For Some of the Gold in China

In November 2019, somehow, despite being in the middle of teaching and just before going on strike, that continuous impoverishing recreation we academics keep having to have, I managed to do something I probably now won’t do again for a long time, which was, go to China. For much of 2018 and 2019, as you’ll have been picking up, I had been making friends in Chinese academic circles, where I am known if at all as a specialist in Byzantine coinage, and as I have distantly mentioned because of its proceedings coming out, at about this point one of these friends got me and m’colleague Dr Rebecca Darley onto the bill of a conference at the National Museum of China, in Běijīng, called “Coinage and Empire: the Influence and Changes of Coins in the International Perspectives”. The timing wasn’t great; but it seemed like the sort of opportunity I shouldn’t turn down. Now, the world has changed, in oh so many ways and so on, but since this is where the backlog has reached and since I still did it, it should be recounted.*

Now, you may remember from my first conference trip to China that I was very impressed by the country and the academic provision, especially but not just of tea. Of course I was meant to be impressed; the relevant international centre of a high-ranking but provincial university was keen to make a good show to its foreign visitors, and I appreciated it. The National Museum of China did the whole conference thing equally grandly, and it was still pretty international (a speaker from Japan, one from Russia, one from France and three from the UK), but on this occasion I’m not sure we foreigners were the audience for the showing-off so much as some of the things being shown off, and the actual conference was much more of a Chinese affair than the previous one had been. This manifested itself in several ways. Firstly, we didn’t get an English-language programme; instead, Dr Helen Wang of the British Museum sent round a scratch translation of it to the other foreigners attending a few days before we departed, for which we were suitably grateful. Likewise, at the conference itself, there was not so much of the translated summaries after papers that had been managed on the previous occasion; instead, we were stationed next to one of those aforesaid friends each and they gave us sotto voce explanations of what was going on, which varied considerably in depth along with their own interest (“Oh, you don’t care about this, it’s Ming”, and so on). And lastly, the fashion of the day was to use slides simply to put up a text of one’s paper as one gave it, which in hànzì you can just about do as you talk because of how dense they are semantically. This all combined with the jetlag to mean that I had between a sketchy idea and no idea at all of what some of the papers were about. Some of the speakers, to whom I was extremely grateful, had used their slides to give a précis in English of their Chinese paper, but it wasn’t very many. So this account is what I could get out of all that, minus what sense I now can’t make of my notes and less the memory loss of three years plus. But there was still some interesting stuff being said. This is how it broke down, in translation anyway.

13th November 2019

The Reasons for the Formation of the Two Different Coinages in the East and the West, and the Impact on their Social, Economic and Financial Development

• Huang Xiquan, “Seeing Power Struggles over Land in Coins”, in Chinese, of which all I could parse was that he was at one point reading the characters off the early ‘spade’ money;
• He Ping, “King Jing of Zhou’s Casting of Large Coins and Chinese Coin-Issuing Principles and Systems”, in Chinese, of which all I got was that in 124 BC Chinese authorities (presumably the Han) took the new step of issuing a multiple coin for the first time and the economy crashed because of it;
• Georges Depeyrot, “The Question of Metal in Europe”, in English
• Wang Liyan, “Evolution of Gold in Ancient Chinese Monetary Systems and its Structure”, in Chinese
• Zhou Weirong, “Response”, in Chinese

So obviously the ones I could engage with here were the papers by Professor Depeyrot and Dr Wang. The former was a determined attempt to read all of European economic history until not far short of the present day as being determined by availability of bullion. It was entertaining, but my notes are covered in quarrelsome asterisks where he said, for example, that coinage paid to barbarians was often converted to jewellery leaving them short of money, that there was no silver available in Western Europe between the 7th and 13th centuries (which would have been news to the miners of Melle and Harz, I imagine!), that the Huns and Mongols supplied silver to the West instead, and that gold arrived in China from Japan rather than from the West meaning that we have no documentation of it. He also appeared to think that the United Kingdom still runs on a gold standard. For all these reasons, I couldn’t really accept the thesis as presented. I learnt more from Professor Wang, who informed us that although pretty much all Chinese coinage has pretty much always been base-metal, actually the Qin, Han, Tang, Song, Ming and Qing all made occasional use of gold currency units, varying from small ‘pots’ known as ‘horse-foot money’ and simple ingots and bars through gold cash to leaves. It was all special-purpose money, and I would love to have heard more about what those purposes were, but even gathering that this stuff existed was a start.

3 gold horse-hoof ingots on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, but excavated from the tomb of Marquis Haihun in Nanchang, Jiangxi, and lent by the Jiangxi Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology

I couldn’t gather what the title of the second session was, but this was it…

• Zhou Weirong, “The Influence of Silk Road Trade on China’s Currency Structure and System”, in Chinese, which pointed out the rather rarer instances of silver coinage or bullion units in Chinese monetary history, but out of which I got little else;
• Wang Yongsheng, “The Relationship between Kings and Currency, as seen in Xi Xia Coins”, in Chinese, where I got nothing; my notes aren’t even sure that this was actually the paper which got delivered;
• Zhou Xiang, “On Dachao Tongbao Coins”, in Chinese, and of which all I got was the way in which Mongol rule brought Islamic patterns of coinage, including die-struck silver ones with square frames like Ayyubid ones, to China for some purposes—and again, I wish I could say what purposes;
• Wang Jijie, “On 50-liang Silver Ingots of Tianqi Year 1 and Grain Taxes in the Ming Dynasty”, in Chinese and presumably, from the title, a quite closely-focused argument, but I’m afraid that all my notes record is that I was impressed by the ingots;
• Zhang Anhaq, “On the Prohibition of Coins in Shunzhi Year 3”, in very fast Chinese with no real help from visuals, so sorry, I know no more;
• He Ping, “Response”, in Chinese

Qing-Dynasty 50-liang silver ingot, image from LiveAuctioneers (linked through) so presumably now in private hands

The Track of Coin Exchanges among the Countries and the Influence of Chinese Currency on Other Country’s Currency

• Lan Rixu, “The Evolution and Characteristics of Silk Road Coins”, in Chinese, of which I have no notes;
• Yang Juping, “The Century’s Research on Lead Cakes with Foreign Inscriptions”, in Chinese
• Rebecca Darley, “A Third Way? Currency Production in India from Antiquity to the Middle Ages in a Global Context”, in English;
• Li Xiaojia & Lin Ying, “On Changes in the Crowns on Sasanian Coins”, in Chinese, explaining the fact that each Sasanian shah of Iran was denoted on his (or indeed her) coins by a different crown, and that sometimes there was even a kind of reign reset with a new crown for the reigning shah;
• Lin Ying, “Response”, in Chinese

Here, as you can tell, the papers I can say anything about are Professor Yang’s and Rebecca’s, I mean Dr Darley’s. Professor Yang was dealing with a certain peculiar type of round lead ingot stamped with characters identifying them as belonging to the Han Wudi Emperor, but also others which have been read as Bactrian, Parthian and several other languages by various Western scholars. Yang pointed out that Chinese scholars have always been pretty clear that they are Chinese as well, meaning roughly ’28 Mansions’ which has Zodiacal significance, and now there have been silver ones found with a different Chinese inscription as well, so whatever they are it probably started in China; thankyou very much. Even though I was following this largely from slides it was still an entertaining slam-dunk of a paper. Rebecca, meanwhile, was posing a third way of ancient peoples having ‘done’ coinage between the Western precious-metal and the East Asian fiat currency tax systems, in the form of the silver punch-mark coins of the South Asian Mauryan Empire of the 5th to 1st centuries BC. Their immense variation within broad characteristics – flat bits of metal, usually rectangular, marked with up to four punched symbols and a load of extra use marks, which carried on being used and imitated long after their initiating empire had collapsed – she argued were a non-state, socially-negotiated, ‘discursive’ coinage system which she likened to early English pennies or Viking arm-rings. This paper, sadly, wasn’t in the proceedings, but I hope it comes out eventually.

Punch-marked karshapana of Pushyamitra Sunga struck at Vidisha in 185–149 BCE, photo by Jean-Michael Moullec, licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Then there was a tea-break, and straight back to more of the same session!

• The first paper in this session wasn’t either of the two that had been on the translated programme I had, and all I can tell you about it is that it was about exhibiting money. I wasn’t paying as much attention as I could have, because the next paper was…
• Jonathan Jarrett, “‘He will ruin many from among the people’: market exchange in the Byzantine Empire and the reform of Emperor Anastasius I”, which you have heard about, so I won’t go on about here as well; then
• Cao Guangsheng, “Sogdian Coins and New Perspectives on the Exchange and Integration of East and West Cultures in the Han to Tang Period”, in Chinese, informing us that the Central Asian Sogdian peoples imitated pretty much every coinage that reached them in their own issues but that this included Chinese cash, which even wound up being cast with local mint-marks from other systems on them;
• Zhao Xiaoming, “Looking at the Differences between East and West Coinages to See Connections between Money and Economy”, in Chinese, between the which and mounting jetlag I got nothing from this, sorry;
• Guo Yunyan, “Gold Money-Like Plaques on the Silk Road”, distinguishing as Guo does three levels of use of Byzantine-style money on the Silk Routes, actual Byzantine coins, close imitations and one-sided foil ‘plaques’ or ‘bracteates’, the question this raises being whether they all counted as, or were being used as, coins, or something else?¹
• And then there was a further paper at the end not on the original program, and I got nothing from that either I’m afraid…

Gold bracteate imitation of a Byzantine solidus made in Central Asia during or after the fifth century CE, BactriaNumis Z-156956, now in private hands

By the next day I was doing a bit better, but my notes suggest that the problem was not just jetlag, alas, as there were still many papers I didn’t get much of.

