, did most of the posting and various other people chimed in every now and then, and from 2009 to the blog’s closure in 2012 I was one of those people. I always found Cliopatria a difficult audience to pitch for; I had been asked to contribute as a medievalist, but despite my efforts and those of the two East Asian studies people also contributing the bulk of both posting and commenting was modern-US-centric. I therefore wound up focusing my activity there either on things about scholarship on the Middle Ages I thought would interest other fields or, and here I had company, on the state of the Academy. Some of that material also appeared here, and I generally mentioned here when I’d got something up there, but I did try and make sure that I was writing distinctly for each blog.
Despite that, in general my posts went uncommented and in fact, it was then usual for me to get more comments and feedback here than anyone ever got on Cliopatria, so I posted there only rarely. Then, somewhere in 2011 I think, HNN had a redesign that changed their stylesheet and effectively wrecked anything that anyone had previously done with HTML tags; quotations ceased to be distinguishable from paragraph text, for example, and hyperlinked text appeared three point sizes smaller than that around it. Much of my existing content now looked stupid or wrong and it was hard to work in the new template; links inside the blog stopped working and posting, not just mine but everybody’s but Ralph’s, dropped right off. It struggled on a little longer and then Ralph finally closed the blog in early 2012. It remains readable, but I learn in writing this that Ralph himself died in August 2015, which I am saddened by. May he rest easily.
Since then, anyway, I’ve occasionally had reason to go back to my Cliopatria posts for something, and they are really hard to find. The site has been redesigned again since Cliopatria closed and things now look better, though not as good as they did before the first redesign; but the links to individual authors’ works have gone, as have all the comments, and its internal search is lousy. My name doesn’t appear over all my posts, and neither my own list of links or Google can bring back everything I wrote there. So for some time I’ve been meaning to put together a list of my posts, for my own reference as much as anything, and this is that list. In compiling it, I’ve discovered quite a number of things I had completely forgotten writing, and I fear that there may still be more I haven’t found. What I have, I’ve broken down by categories and arranged by date within them, and if you wanted to go and read any of them that would be lovely, though I’ve also indicated where they also appear here at A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe because those are easier reading still. When it drops off the front page I’ll set this post up as its own page. In the meantime, this is what I did for Cliopatria.
These were generally poorly-judged for Cliopatria and usually also appeared here. After a while I stopped doing them except out of guilt at having not posted for ages.
A long-term strand of my blogging, this, but all the more important where medievalists would not normally tread but modernists are still reading it. These are probably the posts I’m proudest of writing at Cliopatria, I think they were useful and good publicity for why having experts on this stuff is sometimes helpful.
I’m much less sure about these posts, as a rule. In particular, they mostly come from the point when the Conservative Party under David Cameron was just beginning to muck about with UK higher education funding; a lot of people were self-righteously angry and it was easy to get on that bandwagon without necessarily thinking too hard. After all, the government was directing baton charges against schoolchildren protesting about tuition fees; if you weren’t angry, you arguably weren’t paying attention. Also, though, for much of my time on Cliopatria I was at Oxford, which the more I look back on it (or read my leftover issues of The Oxford Magazine) looks like a bubble of small-c conservative privilege I wasn’t then fully able to see out of. The people writing in the Magazine clearly don’t represent their colleagues very widely—Oxford has not gone private, banned tourists from the Bodleian Library, legislated to remove authority from its own Council or cut back the university administration, or any of the other things for which they regularly campaigned, for a start—but Oxford also doesn’t represent the rest of UK HE very well, and I honestly just didn’t realise how true that was till I got out. So these posts come from an odd, and rather blinkered, place, and occasionally I got pulled up for that. Still, there are some good rants there and a few things I’d still stand by.
Posted in Blogroll, Institutions, Uncategorized
Tagged Blogging, Cliopatria, historians and politics, medievalism, The Academy
The entrance to the Arxiu Capitular i Biblioteca de Vic
Resuming the recounting of my last trip to Catalonia, we left the story at the amazing Santa Maria del Mar in Barcelona but finished that day back in Vic, where we had an excellent dinner at la Creperia and then the next day fell to something alarmingly like work. Admittedly, that work started with a visit to the Museu Episcopal de Vic, because you have to, but they don’t like photography and more and more of their collections are online now, even if still not the bits I would like most. But after that, while my companion went a-touristing, I went to an archive like a real historian. This was something of a flying visit, made more effective as ever by the tremendous help of Dr Rafel Ginebra and the great knowledge of Monsignor Miquel dels Sants Gros i Pujol, exemplary archivists if ever such there were. But I had come in with a hit-list of charters intended to answer certain questions, and apart from a very few that were away for conservation, I came out with all the answers I’d wanted. And since some of the relevant questions are ones I’ve raised here, I may as well tell you the answers!
Arxiu Capitular de Vic, calaix 6, núm. 547
For example, I have many times used this document in my work, because it recounts a meeting at Taradell in which two charters were replaced after having been lost, and it does so in terms that sound utterly realistic but actually must derive from a written model.1 (Joan, if you’re reading, this is our testimony for the Vilar de Gaudila…) I’ve written about it so much that it was clear I would at some point need to illustrate it, so this was me making sure I could. But there are two documents deriving from that meeting, and I had always wondered what the relationship between them was. It turns out it’s physical; they’re both written on the same parchment, as you see, and if you click through to a slightly bigger version you’ll see that several of the same witnesses signed both bits autograph. There’s more questions this raises about how the ceremony actually went, but now I have all the evidence there is with which to answer them.
Arxiu Capitular de Vic, calaix 6, núm. 649
Most of what I was doing, however, was hunting scribes. For example, I have become interested in a particular scribe called Joan who wrote charters for Bishop Guisad II of Urgell but only in various areas of Osona, and doesn’t seem to have been linked to the cathedral which actually covered that county, Vic, although it’s there where his documents largely survive.2 Obviously one question that therefore arises is whether all the documents are by the same Joan. Well, there’s one above…3
Arxiu Capitular de Vic, calaix 6, núm. 2097
… and here’s another and immediately, you see that the simple answer is the correct one; although I did find others by this guy, there is at least one other, the scribe of the above, and one of my new tasks is therefore to go through the list and group the charters according to what I can now see of who is writing them.4 But wait: there is something even more interesting here. Do you remember when I was working through the excellent book of Benoît-Michel Tock about signatures in charters that he had cases where signatures might have been made on and then actually cut off from the formal version of the charter that went into the archive.5 Well, look along that lower margin above there and tell me that isn’t what’s happened here; that mark is the top of someone else’s ruche, isn’t it? We’ll never know whose but it’s educational just to know it could happen.
Arxiu Episcopal de Vic, calaix VIII, núm. 135
Likewise with scribe-hunting: do you remember me writing about a scribe named Ermemir, based at Santa Eulàlia de Riuprimer, who seemed to have been keeping the charters he wrote in his own church? Here’s one of them.6
Arxiu Capitular de Vic, calaix 6, núm. 1302
This, on the other hand, is pretty clearly by a different Ermemir, who actually turns up in a small group of his own.7 Now I can separate the two (or, as it may be, more).
Arxiu Capitular de Vic, calaix 6, núm. 1300
Arxiu Capitular de Vic, calaix 6, núm. 1300, verso
This is the Riuprimer guy again, but this one has its own interest, because you will observe if you look closely that the actual charter text, the paler ink, sat a few centimetres clear of the left-hand margin. Accordingly, someone very short of parchment later wrote an inventory in the margin (the darker ink). This runs onto the reverse, as well. The edition gives one only the tiniest hint of this; Ordeig just says, “Al marge esquerre i al dors hi ha escrits uns capbreus (s. XI)”.8 I’m sure he’s gone on to edit in its proper place in the eleventh-century series but I don’t have access to that, so can’t answer questions like whether this is the same lands that are being inventoried, and whether this therefore counts as a sort of update, or if this was just random parchment reuse.9 Well, now, in theory I can, if I can only read it. And having a high-resolution photograph makes that a lot easier! Now, one last one.
Arxiu Capitular de Vic, calaix 6, núm. 973
You will probably remember my long long series of posts arguing with Michel Zimmermann, and you may remember that a certain trend in his scholarship emerged as a theme in these posts to the extent that I was very surprised to find him writing towards the end of his massive work about an eleventh-century female scribe, called Alba ‘femina’.10 Unfortunately, I had my doubts about whether that scribe was really writing the charter, because there was clearly another one on the same parchment by a very similar-looking hand. Well, now I have seen the parchment, and the other hand is not in fact the same. You have to look very carefully, they are very similar, but they form their loops differently and, perhaps most clearly, the capital N in their signatures is differently constructed. She may have learnt from him, may even have been working wth him and that be why they wound up writing documents on the same parchment, but I’m now fairly sure she did do her own writing, or at least that he did not do hers. And this is the kind of question you can only answer when you can see the original, or at least get a decent picture of it. So my thanks go again to the Arxiu i Biblioteca de Vic, to Rafel Ginebra and to Miquel dels Sants; I will be back when I have more questions!
1. My writing for now at Jonathan Jarrett, “Pathways of Power in late-Carolingian Catalonia”, unpublished Ph. D. thesis (University of London 2005), online here, pp. 49-53, though actual publication of these thoughts is even now under review. The charters are most recently edited as Ramon Ordeig i Mata (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia: els comtats d’Osona i Manresa, Memòries de la Secció Històrico-Arqueològica LIII (Barcelona 1999), 3 vols, doc. nos 33 & 34.
2. Although as this post makes clear they are not all by the same scribe, if you only have the edition ibid. doc. nos. 668, 670, 674, 675, 837, 840, 849, 863, 896, 899 & 1499 are all contendors for his authorship.
3. Printed as ibid. doc. no. 674.
4. This one printed as ibid. doc. no. 840.
5. B.-M. Tock, Scribes, souscripteurs et témoins dans les actes privés en France (VIIe – début XIIe siècle, Atelier de Recherches sur les Textes Médiévaux 9 (Turnhout 2006), pp. 392-397.
6. Printed as Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia IV, doc. no. 1792.
7. This one is too late for the Catalunya Carolíngia; it must be printed in Ramon Ordeig i Mata (ed.), Diplomatari del Catedral de Vic (segle XI) (Vic 2000-2010), 6 fascicules, but nowhere in Britain has more than the first two volumes of that and I’d have to be in London, Oxford or Cambridge even for those.
8. Ordeig, Catalunya Carolíngia IV, III p. 1292 (doc. no. 1822).
9. Again, this must be edited in Ordeig, Diplomatari de la Catedral de Vic (segle XI), but this one won’t even be in one of the sections that is in the country. I am looking into buying a copy…
10. Michel Zimmermann, Écrire et lire en Catalogne (IXe-XIIIe siècles), Bibliothèque de la Casa de Velázquez 23 (Madrid 2003), 2 vols, II p. 1250, fig. 4.
Posted in Catalonia, Charters, Now working on...