Theme 4

• Li Xiuying, “On the Sasanian Coins in the Shouzhou Museum”, in Chinese, and overrunning, but they do indeed have some Sasanian and indeed Arab-Sasanian coins in that there museum;
• Li Shuhui, “On Cotton Money in the Western Regions”, in Chinese, of which I wish I could say I had got anything as it sounds interesting, but sadly I did not;
• Li Xiao, “History of Greek-Indian Relations – Focussing on the Bilingual Coins”, in Chinese but with helpful slides and more or less a history of Indo-Greek and Bactrian coins, on which I have scatty notes that probably don’t serve you better than a good work on the subject;²
• Li Xiaoping, “Questions Relating to Money in Foreign Trade during the Yuan Dynasty”, in Chinese, on which my notes, do with this what you can, read, “Lots of pay of goods and ingots but no help for banking”;
• Wang Xianguo, “China’s Early Silver Money and the Formation of the Silver Liang System”, in Chinese, on which I have nothing;
• Wang Yongsheng, “Response”

And finally!

5

• Li Qiang, “Eastward Journey of Byzantine Gold Coins – Textual and Archaeological Evidence”, in Chinese but with helpful slides and of course on a topic familiar to me;
• Qi Xiaoyan, “From China to Central Asia: Sogdian Imitations of Kaiyuan Tongbao Coins”, in Chinese, hitting roughly the same points as Cao Guangsheng the previous day, though my notes don’t suggest I had any memory of that… ;
• Huang Wei, “Foreign Trade in the Ming Dynasty and Silver Money”, in Chinese; “Oh, you don’t care about this, it’s Ming”…;
• Liu Zhentang, “Seeing Western Power in Ancient Coin Power”, in Chinese, and I have no idea, sorry;
• Shi Jilong, “Developments in Banknote Printing and Distribution”, in Chinese but actually as much about paper-making technology as anything else, interesting;
• Helen Wang, “Displaying Money of the World at the British Museum”, in English with a Chinese introduction, giving a very short history of the British Museum’s coin collections, saying what the display philosophy relating to coins now is (which is, they’re in all galleries) and explaining the development of the Money Gallery itself;³
• Tong Chunyan, “The Concept of the Exhibition ‘Money and Kingship: Influences and Changes from a World Perspective”, in Chinese, and I’m sorry, nothing;
• Huo Hiongwei, “Closing Remarks”, in Chinese.

I confess that by the time this finished, I was ready to stop the effort to show some kind of understanding of that which I really was not understanding. I do have quite thick notes on Li Qiang’s paper, however, which took a broader view of the imitation of Byzantine gold coins in areas eastwards of the Empire than had some others. It was actually quite a widespread phenomenon, covering India to Mongolia with at least something on most major landmasses between, imitating rulers from Theodosius II to Tiberius III so over four centuries with the end coming at different times in different areas. He had lots of broad detail about location, as well, making it clear where this was literally marginal behavior (certainly in China, along the northern frontiers or where the Great Wall is) or just occasional (like Mongolia, where almost all of the known specimens are out of one particular tomb). The interesting thing, however, is that while most of what people have found is gold, the Sogdian and Chinese texts both suggest there should have been much more silver and talk about that as if it was currency. In this respect the texts and the archaeology don’t agree and the non-genuine coins seem to have been more integrated into currency systems than the real ones, but Byzantium still obviously had a cachet that made its coins worth imitating or owning.

This paper, frustratingly, is not in the conference proceedings either, as far as I can tell, possibly because Qiang had already published a version of it a little while before; but then, if it had been there, it’s not as if I could read it!⁴ But for now, it’s not a bad place to wrap up the conference report.
Now, when proceedings were over and lunch was served, we began to go our separate ways but part of this experience was a tour around the National Museum itself, an eye-opening experience. My overall recollection is that repeatedly, I looked at something and thought, ‘oh, it’s a bit like that Western thing that probably does the same job’ and then found that the Chinese specimen was about half a millennium older; it was difficult not to leave with the impression that everything happened or developed in China first. Of course it’s a national museum, that is surely the point; but they did have the material with which to do it…

One side of a Yuan stele bearing the inscription of a treatise by Pan Di whose title translates as ‘Pronunciation and Meaning of the Stone Drums (shiguwen Yinxun)’, from 1339 CE. I just love that this is epigraphy about understanding epigraphy. Photograph by Rebecca Darley, as apparently I just plain forgot to take my camera on this trip!

The next day, we got taken to another museum by one of the archaeologists who had been present at the conference, who between his own efforts and those of an English-speaking student of his was able to give us a fascinating account of some of the Silk Road sites he had dug at, and where we were wistfully sure we would never be able to go, the kind of frontier cities Owen Lattimore had written about in a fargone time before…⁵

Reverse of the same stele, image again by Rebecca Darley.

The last thing we did, in the afternoon of that free day, was visit the Forbidden City. We wandered round it marvelling till chucking-out time, slowly finding our way and understanding bits of how an empire could be ruled from here and also how, if you never took your people outside its walls, it couldn’t, and how completely isolated the lives of the last Qing emperors must have been here. Of course, again, I am not blind to the fact that access to this space was opened up by a revolution whose basis included the alleged unfitness of this ancien régime to govern any more, and that the curation of the site has only that purpose; but it is therefore a pretty powerful thing that what was once actually a forbidden city is now a public space (subject to search, scan and a reasonably hefty admission price anyway). I now feel very lucky to have seen it, since I can’t imagine what circumstances would now take me back there – and I do wish I had some photographs – but it was a good and remarkably peaceful way to conclude a manic trip across the world and back to talk about coins.

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* It may not be fashionable to have friends in China any more, but on this score my guidance has been, since it happened to me, a conversation with a Russian colleague who had only just made it to a conference because of trouble over getting a visa. Embarrassed as I so often am by the Home Office’s obstacles to academic visitors to the country, I began apologising for Britain and he stopped me with a hand on my arm, and said, as I remember it: “Please. You understand that we Russians know that there is a difference between the government of a country and its people.” I still felt obliged to assure him I hadn’t voted for the lot in office, but his assurance has stayed with me as a model.

1. Guo’s work is more widely available in English than many a Chinese scholar’s, and you could consult whichever you can get of Guo Yunyan, “Bracteates with Byzantine coin patterns along the Silk Road” in Fabio Guidetti and Katherine Meinecke (edd.), A Globalised Visual Culture? Towards a Geography of Late Antique Art (Oxford 2020), pp. 341–356, or Guo Yunyan, “Classification of Byzantine Gold Coins and Imitations Found in China” in Sven Günther, Li Qiang, Lin Ying and Claudia Sode (edd.), From Constantinople to Chang’an: Byzantine Gold Coins in the World of Late Antiquity, Supplements to the Journal of Ancient Civilizations 8 (Changchun 2021), pp. 207–240, though her classification goes all the way back to Guo Yunyan, “A General Overview of Byzantine Coins & Their Imitations Found in China” in Eirene: Studia graeca et latina Vol. 41 (Praha 2005), pp. 87–116, whole issue online here.

2. This is not my area of expertise, but at the moment the most obvious Western starting point I know for these coinages is A. Cunningham, Coins of Alexander’s Successors in the East (Bactria, Ariana & India) (Chicago IL 1969), which I found online here.

3. The BM regarded the Money Gallery as a sufficiently big project that they published a volume about making it: see John Orna-Ornstein (ed.), Development and evaluation of the HSBC Money Gallery at the British Museum, British Museum Occasional Papers 140 (London 2001).

4. 李强, “拜占庭金币东方之旅” in 光明日报 (14 August 2017), p. 14.

5. Things like Owen Lattimore, “A Ruined Nestorian City in Inner Mongolia” in The Geographical Journal Vol. 84 (London 1934), pp. 481-497, DOI: 10.2307/1785929, reprinted in Owen Lattimore, Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers, 1928 – 1958 (London 1962), online here, pp. 221–240; but the most amazing of these I have found so far is actually M. Aurel Stein, Sand-Buried Ruins of Khotan: Personal Narrative of a Journey of Archæological & Geographical Exploration in Chinese Turkestan (London 1903), online here.

The conference before the storm: Leeds International Medieval Congress, 2019

Looking back on the last pre-Covid International Medieval Congress seems like a different world by now, even though we’ve but recently had the 2022 one, where, ironically or not, I caught my first dose of Covid. I guess that, because of that and because of the big push towards online hybrid participation that the pandemic gave us, it’s clear already that we’re never going back to quite the same experience of a campus full of medievalists meeting and interacting, but will now live with the sense, firstly, that that may be dangerous as well as desirable and that some people just aren’t going to be able to take part, and secondly that a lot of the action is in fact happening off-stage, in the ether.¹ So this was the end of an era, or the last stop before a change of trains, or some other metaphor. And, to be honest, because of that, before picking up my notes on it I would have said I remembered very little of what happened at the 2019 Congress, as opposed to any other year since the IMC moved to the Central campus. I didn’t organise anything myself, is all I would have told you this morning, and on inspection that is completely untrue: Rethinking the Medieval Frontier ran for a full day, with people speaking from two continents about places from the Canaries to Kashmir. So as it transpires, I was there (obviously) and was pretty busy (nearly as obviously) and learnt a good few things (thankfully), and it was actually an impressively international and intersectional gathering that had all kinds of promise for the future threaded through it, and it still seems worth writing a report on it. It’s just that the future took a different turn… Because these reports are always huge, however, and not necessarily of interest to all (certainly not throughout), I’ll do what has become my practice and give you the running order of my conference experience, and then put actual commentary below a cut and let you decide (the few of you reading on the actual site rather than in your e-mail, anyway) how much further you care to go.

Monday 1st July 2019

119. Materialities at Birkbeck, I: between mind and matter in medieval monetary policy

• Rebecca Darley, “Discourses on Absence, or Kalabhra and Vakataka Monetary Policy in Early Medieval Southern India”
• Chris Budleigh, “Surplus and Scarcity: the contested relationship between monetary supply and aristocratic land management in Comnenian Byzantium”
• Sidin Sunny, “The Lighter Dirham: power relationships in medieval Spanish society and tendencies in coin fineness and debasement.”