Tagged assemblies, diplomatic, Miquel dels Sants Gros i Pujol, palaeography, Rafel Ginebra, scribes, Vic
New state of the entrance to the coin gallery at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts
I no longer work at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, as keen readers will know, but you could be forgiven for making the mistake given that while I deal with the backlog about half the things on the front page of this here blog are posts about objects at the Barber and that until a few weeks ago they were displaying my work in the form of the exhibition Inheriting Rome, which for reasons I explained a while back has had the benefit of a considerably extended run while the new Interim Curator of Coins, Maria Vrij, got appointed and to work. This, however, she has now done and the results in the form of a new exhibition, Buried Treasures: Uncovering Hoards, is now open and I got to go to a private view.
Two of the display cases and the golden doors of the Coin Study Room
I could, if so minded, at least claim an assist on this as, when it still seemed that I would be setting up the next exhibition after Inheriting Rome, I had the idea of displaying some of the hoards that reside in the Barber in their entirety, of which there are several, one of which I am even working towards publishing. They are all kind of bronze and damaged, however, and it remained an undeveloped idea. Maria, however, who has always known the Barber Collections far better than I got to, was also aware that lots of items in the collection had come from hoards, and that has proved the seed for a rather brilliant exhibition.
Introductory case, naming and placing the 1945 Carthage Hoard, the 1954 Tunis Hoard, the 1957 Syria Hoard, ‘Hoard A’ from Syria, the Messina Hoard, the Dorchester Hoard, the Appleford Hoard and the Mardin Hoard, parts of all of which are on display
Using the hoards and their discovery as a platform, Maria has been able to open up in accessible terms many of the questions that lie beneath the practice of burying coins, such as: why do people do it? Are the purposes always the same? (To which, this exhibition makes abundantly clear, the answer is ‘no’.) What sort of coins get buried when? Where do the coins come from? Why were they not recovered? And what can they tell us, about the history of the coinage or about the history of their times?
Coins from the Messina Hoard and a replica of one of the vessels from the Dorchester Hoard against a backdrop of photographs from that hoard’s discovery in 1936
There are also more specific research outcomes on display here. Maria is of course one of the investigators on the project All That Glitters about which I have written here, and as a result one small part of one case uses our findings from that to talk about metal purity in the Byzantine gold coinage. If you want to know more about that, firstly rest assured that further posts will appear here as I slowly tackle the backlog, but more immediately, this coming Wednesday the 18th May there will be a lunchtime lecture at the Barber with the title, “The Marriage of History and Science: Testing the Purity of Byzantine Gold Coinage” and the speaker will be none other than myself! It’s not really my work I’ll be presenting so much as the group’s, set into a context in which the general public can understand it (or so I hope), but it should be fun, it is free and if you happen to be in Birmingham that lunchtime perhaps you’d like to come along?
Section of display on the concavity of late-Byzantine coins in the Syria case
I am, though, almost more pleased with this inset, in as much as without committing itself to any of my theories on the question, this is actually based on my research, which of course I talked out with Maria while I was actually working on it.1 I never thought of displaying the coins in a way that made their fabric this visible, however. As with so many elements of this exhibition, it is not unlike what we did in the coin gallery before (and the designers deserve a huge credit for making it recognisable as well as different) but it is probably better, managing to do more with less and make it more accessible. It runs until 26th February 2017, but go and see it soon! Then you can go again before it closes!
Website banner image created for the exhibition
1. Jonathan Jarrett, “A Problem Of Concavity: The Original Purpose Of The So-Called ‘Scyphate’ Byzantine Coinage”, paper presented at the XV International Numismatic Congress, Università degli Studi di Messina, 21st September 2015, now under review for publication.
Posted in Byzantium, Institutions, numismatics, Romans
Tagged Barber Institute, coin hoards, coinage, exhibitions, Maria Vrij
I now want to turn back for a post to the text I was reading at about this time last year, the De Administrando Imperio of Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus. I’ve already said something about the composite and confusing nature of this text, but I want here to look a little bit more closely at some of its internal contradictions, and that with particular regard to the variation it offers in national origin myths.1 This is clearest in the Balkans, and the interpretation of Constantine’s information there is a tricky matter, as is almost anything in the Balkans really. One can see why this is with no trouble: since 1918, and then again since 1992, there have been a number of different recognised nationalities there competing for space with each other and for either freedom or support from bigger powers to help them in that competition. Explaining all this has naturally enough resulted in work to establish the roots of the nationalities concerned in their desired home area, and Constantine seems to help with this as the stories he provides seem to testify, if not to actual events (though some would claim that they do), at least to long-established beliefs available to a tenth-century enquirer about what had happened when these various peoples arrived centuries before.2
For example, this Wikipedian map claims that it is ‘mostly according to the De Administrando Imperio’, but I bet that you could construct another that would make Croatia the bigger territory, also ‘mostly’ on the basis of Constantine’s information…
In particular, our ailing emperor is the first source we have to use a word that is cognate to the modern ‘Croat’ for some of these people, and to distinguish the area inhabited by such Croats from other areas inhabited by Slavs. (He is also, I should say, fascinating about the innumerable separated ex-Roman peoples who were left along the coast by the Byzantine retreat, and their journey into ethnicity is one I would like someone to do more with–but of course, they became part of other people’s identities in the end, so don’t get their own history.3) It’s not just Balkan scholars who have leapt at this text, of course: scholars of the Russians and Hungarians, all working without the aid of home-grown historical writing this early, have also seen in Constantine’s apparent lack of editing some hope that the materials he preserved represent the authentic popular memory of authentic Slavic, Rus’ or Magyar informants, even if sometimes passed through Greek-literate intermediaries.4 Efforts to push back the date of the information he records may also have the same ultimate motives; thus Francis Dvornik developed a complex hypothesis about the Balkan material by which reports from officials dating from no later than 912 were compiled around 944 by Constantine and then combined with a newer but Slavic (and “truer”) story about the origin of the Croats around 952, all from clues within the text.5 I’m not going to say he was wrong, either, but really all we can say for sure is that Constantine had all the material he used by 952.
The opening page of the earliest mansucript of the De Administrando Imperio, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS grec. 2009, fo. 3r. The thing on the left is some tables from the Letter of Pythagoras to Laïs, which was later bound into the same codex.
He was also presumably not working without some editorial purpose, but sometimes it is very hard to perceive. He gives three accounts of the arrival of the Croats in the Balkans, in fact, none of which fully agree and one of which is internally self-contradictory. In the first place, he tells us that all was peaceful south of the Danube till the Romans crossed it one day in a spirit of adventure and, finding “unarmed Slavonic nations, who were also called Avars”, there, raided them fairly thoroughly and then garrisoned the Danube so as to go on doing that, whereupon the Slavs (“who were also called Avars”) decided that this had to stop, apparently armed themselves, ambushed a Roman detachment and then got through the frontier pass at Klis under their captured standard, whereafter they sprang upon Salona and established themselves there, and all the Romans of the land fled to the coastal cities where they remain.6 Now, not only do we know that this is not true—Slavs served in the Avar military effort but the peoples are distinguished fairly consistently by Roman authors, Salona took years to fall, in the seventh century (whereas Constantine later says this happened 500 years before his date of writing in 952!), and so on—but Constantine had different information too, in the form of the Chronicle of Theophanes that he quotes extensively and, indeed, from whose author he even claims descent.7 But this is the story he tells this time, and although several morals can be seen in it it’s hard to know exactly which one Romanos II was supposed to take from it: that the Balkans were lost because of Roman greed? that the Slavs are fierce, cunning and capable of deceit? or that modern-day Kotor, Dubrovnik, Split, Trogir, Rab, Bekla and Osor were all places that could still be claimed as Byzantine possessions?8
The bit that follows immediately doesn’t make this much clearer:
“Since the reign of Heraclius, emperor of the Romans, as will be related in the narrative concerning the Croats and Serbs, the whole of Dalmatia and the nations about it, such as Croats, Serbs, Zachlumi, Terbouniotes, Kanalites, Diocletians and Arentani, who are also called Pagani… But when the Roman Empire, through the sloth and inexperience of those who governed it and especially in the time of Michael from Amorion, the Lisper, had declined to the verge of total extinction, the inhabitants of the cities of Dalmatia became independent, subject neither to the emperor of the Romans nor to anybody else, and, what is more, the nations of those parts, the Croats and Serbs and Zachlumites, Terbouniotes and Kanalites and Diocletians and the Pagani, shook off the reins of the Empire of the Romans and became self-governing and independent, subject to none. Princes, as they say, these nations had none, but only ‘zupans’, elders, as is the rule in the other Slavonic regions. Moreover, the majority of these Slavs were not even baptised, and remained unbaptized for long enough. But in the time of Basil, the Christ-loving emperor, they sent diplomatic agents, begging and praying him that those of them who were unbaptized might receive baptism and that they might be, as they had originally been, subject to the empire of the Romans.”
Of course Basil II obliged, and his rather messy wars of conquest in the area are overlooked, as indeed is the earlier mission to these areas under Saints Cyril and Methodius.9 At one level the immediate political point of this is obvious: all these peoples are ours, by their own decision, and they owe us both liberty and Salvation, the latter no doubt having implications about authority over the local churchmen. But the claims made on the way are really curious: the whole area was in Byzantine hands until the reign of Michael II (820-29)? and became that way under Heraclius (610-41)? Most modern histories would regard Heraclius’s as the reign in which these areas were lost!10 Furthermore, Constantine seems to know that at some other level, because after a long run through the topography and history of the ‘Roman’ coastal cities, which is to me what this chapter is really about, he finds another way in the next chapter. First he retells the story about the Avars (definitely them this time) hitting back at Roman raiders and getting into Roman territory under false colours then taking Salona with the same trick. Then he goes on:
“Only the townships on the coast held out against them and continued to be in the hands of the Romans, because they obtained their livelihood from the sea. The Avars, then, seeing this land to be most fair, settled down in it. But the Croats at that time were dwelling beyond Bavaria, where the Belocroats are now. From them split off a family of five brothers, Kloukas and Lobelos and Kosentzis and Mouchlo and Chrobatos, and two sisters, Touga and Bouga, who came with their folk to Dalmatia and found the Avars in possession of that land. After they had fought one another for some years, the Croats prevailed and killed some of the Avars and the remainder they compelled to be subject to them. And so from that time the land was possessed by the Croats, and there are still in Croatia some who are of Avar descent and are recognized as Avars. The rest of the Croats stayed over against Francia, and are now called Belocroats, that is, white Croats, and have their own prince; they are subject to Otto, the great king of Francia, of Saxony, and are unbaptized, and intermarry and are friendly with the Turks. From the Croats who came to Dalmatia a part split off and possessed themselves of Illyricum and Pannonia; they too had an independent prince, who used to maintain friendly contact, though through envoys only, with the prince of Croatia.