240. The Use and Construction of Place, Space, and Materiality in Late Antiquity

• Edward James, “Materiality and the Holy in Gregory of Tours”
• Guy Halsall, “Trace, Space, Place: the materiality of identity”
• Catherine-Rose Hailstone, “Place and Space: Gregory, Materiality, and the Fear of God”

334. Seas and Floods in the Islamic West

• Andrew Marsham, “Nile Flood Levels and Egyptian Revolts in the Early Medieval Period”
• Xavier Ballestín, “Ships, Seafarers, Sails and Bows: a source approach to marine networks and coastal settlement in the Western Mediterranean basin on the eve of the rabaḍ uprising in Córdoba, 202 AH/818 AD”
• Maribel Fierro, “Sea in the Life Narratives of Andalusi Scholars and Saints”

Tuesday 2nd July

530. Rethinking the Medieval Frontier 2018, I: Iberian Spaces

• Jonathan Jarrett, “Ends of Empire: Two Island Frontiers between Byzantium and Islam”
• Stacey Murrell, “Centering the Marginal: concubines on Castilian frontiers, c. 1050-1350
• Sandra Schieweck, “Iberian Border Regimes: the case of Castile and Navarre in the late Middle Ages”

630. Rethinking the Medieval Frontier, 2018, II: Administration and Control

• Luca Zavagno, “‘The Byzantine Liquid Frontiers’, or How to Administer Insular and Coastal Peripheral Spaces and Stop Worrying About It”
• Davor Salihović, “The Distribution of Bordering in Late Medieval Hungary”

730. Rethinking the Medieval Frontier 2018, III: between religions

• Roberta Denaro, “Far from the Corrupting City: building the frontier as a stage for martyrdom and asceticism, 8th-10th centuries”
• Turaç Hakalmaz, “‘Islandness’ of a Coastal Kingdom: the case of Cilician Armenia”
• Aniket Tathagata Chettry, “Exploring the Complexities of a Brahmanical Frontier in Bengal”

830. Rethinking the Medieval Frontier 2018, IV: dealing with power on the frontier

• Jakub Kabala, “Claiming Authority over the Edge of the World: Frontier Strategies in Salzburg, c. 870″
• Zeynep Aydoğan, “Conquest and Territoriality in the Late Medieval Anatolian Frontiers”
• Andreas Obenaus, “To Whom Might/Do They Belong? Claims to Newly-Discovered Atlantic Islands in the Late Medieval Period”

Wednesday 3rd July 2019

1048. Forging Memory: false documents and historical consciousness in the Middle Ages, I

• Graham Barrett, “Charters, Forgeries, and the Diplomatic of Salvation in Medieval Iberia”
• Daria Safranova, “Using and Detecting Forged Charters in Northern Iberia, c. 900-1100″
• Levi Roach, “True Lies: Leo of Vercelli, Arduin of Ivrea, and the Struggle for Piedmont”

1140. Byzantine Materialities, II: Ephemera and Iconoclasm

• Rachel Banes, “You Can’t Write That Here! Mapping Religious and Secular Graffiti in Asia Minor, c. 300-700 CE”
• Daniel K. Reynolds, “Images, Icons and Apologetic: Christian Iconoclasm in Early Islamic Palestine”
• Leslie Brubaker, “Dancing in the Streets: the ephemera of Byzantine processions”

1252. Transport, Traders, and Trade Routes in Early Medieval Europe

• Ewa Magdalena Charowska, “Dugout Builders: the trademark of the Sclaveni in the 6th and 7th Centuries”
• Daniel Melleno, “From Strangers to Neighbors: Franks and Vikings in the late 9th century”
• Thomas Freudenhammer, “Rafica: early medieval caravan trade between the West Frankish kingdom and al-Andalus”
• Victor Farías Zurita, “Response”

1340. Byzantine Materialities, IV: workshops, trade and manuscripts

• Shaun Tougher, “Macedonian Materialities: the Menologion of Basil II”
• Chris Wickham, “Materialities of Middle Byzantine Exchange in the Aegean”
• Flavia Vanni, “Men at work: stucco workshops on Mount Athos”

Thursday 4th July 2019

1509. Gold, Coins and Power in the Early Middle Ages

• Marco Cristini, “The War of the Coins: Numismatic Evidence for the Gothic War”
• Nicholas Rogers, “Angels and the King’s Evil: projections of royal authority”
• Vera Kemper, “‘All that glitters is not gold’: heroes and material wealth”

1652. The Monetary System and Currency in Eurasia in the Pre-Modern Era, II: money and its circulation in British Isles and Scandinavia

• Yuta Uchikawa, “Commerce and Coin Circulation around the Irish Sea in the 9th and 10th Centuries”
• Hiroko Yanagawa, “The Irish-Sea Imitations and their Circulation during the Middle Ages”
• Kenji Nishioka, “The Use of Money in Scotland during the 12th and 13th Centuries”
• Takahiro Narikawa, “Church and the Money Circulation in High Medieval Norway”

1738. Materialities and Religion in Medieval Armenia and Byzantium

• Katherine New, “The Representations of Material Objects in Medieval Culture: statue or doll in Byzantine mythography”
• Carmen Morais Puche, “Medieval Byzantine Coinage in Patrimonio Nacional: image, materiality and religions”

Women’s history in my alma mater

I sometimes seem to have derived an unjustified reputation from the fact that my very first publication was about a woman.¹ That was intentional, once I realised that what was mainly coming out of my second virtual archive trawl was mainly the actions of Abbess Emma of Sant Joan de Ripoll; I figured it would do no harm to be seen as a male historian who realised that women were sometimes important in the Middle Ages. But I didn’t expect it to necessarily become the thing people knew me for, and for some people it is. Thus, the thing I have up on Academia.edu that I got the most requests to upload, before I had done so, is a talk I gave in a Kalamazoo round table long ago, because a friend of mine with an actual track record in gender history thought I might have interesting things to say about women and power.² Whether I did or not, I’m not sure, but several people wanted to see what they were, which put me in a quandary as literally all I had by way of a ‘talk’ was a sheet and a half of scribbled thoughts with marginal notes from the session crabbed in round the edges. I did, eventually, upload that and got a message back from one of the requesters saying they’d been “hoping for more”, but what was I to do? Admittedly, I have subsequently written more about women, though it’s always the women of Sant Joan de Ripoll, and the story of running my essentially first-wave feminism into the modern discourse which that provoked has already been told; but it’s for reasons like that that I’m always slightly surprised when, occasionally, I get asked to participate in events or projects relating to women’s history.

Archivo de la Corona d’Aragón, Cancilleria, Pergamins Seniofredo 39, bearing the hands of most of the women I have ever directly studied

This post is about one of those occasions, then, on 17th June 2019, when the visit to London of Professor Rekha Pande of the University of Hyderabad occasioned a kind of scratch conference at Birkbeck, University of London, entitled ‘Medieval Women: Comparative Perspectives’. It was rather strange, having been back inside my old doctoral institution for the first proper time only a month before to hear Chris Wickham speak, now to be back there to speak myself for the first time. This was, however, being organised by my long-term collaborator and ally, Dr Rebecca Darley, then of that parish, which is why I was asked to join in, and it put me on my toes, because as I say, I really only have one well to draw on for this kind of work. That said, I think everyone involved was drawing from wells quite a long way apart from each other, and this actually made for a really interesting discussion. These were the papers:

1. Rekha Pande, “Writing a History of Gender in Medieval India”
2. Sergi Sancho Fibla, “Beyond Literati: instruction, cultural practices and literacy in Southern France nunneries (13-14th c.)”
3. Jonathan Jarrett, “Nuns, Signatures and Literacy in 10th-Century Catalonia”
4. Lauren Wainwright, “Piety, Patronage and Personal Agency: Theodora Douka Palaiologina”
5. Daniel Reynolds, “The Real House-Lives of the Dead Sea Rift: gender and society in Byzantine Palestina, 400-650”
6. Rebecca Darley, “Male Mediation of Female Holiness in Byzantine Hagiography”
7. Discussion

You will immediately see from that that what I drew from my well was in fact a version of the paper I ran into trouble publishing, so I’ve already talked about it here and won’t again. But the others were all really interesting, considering issues in which I am interested from source-bases I didn’t or hardly knew. Professor Pande talked about the difficulties of trying to get women’s history considered when both the source base you have and the scholarship with which you’re dealing are made in two mutually reinforcing patriarchal traditions, the Arabo-Islamic and Indo-Persian ones, and her way through them was to focus on the Bhakti movement, a kind of vernacular mysticism drawing on Buddhist and Jain traditions that is detectable in Indian source material from the 7th century onwards, and in which women were often/occasionally highly regarded.³ As with any movement developing over centuries in an area the size of the Indian subcontinent, there were innumerable variations on Bhakti but some of them involved a refusal to set up buildings or temples, meaning that there were no premises from which women could be excluded. In the extremely scanty record of notable Bhakti practitioners, therefore, there are women as well as men, and their lives show some common patterns, and most especially a refusal to be constrained by the domestic requirements of marriage. There were lots of points of comparison with Western material visible here, from lone ascetic travellers like Indian Margery Kempes (but less tearful and more respected), to the acceptable pattern of life for a hagiography and how that might be shaping the record; but that there even was a trope of the suitably-edifying Indian religious woman is telling us something about a space they created for themselves in these societies.