‘Dolazak Hrvata na Jadran’ (‘The Coming of the Croats to the Adriatic Sea’), painted in 1905 by Oton Iveković (d. 1939) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. This, we might regard as a positivist reading of our source…
“For a number of years the Croats of Dalmatia also were subject to the Franks, as they had formerly been in their own country; but the Franks treated them with such brutality that they used to murder Croat infants at the breast and cast them to the dogs. The Croats, unable to endure such treatment from the Franks, revolted from them, and slew those of them whom they had for princes. On this, a large army from Francia marched against then, and after they had fought one another for seven years, at last the Croats managed to prevail and destroyed all the Franks with their leader, who was called Kotzilis. From that time they remained independent and autonomous, and they requested the holy baptism from the bishop of Rome, and bishops were sent who baptized them in the time of Porinos their prince.”11
So are you following? These people, who the previous chapter had been Byzantine subjects since at least 641, have now been independent ever since they threw off Frankish rule, in what is presumably a reference to the rebellions against Louis the Pious and his régime in Pannonia of the 820s.12 They were also baptised by Roman missionaries at about that time, but last chapter were still pagan in the reign of Basil II (886-912). Interestingly, they move as a family group with hangers-on: this really is something like a tribal migration as Constantine tells it, and that seems to be because whoever was telling it was aware of a family of princes with particular claims to the over-rule of connected peoples. In other words, where the previous chapter looked like a statement of a Byzantine political position, this looks much more like a Croat one, although it presumably still had a use for Constantine. My guess would be that this was the abrogation of any claim the Franks might make to the control of these people, voided by illegitimate brutality, just rebellion and right of combat. So again we can see a purpose, but then there is a third version…
“The Croats who now live in the region of Dalmatia are descended from the unbaptized Croats, also called ‘white’, who live beyond Turkey and next to Francia, and have for Slav neighbours the unbaptized Serbs. ‘Croats’ in the Slav tongue means ‘those who occupy much territory’. These same Croats arrived to claim the protection of the emperor of the Romans Heraclius before the Serbs claimed the protection of the same emperor Heraclius, at that time when the Avars had fought and expelled from those parts the Romani whom the emperor Diocletian had brought from Rome and settled there, and who were therefore called ‘Romani’ from their having been translated from Rome to those countries, I mean, to those now called Croatia and Serbia. These same Romani having been expelled by the Avars in the days of this same emperor of the Romans Heraclius, their countries were made desolate. And so, by command of the emperor Heraclius these same Croats defeated and expelled the Avars from those parts, and by mandate of Heraclius the emperor they settled down in that same country of the Avars, where they now dwell. These same Croats had at that time for prince the father of Porgas. The emperor Heraclius sent and brought priests from Rome, and made of them an archbishop and bishop and elders and deacons, and baptized the Croats; and at that time these Croats had Porgas for their prince.”13
So, in this version it’s not at all clear who controls the territory into which our migrants, again with a named prince, move. It’s waste, because the Romani have moved out; it’s Roman, because the Slavs come to Heraclius to get their permission to settle; it’s Avar, because the Avars have to be chucked out of it… But the important thing is that it’s Heraclius who decides, both on the settlement and on the Christianization; the pope’s rôle is reduced to ancillary of the emperor, and the mission of Cyril and Methodius is again apparently just too embarrassing or compromised to mention. This, alone of the three, looks like a fudge to match the previous stories and Byzantium’s claims to the contrary with the chronology of what actually happened, as far as we can tell, that the area fell under local control after Heraclius pulled out the troops to fight against Persia and that the papacy sent a mission into Dalmatia in the year of Heraclius’s death, although to recover relics and ransom captives rather than to convert Slavs.14 These may indeed have been things that were remembered at Split, which later claimed to have been made an archbishopric at about this time.15 The point, again, would seem to be that whoever was in control here it certainly wasn’t the Franks, but the papacy’s relegation to imperial auxiliary, actually truer than you might think given that Pope Martin I was imprisoned for some time in Constantinople for non-cooperation with the emperors, might also have had a special bite by the point where control of the Balkans and its bishoprics was once more on the Byzantine agenda.16
The cathedral of St Domnius, Split, potentially source of a lot of Constantine’s confusion but itself also a testimony to the complexities it was trying to reconcile: the octagonal nave began as the mausoleum of Emperor Diocletian (284-307), who was of course a persecutor of Christians…
So what is to make of all this contradiction? Obviously there were different stories in circulation by the tenth century about what had happened in the seventh, which is not surprising. As we have them here, however, all of them can be read as serving a Byzantine political agenda: in the first case, the uninterrupted claim to the coastal cities of the Romani is the key, no matter what else it means admitting, but it is also worth asserting religious sponsorship of the Slavic peoples in those cities’ ecclesiastical orbits; in the second place, the key point is probably that any claim that the ‘Franks’ (which by Constantine’s time was the Ottonians for all functional purposes) could raise over the northern Balkans had been voided by their ancient conduct and the Croats’ brave resistance; in the third place, the point is that the peoples of this area hold their lands by imperial concession and that their Christianity ultimately also has such an origin. This probably makes it dangerous to assume that any of this stuff is reaching us unspun; Constantine may indeed have had local informants informing his sources, but what we have here is a selection of material to a purpose; you have to assume that if it had not served that purpose it could have been adjusted to do so.
But, you may say, it’s still a contradictory mess. How could Constantine put this stuff together and expect it all to work? Well, it works to its purpose, doesn’t it? If we think he was actually interested in recording the history of these peoples, we’re probably right, but this selection of the material he had was not being made for that purpose, but to underpin Byzantine diplomacy. This is a lot clearer in a much earlier part of the book that deals with how to handle excessive demands for treasure from barbarian ambassadors (apparently a common problem). Compare the above and the claims I have argued they probably support to this:
“Should they ever require and demand, whether they be Chazars, or Turks, or again Russians, or any other nation of the northerners and Scythians, as frequently happens, that some of the imperial vesture or diadems or state robes should be sent to them in return for some service or office performed by them, then thus you shall excuse yourself: «These robes of state and the diadems, which you call ‘kamelaukia’, were not fashioned by men, nor by human arts devised or elaborated, but, as we read in secret stories of old history, when God made emperor Constantine the great, who was the first Christian emperor, He sent him these robes of state by the hand of His angel, and the diadems which you call ‘kamelaukia’, and charged him to lay them in the great and holy Church of God, which… is called St. Sophia; and not to clothe himself in them every day, but only when it is a great public festival of the Lord… Moreover, there is a curse of the holy and great emperor Constantine engraved upon this holy table of the church if God, according as he was charged by God through the angel, that if an emperor for any use or occasion or unreasonable desire be minded to take of them and either himself misuse them or give them to others, he shall be anathematized as the foe and enemy of the commands of God, and shall be excommunicated from the church… And mighty dread hangs over them who are minded to transgress any of these divine ordinances. For one of the emperors, Leo by name, who also married a wife from Chazaria, out of his folly and rashness took up one of those diadems when no festival of the Lord was toward, and without the approval of the patriarch put it about his head. And straightway a carbuncle came forth upon his forehead so that in torment at the pains of it he evilly departed his evil life, and ran upon death untimely….»”17
That, judging by the wife, would be Leo IV (775-780), whose wife Eirini (797-802) was famously from Khazaria and apparently counted as one of his bad decisions, but obviously real history is not the concern here; what is concerned here is what sounds both impressive enough and ancient enough to shut up your peremptory barbarian visitors. There are I think, after putting this post together (it was originally supposed to be about migration, would you believe?), that we have to see the various Croat origin myths in the same way. Yes, so they contradict each other; who cares? You’ll only be using one of them when you need historical backing for the claim of the moment, choose the one that fits! This text is not a set of historical accounts, for all that it is often used as one; it is a grab-bag of historical justifications for claims the emperor might need to make in negotiations. “Oh no: we appoint the archbishops of Salona, no matter what this new pope may say. It’s been that way for hundreds of years.” “The Croats? Yes: valuable subjects! Did you know that the Bulgars have never ever defeated them? The Christ-loving Heraclius was right to let them settle in the Empire after the Franks betrayed God’s trust over them.” And so on. None of it has to be true; it had to be useful, and could have been crafted to be so. This goes some way to redeeming Constantine from some of the charges of boozy slapdash editing I was vaguely raising last time, perhaps, and makes us think harder about what his use for history really was. The pity for us is that as I have been saying for many many years, to use history is pretty much the same as to misuse it…
1. Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De Administrando Imperii, ed. Gyula Moravcsik & transl. Romilly J. H. Jenkins, new edn., Dumbarton Oaks Texts 1 (Washington DC 1967, repr. 1993).
2. Critical appraisals in Florin Curta, The Making of the Slavs: history and archaeology of the Lower Danube Region, c. 500-700 (Cambridge 2001), pp. 64-66, and John V. A. Fine Jr, When Ethnicity Did Not Matter in the Balkans: a study of identity in pre-nationalist Croatia, Dalmatia, and Slavonia in the medieval and early-modern periods (Kalamazoo 2006), pp. 23-26. For a more traditional reading see Francis Dvornik, “Cc. 29/1-53, 217-295; 30-36” in Romilly J. H. Jenkins (ed.), Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De Administrando Imperio: a commentary (London 1962, repr. Washington DC 2012), pp. 93-142 at pp. 93-101. Curta provides references to more modern pro-national readings of the text. As with some of the Catalan issues with which I work it’s rather uncomfortable here that all the voices denying these modern nations their ancient roots write in English (although not always only in English) and the pro-national opposition stays in the local languages, but some indication of the market for the old-fashioned reading might be found in the existence of K. Y. Grot (transl.), Izvestiya Konstantina Bagryanorodnogo O Serbah I Horvatah I Ih Rasselenii Na Balkanskom Poluostrove (n. p. 2013).
3. I’ve no idea what’s good to read on these coastal cities, but a quick search brings information to me on these: Ivo Goldstein, “Byzantine rule on the Adriatic (in Dalmatia, Istria and on the Western Adriatic): possibilities for a comparative study” in Acta Histriae Vol. 7 (Koper 1999), pp. 59-76; Ivan D. Stevovic, “Byzantium, Byzantine Italy and cities on the eastern coast of the Adriatic: the case of Kotor and Dubrovnik” in Zbornik radova Vizantoloskog Instituta Vol. 39 (Beograd 2001), pp. 165-182, DOI: 10.2298/ZRVI0239165S (no longer maintained); and Nenad Fejic, Dubrovnik (Raguse) au Moyen-Age : espace de convergence, espace menacé (Paris 2010).
4. Dvornik, “Cc. 29/1-53, 217-295; 30-36“, pp. 96-101, 112-114 & 118, esp. 114; Gyula Moravcsik, “Cc. 37-42” in Jenkins, Commentary, pp. 142-156 at pp. 143 & 145-146, esp. 146, does the same thing for Hungary and Dimitri Obolensky, “C. 9“, ibid. pp. 16-61 at pp. 19, 25-26 & 40-42, esp. 42, does it for the Rus’.
5. Dvornik as in n. 4 above, “truer” at p. 101.
6. Constantine, De Administrando Imperio, c. 29, ll. 13-49.
7. See Curta, Making of the Slavs, pp. 139-140; Fine, When Ethnicity Did Not Matter, pp. 22-23. Constantine’s claim to be descended from Theophanes is at De Administrando Imperii, c. 22, ll. 77-82.