This is a Rajasthani portrait, date unknown to me, on display at Delhi Haat of Meerabai, a fifteenth-to-sixteenth-century Bhakti practitioner who, starting from a princely family position, has left us more record than most including a temple which she had built. Image by Onef9day – own work, licensed under CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons, whence you can find out more.⁴

The other papers, being closer to my areas of expertise, I can probably talk about quicker. Dr Sancho was interested in the education and learning of Carthusian nuns over the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and had a range of examples of women patrons of artwork or even inscriptions for churches or nunneries which required a considerable depth of theological education to get, liturgical manuscripts owned and annotated by such women, and so on, which allowed him to conclude that while they might not have access to formal schooling or the universities, at least some such women were getting that level of religious and knowledge and literacy anyway. He has his slides online still, so you can find out more there, but the discussion focused on what modes of transmission of that knowledge we aren’t being shown by the texts which we have. Lauren was studying the wife of Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos, and therefore the empress who returned Greek imperial empressdom to Constantinople; she had got interested in her because the Barber Institute of Fine Arts has a superb example of one of her seals, but it transpired that she was quite politically active—definitely not always the case with Byzantine empresses—including issuing judgements on religious matters and getting Persian geographical works translated into Greek. However, Lauren also had examples of other rulers in the Byzantine sphere putting their queens or empresses to work like this, including Serbia and the Despotate of Epirus, and so raised the possibility that this was actually Nicæa keeping up with its neighbours, rather than Theodora being a single exception.

Lead seal of Empress Theodora Doukaina Palaiologina, struck 1259-1303, Barber Institute of Fine Arts SL0165

Dan, meanwhile, was up against my sort of problem: a landscape, both social and geographical, about which we can talk mainly through archæology and land transactions, both of which will show you that women were there but rarely very much about what they did. He had some examples of patronesses for buildings and female land ownership (as well as male ownership of female slaves…), and mainly wondered if there was any way through these difficulties. One factor against him that I didn’t have is that Palestine in his kind of period still largely had professional scribes and notaries, so we don’t even have access to women’s signatures as I do. Then Rebecca talked about the one class of women Byzantine writers were usually happy to write about, that is, saints, and the problem, which Professor Pande was also facing, that this inevitably gives us a male view of female holiness and one written for a male audience, not least because only male monasteries have survived in the Orthodox world from the Byzantine period so any female writings have likely been lost. (It’s probably not safe to say anything Byzantine and monastic is lost for sure until we get to the bottom of the archives at Saint Catherine’s Sinai, but the odds aren’t good.) In that writing, then, the two trends we see is that female saints were firstly usually subject to male violence, which was seen as part of the trials they had to endure to attain sanctity, and secondly that they had to get free of both parents and children to live the holy life; only by breaking their social bonds could they be God’s agents.

Mary of Egypt being given a cloak by the monk Zosimos in the desert, as pictured in British Library Yates Thompson MS 3 fo. 287, image from http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=mid&IllID=5837, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Not that Mary of Egypt was really a typical Byzantine woman saint, but she was one of the ones famous enough even to be culted in the West, as this shows.

But as I say, it was the discussion that was probably the most fun. Rebecca noted a big difference between women in the West and women in India at the stage of widowhood; in the West that could be women’s most independent stage of life whereas in India it ended their access to resource and prevented them from carrying on with the spiritual life unless they could find other support. There were also sharp differences over virginity and sex, with which the West was obsessed and India not so much, and celebrating the latter rather than the former if it did anything. We also had a profitable discussion over the rôle of individuality: Professor Pande was keen to stress that her Bhakti women were not proto-feminists, in so far as they did not agitate for the emancipation of women but only for themselves and their religious practice, and this led us all to reflect on the historian’s desire to create movements out of the very few individuals, usually very individual, whom we can see. Then we had a long exchange over the social value of literacy in our various spheres, and thus the price of and restrictions on access to it; this turned out to be one of the most variable things of all, depending on what other structures of writing and education existed. One can say that women were rarely taught to write throughout the Middle Ages, for example, but that had different value in a world where basically no-one was so taught outside a small Church group from one where there was a university in almost every major city, from which women were excluded, but which generated an overflow of literate tutors that might still result in broader general, and therefore also female, literacy overall. We could obviously have talked for much longer about this than we had, and though some sketchy plans to create a teaching book out of all of this were probably best let drop, given how many of us didn’t usually do this stuff, I still wonder what it might have looked like. A good day, anyway, to which I’m glad my dubious gender history credentials were able to get me entry!

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1. Jonathan Jarrett, “Power over Past and Future: Abbess Emma and the nunnery of Sant Joan de les Abadesses” in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 12 (Oxford 2003), pp. 229–258, DOI: 10.1111/j.0963-9462.2004.00128.x.

2. There were two things in that presentation I’d still quite like to write up, even though it was short, because I’ve kept on thinking with them since having thought of them. One was that we need a word, when we speak of powerful women in the Middle Ages, for something that was unusual and always non-default, but still happened quite a lot, and which society could accept as a reasonable thing to happen that still normally wouldn’t. As it is we’re always forced to discuss each powerful woman as an outlier, and that’s not wrong but it’s also missing the fact that her position was a fairly normal abnormality. The other is that those who minimise women’s political influence in the period tend to point to the men they had to operate with and delegate to, as if to suggest that without men they had no power. Well, fine, but I wouldn’t mind people recognising that this also applied to men in power. Granted, it was much rarer for women to settle anything by armed violence – though there are cases and even times and places where it was more normal – but even kings who were tournament champions and so on had armies and champions of their own, you know? There is something different about the kinds of power men and women could wield, for sure, but the necessity of delegation ain’t it.

3. If this all sounds interesting, and you can find it, the obvious thing to read would seem to be Rekha Pande, Religious Movements in Medieval India: Bhakti Creation of Alternative Spaces (New Delhi 2005).

4. See also S. M. Pandey and Norman Zide, “Mīrābāī and Her Contributions to the Bhakti Movement” in History of Religions Vol. 5 (Chicago IL 1965), pp. 54–73, I assume with suitable period caution.

Rulers who weren’t kings, discussed at Leeds

I have as usual to apologise for a gap in posting. I mentioned the Covid-19; then I was on holiday; and then I was late with a chapter submission that I finished, on overtime, yesterday. Much of this post was written before that all started piling up, but I’ve only today had time to finish it. I was originally going to give you another source translation for the first time in ages, but it turns out that even though I translated the relevant thing fresh in 2019, two other people had already done it even then and I somehow missed that at the time. Oh well, never mind, because that progresses my backlog into April of that year, when I had the honour of giving my second ever keynote address (and, it must be said, so far my last). This was kindly arranged by my then-colleague Dr Fraser McNair, who had put together a conference called Non-Royal Rulership in the Earlier Medieval West, c. 600-1200. To be fair, though, I was only one of three keynote speakers, so well-connected is Fraser. As ever, I can’t give a full account of a two-day conference at a three-year remove, but I can give you the premise, the list of speakers and some thoughts which, I promise, will not just be about my paper. I’ll put the abstract and running order above the cut, but the rest can go below one so that if it doesn’t interest you, you few who actually read this on the website can more easily scroll to things that do. So here we are!

Between the breakdown of Roman rule and the sweeping legal and administrative changes of the later twelfth century, western Europe saw many types of rulers. The precise nature of their title and authority changed: dukes, counts, rectores, gastalds, ealdormen… These rulers were ubiquituous and diverse, but despite the variation between them, they all shared a neeed to conceptualise, to justify, and to exercise their rule without access to the ideological and governmental resources of kingship. This conference will explore the political practices of non-royal ruler across the earlier medieval period, in order to understand how the ambiguities of a position of rule that was not kingship were resolved in their varuous inflections.

And in order to do that thing, Fraser got hold of this glittering line-up (and me):

8th April 2019

Keynote 1

Vito Loré, “How Many Lombard Kingdoms? The Duchies of Benevento and Spoleto in the Eighth Century”

The Terminology of Non-Royal Rule

• Russell Ó Ríagáin, “A King by Any Other Name Would Rule the Same? A Relational and Diachronic Examination of the Terminology of Authority in Medieval Ireland”
• Emily Ward, “Quasi interrex? Boy Kings and the Terminology of Non-Royal ‘Rule’, 1056-c. 1200″
• Andrea Mariani, “Portugal Before the Kingdom: A Study of the Count of Portucale’s Titles and their Political Legitimation (9th-12th Centuries)”

Lay and Ecclesiastical Non-Royal Rulership

• Mary Blanchard, “Equal but Separate? The Offices of Bishop and Ealdorman in Late Anglo-Saxon England”
• James Doherty, “The Righteous Brothers: Bishop Philip of Châlons, Count Hugh of Troyes and Cultural Capital on the Stage of Crusade”
• George Luff, “Princes of the Church: The Emergence of Ecclesiastical Rulership in the Early Medieval West”

Keynote 2

Fiona Edmonds, “Regional Rulership: Northern Britain in its Insular Context, 600-1100”

9th April 2019

Analysing Non-Royal Power Relations

• Sverrir Jakobsson, “Non-Royal Rulers in Twelfth-Century Iceland”
• Mariña Bermúdez Beloso, “Non-Royal Rulership in North-Western Iberia: Who (Were They), what (Were Their Functions), Over Which (Territories did They Rule), How (to Study Them), and Other Questions for the Sources”
• Alberto Spataro, “Rule by Law? Judicial and Political Hegemony of Milan in the Regnum Italiae (11th-12th Centuries)”

Keynote 3

Jonathan Jarrett, “Counts Where It Counts: Spheres of Comital Action in the Tenth-Century West Frankish Periphery”

Non-Royal Rulers in the Middle

• Daniel Schumacher, “Count Reginar: Duke, missus dominicus, and Rebel”
• Fraser McNair, “An Anglo-Saxon Strand in Legitimizing the Counts of Flanders”
• Jamie Smith, “‘Friends in Other Places’: The Diplomacy of Early Tostig of Northumbria, 1055-1066”

Symbolic Communication and Non-Royal Rule

• Guilia Zornetta, “Benevento Before and After the Fall of the Lombard Kingdom: From Ducatus to Principatus“
• Rodrigo Hernández Hernández, “Justice, Peace and Virtue: The Mercy of Diego Gelmirez as a Discursive Element to Consolidate his Rulership in the Historia Compostelana“
• Anna Gehler-Rachůnek, “Strategies of Political Communication: the Papacy and the West around 600”

Different sorts of rulers on the edges

View over the Universitat de Girona taken earlier today by your author

Hullo again! I actually write this from a hotel in Girona, where I was kindly invited to give a guest lecture, because when I would ordinarily write the week’s post I’ll be travelling back by the dubious offices of Ryanair, so things are going on to which, let’s be optimistic, I will some day soon catch up. Right now, however, the post I promised you was about the culmination, for now, in 2018, of my network project for ‘rethinking the medieval frontier’. Now, I was more or less set last week for the need this week to write up a report on that conference, and then while writing last week’s, I was reminded as I linked to the project blog that I actually already did so, there rather than here, within literal months of the conference actually happening. So the first point of this post is to point you at that account, which is here:

Report on 1st Conference

There are photos and everything, and also links to others’ reports should you (rightly) think that something I put on a project blog might seek to emphasise the positive out of all proportion. But what, of course, that post has fairly little of, except in phrasing, is me, and what, as I have often said is the point of a blog except to give the Internet more of yourself? So secondarily in this post I want to talk a bit more about where my paper came from, where it was and is intended to lead, and why, in fact, I was even reading up on ‘Abd al-Rahmān ibn Marwān al-Ŷillīqī. Since that is kind of gratuitous, though hopefully interesting, I’ll stick it behind a cut even though it’s not very long, and encourage you to go read about other interesting people and their thoughts via that link first.

An(other) peculiar choice of local hero

The blog backlog seems to be moving quite rapidly through 2018 now; there is a grave danger of currency some year soon… But right now you find my memory of my life academic in late March 2018, facing the reality that, because of that grant I had got the previous year to get people together to talk about frontiers, I was now going to have to come up with a paper to give in a few weeks at a conference in front of those people. I will write (again) about that conference, in which there were much more interesting papers than mine, shortly, but by way of a run-up I want first to write about a peculiarity of local historical memory about a little-known figure of the Muslim régime in the Iberian Peninsula (or to use its snappier Arabic name, al-Andalus), a guy known to us as ‘Abd al-Rahmān ibn Marwān al-Ŷillīqī.

Modern bust of Mūsā ibn Mūsā Ibn Qāsi in Tudela, by Arenillas (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

To do this I want to start somewhere we’ve been before, Tudela in the time of the nearly-legendary frontier warlord Mūsā ibn Mūsā. You may remember (or may quickly surmise from the old blog post I just linked there) that this man was said in a Christian chronicle of his era to have called himself ‘the third king of Hispania‘, which for me raised the questions, firstly, who’s number 2, and secondly, why does no Muslim source say this?¹ But more important than my answers to those questions (which, after all, are in that post) is the fact that at Tudela Mūsā is now a feature of public memorialization, as ‘el Rey de l’Ebro’, King of the Ebro Valley, presumably because he is the only person who ever ruled as a successful independent from Tudela, so is ‘theirs’ in some way despite having repeatedly conquered or been awarded the place from his actual base at Arnedo. And it transpires that that is not the only such story, except that this one has maybe even shakier a basis.

It’s not, I should say, that there is any doubt that al-Ŷillīqī (or indeed Mūsā) actually existed; they are both reasonably attested. Neither is it that al-Ŷillīqī wasn’t an interesting and indicative character; that was indeed why I was looking at him. His story is substantially told in the Ta’rikh iftitāḥ al-Andalus (History of the Conquest of al-Andalus) of Muḥammad Ibn ʿUmar Ibn al-Qūṭiyya, which is now well-translated into English.² It goes basically like this: he was the son of the governor of Mérida, from an originally-Christian family who had converted to Islam (which is probably why the likewise-descended Ibn al-Qūṭiyya, ‘son of the Gothic woman’, was interested in his story), and for reasons we know not (possibly not being allowed himself to become governor of Mérida?) rebelled against the Cordoban government of al-Andalus in 868.³ This coincided with a rebellion by another descendant of converts about whom we know much less, a guy called Sa’dūn ibn Fatḥ al-Surunbāqī, and the two of them teamed up and got help from the Christian north, at this time dominated by the aggressive and successful King Alfonso III of Asturias, as Ibn al-Qūṭiyya puts it, “causing huge disturbances throughout Islam, which would take too long to relate.” It was this connection to the Christian north, known in al-Andalus as Ŷillīyya from the same root that gives us modern Galicia, that got al-Ŷillīqī the by-name by which history now recalls him.

Anyway, this escalated, because the emir Muḥammad I sent his son with an army against the rebels, and the rebels won and captured the army’s commander, whom they gave to Alfonso III to ransom. This elevated al-Ŷillīqī’s standing on the frontier to the point where he was basically untouachable, and the terrible two began raiding much deeper into Cordoban territory. Muḥammad, apparently recognising that the situation could not be recovered, now entered negotiations, and Ibn al-Qūṭiyya’s report of this is so great that I’ll just quote it.

“Now, when the emir had become sorely tired of Ibn Marwān, he sent an intermediary to him, who said, ‘Listen! We are tired of you and you of us, so make known your plans.’ He replied, ‘My plan is to have al-Basharnal [San Cristobal], to build it up, extend it and populate it. I will pay allegiance, but will make no tribute nor abeyance, nor will you make any prohibitions.’ This place, al-Basharnal, is opposite Baṭalyaws [Badajoz], with the river [the Guadiana] between. It was agreed that Badajoz should be fortified as far as the river, to protect the party of Islam, according to the conditions.”

So with that matters were temporarily arranged. The province was at least notionally no longer in rebellion and the frontier of al-Andalus technically extended to its edge, even if Córdoba had no real power there; one would like to know whether al-Ŷillīqī would have fought in the emiral army if Muḥammad I had summoned him, as Mūsā ibn Mūsā did when the Vikings came a generation before, but as far as we know this never came up. Nonetheless, the situation was embarrassing, and eventually the ransomed army commander, a guy named Hāshim, persuaded Muḥammad to let him have another go (with a different one of the emir’s sons in tow this time). They must have moved quite slowly, however, because apparently news of their move north reached al-Ŷillīqī in plenty of time for him to send a letter to Córdoba, which Ibn al-Qūṭiyya summarises as follows:

“‘I have heard that Hāshim is on his way west. I have no doubt that he is intent on revenge, now that I am staying in a secure fort. Well, by God! if he comes past Niebla, I will put Badajoz to the torch! Then I will return to my previous tactics with you.'”

The army must have stayed in Niebla for some time, because on receipt of this letter Muḥammad I was apparently able to send orders to it to halt, and Badajoz was not burned on this occasion. It’s all a fascinating story for my purposes, and I’ll talk about the conclusions I draw from it in the next post, but as far as either Ibn al-Qūṭiyya or any other writer is concerned that’s where the story ends. We know of two sons of al-Ŷillīqī and some descendant was in rebellion against ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III (912-961 CE) in Ibn al-Qūṭiyya’s own time, so the family probably stayed in charge in the area till at least then, but this is not part of any coherent account of anything except ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III.⁴ But it’s not where local memory of the man ended, or at least it has been revived, because look!

Statue of Ibn Marwān al-Ŷillīqī as founder of Badajoz, by Estanislao García, Badajoz, 2003; image by Gianni86 – Trabajo propio, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

This was put up in Badajoz in 2003, and is the work of one Estanislao García. You can’t see the plaque on this public-domain image, but there are several very good copyright ones on another site here and they make it clear that the Wikimedia caption is actually what is on the plaque, in both Spanish and Arabic, “Ibn Marwán, fundador de Badajoz, año 875 / 261 AH” (Ibn Marwān, founder of Badajoz, 875 CE or 261 Hijri).

Now, for reasons that are probably obvious, this historian here finds these choices a bit peculiar. Let’s never mind that there is basically no date for any of al-Ŷillīqī’s actions after 868; the date they’ve chosen is indicative and might not even be wrong. I’m more puzzled by the choice of this figure at all and the rôle they’ve given him. Firstly, I guess it’s evident from the story as reported above that Badajoz already existed when al-Ŷillīqī first became a problem there, and indeed as you’d expect the archaeology supports that. This city website admits that but still argues that the city can be considered al-Ŷillīqī’s foundation, and attributes to him walls that were built around the city in 878; but we’ve seen from Ibn al-Qūṭiyya that those walls were most likely put up against him, “to protect the party of Islam.”⁵ The place that al-Ŷillīqī founded, or at least built up, was San Cristobal, which is now all gone as far as I can tell, and he did that primarily so as to be able to threaten the good people of Badajoz if state power looked like coming anywhere near him.

Yet the descendants of those good people have still paid for a statue of this man, who would have cheerfully burned their city and ancestors, and decided he should be the crucial figure of their local history. Part of me would like to know what the consultation and decision process, and indeed the available education about the city’s past, were that lay behind the commissioning of that statue; and part of me fears that the answers would give me unto despair for the usefulness of the historical profession. And I suppose the reply from a patriotic citizen might be, “if you can’t give us anything better but can only take away the one documented early mention of our town, you can get out of town yourself,” and I would understand that to a point. And I suppose it’s even possible from what Ibn al-Qūṭiyya says about it that San Cristobal is now in Badajoz, which now extends over both banks of the Guadiana, and so that in that sense there would be a part of the city which he founded. But even if so, he did that by turning the other half into his hostages, and I can’t help feeling that should make a difference to his memory!⁶

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1. Yves Bonnaz (ed./transl.), Chroniques Asturiennes (fin IX^e siècle) (Paris 1987), Chronique d’Alphonse III s. a. 850. On the family and their position on the frontier see now Jesús Lorenzo Jiménez, La dawla de los Banū Qasī: origen, auge y caída de una dinastía muladí en la frontera superior de al-Andalus, Estudios Árabes e Islámicos: Monografías 17 (Madrid 2010).

2. Muḥammad ibn ʻUmar Ibn al-Qūṭīyah, Early Islamic Spain: the history of Ibn al-Qutiya, transl. David James (London 2011), where see pp. 118-119.