8. These cities are all named in Greek ibid., c. 29, ll. 50-53; I take the Croatian names from Dvornik, “Cc. 29/1-53, 217-295; 30-36“, pp. 106-110.
9. On Basil II see Catherine Holmes, Basil II and the governance of Empire (976-1025) (Oxford 2005); for Cyril and Methodius I’m kind of still going on Alexis P. Vlasto, The entry of the Slavs into Christendom: an introduction to the medieval history of the Slavs (Cambridge 1970), and there must by now be something better, but I don’t know what it is. Any suggestions?
10. Summary of recent debates is available in Mitko B. Panov, “Reconstructing 7th century Macedonia: some neglected aspects of the miracles of St Demetrius” in Istorija: Journal of History Vol. 47 (Skopje 2012), pp. 93-115.
11. Constantine, De Administrando Imperio, c. 30, ll. 60-90.
12. My understanding here comes largely from the Royal Frankish Annals as presented in Bernard Scholz & Barbara Rogers (transl.), Carolingian Chronicles: Royal Frankish Annals and Nithard’s Histories (Michigan 1972), pp. 35-125 with commentary pp. 2-21, s. aa. 818-823, topped up with Miljenko Jurkovic and Ante Milosevic, “Split. Croatas y Carolingias: arte y arquitectura en Croacia en la alta edad media” in Jordi Camps (ed.), Cataluña Carolingia: arte y cultura antes del Románico (siglos IX y X) (Barcelona 1999), pp. 165-170, transl. as “Split. Croats and Carolingians: art and architecture in the early Middle Ages”, ibid. pp. 501-504.
13. Constantine, De Administrando Imperio, c. 31, ll. 3-25.
14. On the dating of the withdrawal, see Curta, Making of the Slavs, pp. 169-189. The papal mission is mentioned in the Liber Pontificalis, but I learn that from Dvornik, “Cc. 29/1-53, 217-295; 30-36“, pp. 125-126, and haven’t been to look.
15. Ibid.; this time the source is held to be reflected in the thirteenth-century History of Split by Thomas the Archdeacon, apparently published as Thomas Archidiaconus, Historia Salonitana, ed. Franjo Racki, Monumenta spectantia historiam Slavorum meridionalium (Scriptores) 26.3 (Zagreb 1894), but again I’ve not been to look and Thomas surely had his own agenda.
16. The easiest study on Pope Martin I’s troubles is probably Bronwen Neil, “Commemorating Pope Martin I: His Trial in Constantinople” in Studia Patristica Vol. 39 (Leuven 2006), pp. 77-82. On the situation in the Balkans in Constantine’s era see now Jonathan Shepard, “Equilibrium to Expansion (886–1025)” in idem (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire (Cambridge 2008), pp. 493-536, doi: 10.1017/CHOL9780521832311.020 at pp. 503-518.
17. Constantine, De Administrando Imperio, c. 13, ll. 24-66.
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In between second-marking palæography assignments I think I have time for a quick photo post. Now: we left this story of my April 2015 trip to Catalonia, now sadly more than a year ago again, with me in Barcelona but … Continue reading
Sorry: marking, a conference overseas and the finality of the semester’s teaching have kept me too busy to be active here; it’s not really catching up, is it? Still: if you were keeping an obsessive eagle eye on what I say on this blog, which presumably only I actually do, you might have noticed that by taking some affable and underresearched swings at David Bachrach’s recent book a few posts ago, I have moved into the posts promised in my catch-up post of last July that even now hangs at the bottom of the sticky announcement posts on the front page, and the new step towards Byzantium is also part of that. While reading Constantine VII, however, I was also reading the work of Mark Handley, a long acquaintance of this blog, and you can see from the catch-up post that I had high praise for it, and one tiny niggle.1
Photograph of a seventh-century funerary inscription from Capel Llanilltern, Wales, though not material for Mark since there’s nothing there to identify the deceased as non-local.2
The praise must come first, of course. Mark makes almost of all his contentions almost inarguable by virtue of having a well-managed database of evidence, in this case of inscriptions from right across the late Roman and early medieval Mediterranean, from which he selects those dealing with people who are identified in some way as being out of place, foreign, or else merchants or travellers, a sample of 621 people overall, and he uses this to test the many generalisations that are out there about such groups, like the predominance-to-exclusion of Syrians (or Jews) in Mediterranean maritime trade of the period, about directions of travel and foci of movement and so on. Some surprising things come out of this: for example, the largest sample of such inscriptions outside of Rome itself comes not from one of the other big maritime entrepôts but from Salona in the Balkans, which Mark admits he himself had not expected.3 Quite a lot of things come out of it that conflict with the views of other scholars too, and they get deliciously definite rebuttal in the extensive footnotes. I really do recommend this book as a scholarly read, I enjoyed it thoroughly. But of course, it being me, I do have a niggle.