3. Not all of these details are in the text; Ibn al-Qūṭīyah, History, p. 127 n. 38 supplies them from Maria Isabel Fierro, “Familias en el Ta’rīj Iftitāḥ al-Andalus de Ibn al-Qūṭīyya” in Estudios Onomástico-Biográficos de al-Andalus vol. IV (Granada 1990), pp. 41-70, citing no. 67 & nn. 79-80, which I have not seen myself.

4. For the sons see ibid.; for the subsequent rebellion, Ibn al-Qūṭīyah, History, p. 140. The rebel lost this time, and that probably was the end of the family’s story.

5. See n. 2 above for the quote; “Historia”, Ajuntamiento de Badajoz, online here, says:

“La ciudad de Badajoz puede considerarse de fundación musulmana, a pesar de que las excavaciones realizadas en la Alcazaba, demuestran que ya en época prehistórica, en el calcolítico concretamente, existió un considerable núcleo de población. Esta población perdura en epoca protohistórica, pero no parece que existiera núcleo urbano durante el dominio romano de la península, aunque sí abundantes “villas” en sus proximidades.
“Tampoco ha quedado ninguna edificación visigoda, pero sabemos que debió tener cierta importancia este momento histórico a juzgar por la cantidad de restos encontrados como pilastras de mármol, capiteles, etc…
“Con los musulmanes, la ciudad adquiere notable importancia, siendo por dos veces capital de un reino independiente: la primera vez en tiempo del Valí Ibn Marwan (868) quien contruye las primeras murallas de adobe y tapial en el 878 y posteriormente al formarse los reinos de taifas y derrumbarse el califato cordobés en los primeros años del siglo XI.”

The key phrase here is pretty clearly “capital de un reino independiente”, capital of an independent kingdom, but to call Ibn Marwan walī, governor, or to accuse him of establishing that thing from that basis is surely to miss the context of his actions…

6. I should admit at this point that there is some relevant scholarship I haven’t been able to access, to wit, Christophe Picard, “La fondation de Badajoz par Abd al-Rahman Ibn Yunus al-Jalliki” in Revue des études islamiques Vol. 49 (Paris 1981), pp. 215–230, which nowhere I can easily reach has. I promise to check it before I try actually publishing anything involving al-Ŷillīqī, but it’s odd that Picard doesn’t even apparently agree about the guy’s filiation. Santiago Feijoo Martínez & Miguel Alba Calzado, “La decadencia de Mérida en el siglo IX” in Juan Zozaya Stabel-Hansen & Guillermo S. Kurtz Schaefer (edd.), Estudios sobre el Reino Aftasí, Bataliús 3 (Badajoz 2014), pp. 93–110, meanwhile, argue (p. 110) that the big event for Badajoz was the translocation of a decent part of the population of Mérida there in 875, for which they give no source; but if it happened, it was presumably another part of the state defence against al-Ŷillīqī, since we don’t think he controlled Mérida…

From Ankara to al-Masāq in eighteen months or so

Right, let’s see about that post I promised. I promised some account of the conference which had taken me to Ankara in February 2018, but given that a decent part of it emerged as a journal issue about which you’ve already heard, and that I already blogged much of the conference elsewhere long ago, I thought it might be more interesting to do this post as a story of how academic ideas becomes a publication at the moment.¹ This will be old news to some of my readership, I know, but I’ll load it with enough stuff that didn’t get as far as the journal issue or into the other blog post to keep you interested as well, I hope. So here goes.

Luca Zavagno, standing outside the walls of Ankara Castle on this very occasion

As I said in the last proper post, my friend and colleague Luca Zavagno had found himself with more of a grant he held with me left than we’d expected, and thus upscaled from what had been meant to be a single workshop at Bilkent Universitesi to a small but complete international conference with a few ancillary events, because he could. The whole program stretched over three days in the end. On the first of these and second of these the relevant events were public lectures held in the afternoon, and then the conference proper happened on the third day. In between times we climbed on castles, taught master-classes to the Bilkent students like visiting celebrities (which, I suppose I have to admit, we sort of were) and tried to make sure our papers would be OK. There were also, I admit, a few meals out. I have some pictures of parts of this academic jamboree, but I think I might be discreetly murdered if I posted them, so you will have to manage without. Instead, have some food for the mind in the form of the running order.

21 February 2018

• Public lecture: Rebecca Darley, “Speaking in Many Voices: Roman and Byzantine coins in South India as sources for maritime and inland histories”

22 February 2018

• Public lecture: Francisco Moreno Martín, “Visigothic Past and Nationalism after the Spanish Civil War”

23 February 2018

Workshop: Islands at the Frontier of Empires in the Middle Ages
• Elif Denel introducing the American Research Institute in Turkey
• Lutgarde Vandeput introducing the British Institute at Ankara
• Leslie Brubaker, “Piercing the Cultural Frontier: images of the Virgin in insular churches and the Byzantine heartland”
• Matthew Harpster, “Sicily: a frontier in the centre of the sea?”
• Luca Zavagno, “‘I Don’t Know Why I Go to Extremes’: the Balearics and Cyprus between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages”
• Rebecca Darley, “Is an Island always a Hub? Sokotra, Sri Lanka and the Shape of Commerce in the Late Antique Western Indian Ocean”
• Chris Wickham, “Looking Back at the Eighth Century from the Eleventh”
• Jonathan Jarrett, “Nests of Pirates:The Balearic Islands and la-Garde-Freinet compared”
• Francisco J. Moreno Martín, “Archaeology of Iberian ‘Ecclesiastical Frontiers’ between 6th and 10th centuries”
• Round Table

Now, if you are as keen a reader of my work as I wish I somewhere had, you will have maybe noticed that there is a lot more there than got into the eventual publication, and indeed that one article there isn’t here. This is the story of how the moment becomes the monument that I alluded to at the beginning, really. Luca had thrown this together quite quickly; thus, some people had brought stuff that was directly related to the topic, some had fortuitously had something tangentially related presentable, and one or two papers slipped in because they were what the speaker could offer. In particular, it was only a very few days before that Luca had discovered that one of his planned speakers would not be able to make it (and this being before we all adapted to Zoom, that was considered prohibitive), so Francisco wound up stepping in with literally days notice, and the paper was definitely never expected to be more than work in progress. So it goes.

Of the ones that didn’t get published, therefore, I’ll say a little on content as well as process. Rebecca’s public lecture looked at the distribution of Roman and Byzantine coin finds in India as compared to local coinage systems and as compared to temple sites, pursuing a connection she had by this time already suggested in print.² There seem to be some sharp differentiations; Roman silver, gold and even copper is sometimes found in most areas south of the Deccan, but Byzantine coin only much further south (and only in gold), and both Roman and Byzantine stuff often appears slashed, cut up or imitated using gold foil round base-metal cores, none of which happened to local coinages. The former Rebecca suggested might be to do with the emergence of the Vakataka Empire during the late Roman era, across whose borders Byzantine coin seems not have got (and which ran no coin of its own as far as we know); the latter is where the temples might come in, if the damage to the coins was somehow part of the ritual in which they were given to such institutions (some of whose treasuries are even now objects of mystery and speculation). This didn’t go into the journal issue mainly becaue Rebecca was still working out what these things might mean, but also because it was nowhere near that issue’s topic, however interesting, and so it was left for her to pursue further elsewhere.³

Francisco and Rebecca conferring before Rebecca’s lecture, Professor Paul Latimer at right about to do the introductions

The next day Francisco took us through some of the different ways in which Spanish nationalist politics had looked at and used the Visigothic period in their thought and propaganda. As the only period in which the whole Iberian peninsula has been under one autonomous rule, between 624 and 711 except during the numerous civil wars, and under a Catholic autonomous rule to boot, you can see how this would be useful to such agendas, and indeed it was seen so in the ninetheenth century by such historians as Lafuente and Amador de Rios, but initially at least it did not form a big part of the propaganda of the Franco era, the Generalissimo seeing himself (and having himself shown) more in the mould of a Crusader or hero of the Reconquista, but his state more like the Roman Empire (like most right-wing states of the period, one might observe). The alliance with Nazi Germany however brought a shift in emphasis away from the Romans towards the supposedly shared Germanic background of the Goths, and a chance to grab border territory off defeated France in 1941 was framed as revenge for several occasions on which the Franks of French had underhandedly defeated the Goths or Spanish. This powered some new archæology of ‘Germanic’ burials but, when Germany lost the war, Franco had to fall back on the Church, always his support and now the only apparent explanation for why his far-right government alone survived, and started paying more attention to the Reconquista and the Asturian kings again. This was an object lesson in how political preoccupations can drive not just propaganda but the research behind it, but it was also one that Francisco was largely reprising from the work of people he’d edited rather than being something of his to offer, as well as being nowhere near the theme of the workshop, so it too did not get included.⁴

When it came to the actual workshop, the first two papers were never intended to be more than advertisements for two scholarly institutes in the neighbourhood and the facilities they could offer scholars working on the area, which are indeed worth knowing about, but which were obviously not publications. Leslie Brubaker’s paper was closely related to the one she gave at that year’s Spoleto conference, which was printed as part of that, but her version of it for this workshop included some reflections on how, if you looked at the right way everything could be considered a frontier, and on how islands, our actual theme, were so rarely self-sufficient as for their coasts to constitute boundaries that were ‘meant to be breached’, and I wish we could have found some way to include those alongside what we did.⁵ Matthew’s, Luca’s and Rebecca’s papers did all go into the publication, so I’ll not say more about them here as I’ve already written them up once; they are all very good, however!⁶ Chris’s paper was about state-economy interactions across the three-century period of his title, and concluded that the eleventh-century world was economically busier but more broken up, making a tax-driven state harder to maintain and in some part, thus explaining a shift of economic basis; and from here, I can see that this was all work going towards his eventual (and amazing) article ‘How Did the Feudal Economy Work?’ As it was, it was still work in progress as far as he was concerned, and admittedly not even slightly about islands, and so we couldn’t really prevail upon him to let us have it.⁷ And then there was me, and I’ve already mentioned how Francisco had stepped into the breach.

So, in the weeks subsequent to all this when Luca, Rebecca and I worked this out, what this mean we had was Matthew, Luca, me and Rebecca’s workshop paper, and we also actually had the promise of a version of the paper which had been cancelled, by Nikolas Bakirtzis and a collaborator of his, Xenophon Moniaros. Five chapters is too few for a book, but it’s about right for a journal issue, so we looked around for likely venues and lit upon al-Masāq: Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean. They turned out to be a more or less ideal venue except in one particular, which was that they could give us a choice of being published either three years down the line or in eighteen months; the former was too far away but the deadlines for the latter meant a lot of work squeezed in between teaching. In particular, as editors of the issue, it fell to us to find reviewers for each article. Since we were between us three-fifths of the authors who were being reviewed, and some of our expertises were pretty identifiable as well, this got a little surreal, though I did not know either of the people who reviewed mine and got a slightly rough ride from one of them, which did make it a better article but required work I really struggled to do in the time available (mainly reading about Balearic archaeology). I guess the article now provides quite a good state of the question on late antique settlement in the Balearics…

Volume 31 issue 2 of al-Masāq: Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean, entitled Not the Final Frontier: The World of Early Medieval Islands, editors Jonathan Jarrett, Luca Zavagno and Rebecca Darley

But, on the other hand, it ran through editing and proofs very easily, partly I’d like to say because of the excellent editing work we’d done ourselves, but also because of very good type-setting by the publishers, working with a bewildering number of Mediterranean languages and some fairly scientific archaeology to boot, and the whole thing existed within eighteen months of our first having the idea, which was extremely convenient for us all, I think. Had I had world enough and time I would have done more work on mine—I’m not sure if there’s anything I’ve ever published bar my first article on which I might not, ideally, have done more work and of course my book then had to modify that first article extensively…—but as it was, it was one of those things which seemed impossible but, because there were three of us doing it and no-one wanted to disappoint the others was in the end possible anyway, and we are all (still) quite proud of it. But I’m not sure I foresaw that in Ankara in February 2018!

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1. The journal issue being, of course, Luca Zavagno, Rebecca Darley & Jonathan Jarrett (edd.), ‘Not the Final Frontier’: the World of Medieval Islands, al-Masāq: Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean Vol. 31 no. 2 (Abingdon 2019), pp. 129-241.

2. Rebecca Darley, “Self, Other and the Use and Appropriation of Late Roman coins in south India and Sri Lanka (4th-7th centuries A.D.)” in H. P. Ray (ed.), Negotiating Cultural Identity: Landscapes in Early Medieval South Asian History (London 2015), pp. 60-84, DOI: 10.4324/9780429274169-4.

3. Already in Rebecca Darley, “罗马-拜占庭钱币的流入与印度次大陆的社会变迁”, transl. Wang Baixu in 古代文明 Vol. 14 no. 3 (Changchun 2020), pp. 43–50, and soon to appear in English.

4. Francisco Moreno Martín (ed.), El franquismo y la apropiación del pasado: El uso de la historia, de la arqueología y de la historia del arte para la legitimación de la dictadura (Madrid 2016).

5. Leslie Brubaker, “The Migrations of the Mother of God: Santa Maria Antiqua in Rome, Hagios Demetrios in Thessaloniki, and the Blachernai in Constantinople” in Le migrazioni nell’Alto Medioevo, Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo Vol. 66 Pt. 2 (Spoleto 2019), pp. 1003-1020.

6. Matthew Harpster, “Sicily: A Frontier in the Centre of the Sea?” in Zavagno, Darley & Jarrett, ‘Not the Final Frontier’, pp. 158–170, DOI: 10.1080/09503110.2019.1602748; Luca Zavagno, “‘Going to the Extremes’: The Balearics and Cyprus in the Early Medieval Byzantine Insular System”, ibid., pp. 140–157, DOI: 10.1080/09503110.2019.1602375; Rebecca Darley, “The Island Frontier: Socotra, Sri Lanka and the Shape of Commerce in the Late Antique Western Indian Ocean”, ibid. pp. 223–241, DOI: 10.1080/09503110.2019.1604930.

7. Chris Wickham, “How did the Feudal Economy Work? the Economic Logic of Medieval Societies” in Past & Present no. 251 (Oxford 2021), pp. 3–40, DOI: 10.1093/pastj/gtaa018, which was really never going to be published anywhere else given his long connection with the journal.

Changing Ways to Read a Graph of Landlordship

A day early and about four years late still, here is this week’s post. While in the very last days of my previous bout of research leave, in late 2017 and early 2018, I was reading my way through the various Italian polyptychs and inventories in a 1979 volume edited by Castagnetti; two of them actually contain crop yields data, only one of which I’d known about, and I wanted to make sure that I found any more.¹ Now, there weren’t any more but there were a lot of references to a couple of early articles by David Herlihy. Herlihy was a bit of a legend, mainly for his work on town and women’s life in later medieval Italy but he also did a rook of short articles in the late 1950s to early 1970s on the basis of a huge database of published charter material he’d assembled somehow, and some of those articles are still really big in the literature. If you’ve ever seen a claim that in the Middle Ages the Church owned up to a third of all land, for example, that was Herlihy, and he also stands out as one of the first people to point out that actually female landownership is not uncommon in medieval documents, which gathered him a small raft of students who have become important gender historians, mainly because he was willing to see what was there.² So I’ve always thought that Herlihy was not a bad model for the kind of historian I’d like to be, and when I catch references like these to work of his I’ve not read, I try and follow them up. And in one of these, there is this graph.³

David Herlihy, “The History of the Rural Seigneury in Italy, 751-1200” in Agricultural History Vol. 33 (Washington DC 1959), pp. 58-71 at p. 60

Now, if there is a weakness in these early articles of Herlihy’s it’s a tendency to proffer a single explanation and then cover no alternatives, which is why he could do in twenty-five pages what would take most people a book, I guess, and this is no different. Here Herlihy argued that money rents were the weak landlord’s option compared to service, since commutation to money deprived him of guaranteed labour and foodstuffs and subject him to the market (Herlihy liked the market, so he didn’t say that last bit, but it’s implicit). They also broke the closeness of a landlord’s connection to his tenants. For all these reasons, for Herlihy what this graph shows was a tightening of landlords’ control under the Carolingians and then its loss as the Italian kingdom disintegrated in the late ninth and early tenth centries, accompanied by an increase in tenurial fragmentation which he thought he’d showed in a previous article, till the economy was in genuine crisis, with which various ‘vigorous’ landholders dealt by consolidating holdings in aggressive campaigns of acquisition and subjection. But we should see those as a good thing! because they revitalised the agrarian economy and allowed the development of towns and government and developed economies and the Renaissance and so on.⁴ That last bit makes me wish to be Herlihy a bit less, I admit, but it’s an impressive bit of theorisation of massive changes from one graph. But there are times when a graph is not enough…

Ph.D. Comics for 13th February 1998. Admit it, you have seen this done in presentations

… and it’s necessary to ask what else might be going on here. As a self-denying numismatist, for example, one thing struck me straight away which is that you could, if you wanted to be equally careless, read this instead as a graph of monetisation of the Italian economy, by assuming that everyone would have used money if they could have, and so if they weren’t it wasn’t available.⁵ Certainly, Herlihy never really thought about money supply; he apparently just assumed it could be got if needed, but I’m not sure that was true in this era and in notes occasionally it becomes clear that neither was Herlihy, really.⁶ But it needs factoring in for his deductions to stand up. That is so not least because he stated an assumption that a shift to money rents automatically meant that the landlords were giving up on farming their manorial lands directly and breaking them up into tenancies because of no longer having labour available, but obviously that need not have been so if they were hiring labour instead, in which case of course they might have wanted money rents, because then they’d have been able to get work done when they needed it and not just when their peasants’ obligations came up.⁷ I don’t think that’s necessarily what’s happening in Herlihy’s graph but he certainly didn’t show any signs of having considered it.

The kind of money the peasants in question either could or could not get, a silver denaro of Emperor Otto I struck at Pavia in 956-973, image by FabioRomanoni – own work, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

In the end, therefore, I like this article to think with and I’m always impressed how well Herlihy’s charter stuff holds its worth, largely because of being so directly data-driven, but what is maybe most interesting to me is the difference your starting assumptions make to how you read that graph. Herlihy had already detected what he thought was a break-up of landholding and an economic crisis that fitted this graph’s chronology; but the sadly late Peter Spufford would probably have seen signs of European silver famine here, a number of economic historians might prefer to see a growth of wage labour hindered by big bad feudalism and eventually triumphed over by the dialectical triumph of the capitalist market economy, and I’m not sure where I myself stand but it definitely comes from Pierre Bonnassie‘s and Chris Wickham‘s similar but differently-timed cases for a period of light obligations on the peasantry in the early or central Middle Ages.⁸ I suppose it’s a reminder that data may be neutral but its interpretation is another matter…

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1. Andrea Castagnetti, Michele Luzzati, Gianfranco Pasquali and Augusto Vasina (edd.), Inventari altomedievali di terre, coloni e redditi, Fonti per la Storia d’Italia 104 (Roma 1979); see now Jonathan Jarrett, “Outgrowing the Dark Ages: agrarian productivity in Carolingian Europe re-evaluated” in Agricultural History Review Vol. 77 (Reading 2019), pp. 1–28 at pp. 16-19 & 25-26.

2. His greatest hits would probably be D. Herlihy, Pisa In The Early Renaissance: A Study Of Urban Growth (New Haven CT 1958); idem, Medieval Households (Cambridge MA 1985); and idem, Opera Muliebria: Women And Work in Medieval Europe (Philadelphia PA 1990); but one also has to list the two ground-breaking articles, idem, “Church Property on the European Continent, 701-1200” in Speculum Vol. 36 (Cambridge MA 1961), pp. 81–105 and idem, “Land, Family and Women in Continental Europe, 701-1200” in Traditio Vol. 18 (Fordham NY 1962), pp. 89–120, repr. in Susan Mosher Stuard (ed.), Women in Medieval Society (Philadelphia PA 1976), pp. 13–45. He also had at least one Variorum volume which must have collected these and others like them.