Funerary stone of the priest Opila at Sant Pere de Vilamajor, again out of Mark’s compass but one of these things that I have actually seen
The niggle is in some ways a danger of database work as much as anything else. Obviously to make it usefully sortable, searchable and organisable you want your data as atomised as possible, and this makes fields that contain more than one sort of data difficult. If one has categories into which a datum, be that a person or whatever, needs to be fitted, it is sometimes hard to let it go into more than one category; otherwise it winds up getting double-counted. Perhaps something like that explains this:
“Secondly, the evidence gathered here firmly indicates that many Syrians, and indeed others from the East attested in the West, were not engaged in commerce. Many 5th-c. Syrian solders were commemorated at Concordia; two Syrian priests are known from Salona; a Syrian sub-deacon is known at Tomis; Flavia Marthana, a nun from Antioch, is commemorated at Bolsena; a Syrian primipilarius is known in Gigen; and the woman Eusebia from Syria had lived in Trier 15 years before she died in 409. A Syrian lawyer was commemorated at Kallatis, and a Syrian stone-worker at Sofia. We should not add a ‘dot’ on a map to indicate a Syrian ‘trader’ when Agnellus of Ravenna states that the first 16 bishops of Ravenna were Syrian, when a Syrian autocephalous bishop attended the second council of Seville in 619, or when the Syrian Johannes helped Gregory of Tours with some Greek texts. Not all Syrians in the West were traders.”4
You may be wondering what needs explaining here, since this is pretty obviously methodologically right in summary, and many of these people are clearly not traders. But were none of them? You see, this puts me in mind of a story from Catalonia, as so many things do. In 1018 the chapter of Barcelona received a substantial bequest of cloth from a Flemish merchant called Robert who had fallen ill at the city while on a voyage, and made an emergency will for the good of his soul before dying, this largely at the behest of a Barceona canon by the name of Bonnuç. This actually got the chapter into trouble, because a few days later Robert’s brother turned up to reclaim the goods, and in the end the canons had to pay him off to be allowed to pray for his brother’s soul and keep at least some of the bequest. But the interesting thing from our immediate point of view is that Bishop Æci also made a gift of cloth for the merchant’s soul, and he had bought that cloth from none other than Bonnuç, who suddenly appears to have been Robert’s contact in the city, at least by the time Robert’s final deal was closed.5 So does Bonnuç go into our notional database as a cleric, or as a trader?
The Miracle of St Eligius by Sandro Botticelli, now in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
Clerics are in general a potential problem with this sort of categorisation, in fact. As a sometime numismatist I think rapidly of Bishop Eligius of Noyon, Saint Eloy, who was a goldsmith before he came to the Church and who seems to have continued to dabble thereafter.6 And at roughly the same time, as Mark himself notes:
“Gregory of Tours, Hist. 7.30 and 10.25, record a Syrian merchant Euphronius at Bordeaux and another Syrian merchant Eusebius becoming bishop of Paris, respectively.”
The latter is actually 10.26 and Gregory says no more about the guy than that he was a merchant and a Syrian by race (“negotiator genere Syrus”), and that he was elected by bribery.7 Do we know anything else about the guy? I don’t think, in any case, we should assume that this precludes him nonetheless being in holy orders, or indeed precludes him continuing trading once appointed. The more I look at the Catalan Church the more I see deacons with day-jobs being involved members of the chapters of cathedrals precisely because of those day-jobs, and yet the more I look at churches in other areas the less unusual the Catalan one seems to be.8 Mark may have accidentally provided me with more evidence for this! I’m sure that in outline and in most of his detail he’s right, and I don’t by any means want to restore the Syrian people’s historiographical monopoly on early medieval sea travel, but it is as I say the devil of database work on people that they won’t stay in the categories we set up for them.
1. M. Handley, Dying on Foreign Shores: travel and mobility in the late-Antique West, Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplement 86 (Portsmouth RI 2011).
2. It is V. E. Nash-Williams (ed.), Catalogue of Early Christian Monuments of Wales (Cardiff 1950), no. 214, for those that care about such things.
3. Handley, Dying on Foreign Shores, p. 97, with detail pp. 78-82.
4. Ibid., pp. 83-84, with the copious references to inscriptions in his appendix cruelly elided here.
5. The documents are now best printed as Josep Baucells i Reig, Àngel Fàbrega i Grau, Manuel Riu i Riu, Josep Hernando i Delgado & Carme Batlle i Gallart (edd.), Diplomatari de l’Arxiu Capitular de la Catedral de Barcelona: segle XI, Diplomataris 37-41 (Barcelona 2006), 5 vols, online here, doc. nos 121 & 125. The canonical study is Philippe Wolff, “Quidam homo nomine Roberto negociatore” in Le Moyen Àge Vol. 69 (Paris 1963), online here, pp. 129-139.
6. Bishop Dado of Rouen, Vita sancti Eligii, ed. Wilhelm Levison as “Vita Eligii episcopi Noviomagensis” in Passiones vitaeque sanctorum ævi Merovingicarum, ed. Bruno Krusch, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Scriptores rerum merovingicarum) IV (Hannover 1902, repr. 1997), online here, pp. 669-742, transl. Jo Ann McNamara as “Life of St. Eligius of Noyon” in Thomas Head (ed.), Medieval Hagiography: an anthology (New York City NY 2000), pp. 137-168, a fuller version without notes online here.
7. Handley, Dying on Foreign Shores, p. 84 n. 104. The source is Gregory of Tours, Libri decem historiarum, edd. Bruno Krusch & Wilhelm Levison as Gregorii Episcopi Turonensis Libri Historiarum X, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Scriptores rerum merovingicarum) I.1 (Hannover 1937-1951, repr. 1992), transl. Lewis Thorpe as The History of the Franks (Harmondsworth 1974, many reprints).
8. See Paul H. Freedman, The Diocese of Vic: Tradition and Regeneration in Medieval Catalonia (New Brunswick 1983), online here, pp. 21-25; cf. Jonathan Jarrett, Rulers and Ruled in Frontier Catalonia 880-1010: pathways of power (Woodbridge 2010), pp. 122-125.
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A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe 