3. David Herlihy, “The History of the Rural Seigneury in Italy, 751-1200” in Agricultural History Vol. 33 (Washington DC 1959), pp. 58-71 at p. 60.

4. Ibid., pp. 68-69, almost as explicitly as I render it; the previous article was Herlihy, “The Agrarian Revolution in Southern France and Italy, 801–1150” in Speculum Vol. 33 (Cambridge MA 1958), pp. 23–41, again not a small-scale study.

5. For a really sane critique of these kinds of views, see Dagfinn Skre, “Commodity Money, Silver and Coinage in Viking-Age Scandinavia” in James Graham-Campbell and Gareth Williams (edd.), Silver Economy in the Viking Age (Walnut Creek CA 2007), pp. 67–92, effectively printed again as Skre, “Commodity Money, Silver and Coinage in Viking-Age Scandinavia” in James Graham-Campbell, Søren M. Sindbæk and Gareth Williams (edd.), Silver Economies, Monetisation and Society in Scandinavia, AD 800 – 1100: Studies Dedicated to Mark Blackburn (Aarhus 2011), pp. 67–91, whence online here.

6. Herlihy, “Rural Seigneury”, p. 68 n. 53 is a dismissal of an argument by another historian that depreciation of the coinage might explain the drop in rent value, which of course it might; Herlihy argued that the coinage was down by half but the rents went up tenfold, but here and ibid. p. 61 where he suggested that peasants would have struggled to convert all their crop to cash, he showed some awareness that money supply might be a problem, a problem which he otherwise blithely ignored, presumably because that observation was all he needed to support the idea that money rents were necessarily a poor option. We might now think differently about the monetisation levels of the Italian countryside, but admittedly we might also not; see Alessia Rovelli, “Nuove zecche e circolazioni monetaria tra X e XIII secolo: l’esempio del Lazio e della Toscana”, ed. Alessandra Molinari, in Archeologia Medievale Vol. 37 (Firenze 2010), pp. 163–171.

7. Cf. Herlihy, “Rural Seigneury”, p. 61.

8. Pierre Bonnassie, “D’une servitude à l’autre : les paysans du royaume” in Robert Delort (ed.), La France de l’An Mil, Points-Histoires H130 (Paris 1990), pp. 125-141, transl. as Bonnassie, “From one Servitude to Another: the peasantry of the Frankish kingdom at the time of Hugh Capet and Robert the Pious (987-1031)”, in idem, From Slavery to Feudalism in South-Western Europe, transl. Jean Birrell (Cambridge 1991), pp. 288–313; Chris Wickham, “La chute de Rome n’aura pas lieu”, transl. André Joris, in Le Moyen Âge Vol. 99 (Bruxelles 1993), pp. 107–126, published in English as Chris Wickham, “The Fall of Rome Will Not Take Place” in Lester K. Little and Barbara H. Rosenwein (edd.), Debating the Middle Ages: issues and readings (Oxford 1998), pp. 45–57, or Wickham, “Sul mutamento sociale ed economico di lungo periodo in Occidente (400-800)” in Storica: rivista quadrimestrale Vol. 8 (Firenze 2002), pp. 7–28, transl. Igor Santos Salazar and ed. Iñaki Martín Viso as “Sobre la mutación socioeconómica de larga duración en Occidente durante los siglos V-VIII” in Studia Historica: historia medieval Vol. 22 (Salamanca 2004), pp. 17–32; but cf. now Wickham, “How did the Feudal Economy Work? the Economic Logic of Medieval Societies” in Past & Present No. 251 (Oxford 2021), pp. 3–40, which I haven’t yet had time to internalise but threatens to change really quite a lot…

An unobserved model of Byzantine economic development

After reimmersing myself in the literature of frontiers back in summer of 2017, I deduce from the blog stubs I left for myself that I must then have made a proper attempt to read Michael Hendy’s The Byzantine Monetary Economy.¹ This is a monster tome which was supposed to be one of three and still contains a vast amount of material whose relevance to the exact topic is hard to see, but which also throws out important points and valuable insights as if they were incidental; it really needed an editor, but the legend goes that Hendy told Cambridge University Press that if they changed a word of it he’d cancel his contract with them, and somehow they wanted the book badly enough that this cowed them. So it went out as he wanted it even though it’s hard to understand, as a reader, why that was. In any case, despite being thirty-plus years old it’s still important and, I guess because I was by now writing up the work that would become my ‘Middle Byzantine Numismatics’, I set out to read it.²

Cover of Michael Hendy’s Studies in the Byzantine Monetary Economy c. 300-1450 (Cambridge 1985)

One of the major controversies in which Hendy repeatedly intervened during his rebarbative scholarly life was that of the importance of commerce to the Byzantine Empire, both economically and ideologically. Most people have been at least ready and in some cases downright keen to see the emperors as wanting to grow their commercial economy, even though they are sometimes hard-placed to explain why. For Hendy, however, this was anything but a given, and he saw the primary purpose of the coinage, for example, as to enable the tax system and the payment of the army, not to facilitate market exchange. Without wanting to spoil the book for you, he in fact went on to argue that the Byzantine Empire resisted commercialisation to the point that this became the reason that the Italian city-states with which they reluctantly dealt were able to out-compete them and drain the empire’s resource westwards.³ I do personally find him persuasive on this general score, I admit, but of course he was publishing under Thatcher and no-one was interested in anti-commercial scholarship as the 1980s boomed and academics were settling into how we justify the Great Divergence without having to give up our global predominance.

Nonetheless, he began, or nearly began, with a stab at economic modelling as applied to past societies that I think bears thinking with even now. It should be said that Hendy was just as prepared as his rivals to build elaborate hypotheses on shaky figures—he spent seventy pages here on reconstructing the Byzantine imperial budget, largely on the basis of eighteenth-century Ottoman figures, for example—but he obviously thought his were better, because he liked to attack others’ anyway. As witness, on p. 7 he has a set at someone who had applied Fisher’s Equation to the debasement of the Byzantine coinage in the eleventh century.⁴

If you’ve not met Fisher’s Equation, here is a summary representation, linked through to a pretty clear explanation; I would try myself, but this post is already pretty long and in-depth economics will not help…

Because he never wrote anything briefly when you would like him to have, I summarise how Hendy dealt with this rather than quote. Firstly he admitted that we probably do now have a decent grip on how that debasement unfolded, in which, ironically, he was probably wrong.⁵ He then admitted that in an economy where there was effectively no credit, and therefore no elasticity in the money supply, restricted as it was by available precious-metal, the application of Fisher ought if anything to be simpler than in a modern economy. But because the coinage was not, as he saw it, a commercial instrument and not made in quantities intended for it to be one, and was thus distributed not where trade required it but where soldiers and state operatives spent it; because transport was slow and its costs away from water very high, with consequent limits on what could be traded and how far; because, “the producer was almost invariably the distributor and/or the seller”; and because a really substantial part of the empire’s wealth was owned by the emperor, a few landed magnates and the Church, and thus immobilised…

“In the light of all these circumstances separately or in combination, and despite wide-ranging claims to the contrary, it is at least questionable whether the application of Fisher’s Equation has much, if any, relevance to the situation, and whether the pre-conditions necessary for its operation in any chronologically and geographically uniform, and in any detailed, fashion existed.”⁶

And you can see from that both why Hendy is little quoted, if much cited, and how his book ran to 773 pages. Even so, there are still bits one wants to quote on themes like this…

“These observations… are intended to suggest that it is on the one hand unacceptable for the numismatist, in accounting for some monetary phenomenon, to connect it with a contemporary ‘economic crisis’ (for the basic distinction between a financial and an economic crisis is one that is scarcely ever made), the existence of which is asserted through reference to another such assertion, which turns out to be based on a statement in George Ostrogorsky’s History of the Byzantine State – however distinguished that author, and however valuable that work. But they are also intended to suggest that it is on the other hand equally dangerous, that is dangerous enough to be unacceptable, for the numismatist, in accounting for some other monetary phenomenon, to insert it into a precise mathematical interrelationship evolved in the light of modern monetary theories and conditions. In general, if in no other sense, the result is thereby lent an entirely spurious air of precision and authority, and the nature and mode of operation of the ancient or mediaeval monetary economy involved is effectively never questioned.”⁷

You see what I mean by now, I guess. Part of me wants to yell “hurrah” and the rest is saying, “Wait, where was all this going again?” and “Could that maybe have been shorter, with fewer subclauses, or else in more than three sentences?” and unhelpfully unsympathetic things like that. I suppose that the general point here is that a model that is never tested against data or accurately set into context can never be proven or disproven.⁸ Of course, as I say, that didn’t stop Hendy coming up with his own, and what I want to do with the rest of this post is extend one of them for fun. You see, having got to that bit quoted above where he concluded that Fisher’s Equation wasn’t going to work here, he tries to explain the state’s resort to debasement by other means, for which the chief reason was its inability to extract very much money from its leading aristocrats. (He elsewhere argues that the wealthiest Byzantine magnates could severally possess enough to come close to equalling, in their total worth at least, the entire state budget, and while the comparison relies on the accuracy of his reconstructed budget, the figures for aristocratic wealth, at least, are contemporary ones.⁹) To their wealth, however, there was little alternative, given the probable insufficiency to make up the gap of what could be got from overtaxing the peasantry—which anyway tended simply to drive them into dependency upon those untouchable aristocrats instead.¹⁰ Sorry: once you start trying to think with Hendy it’s apparently difficult not to write like him. I’ll fight it.

This got me thinking, anyway, and what I thought is that it has implications which Hendy did not draw out. The tenth century was a time of recovery for the Byzantine Empire, territorially and militarily speaking, but by the end of it, nonetheless, the state was nearly bankrupt. (That is usually put down to Alexios Komnenos’s loss of Anatolia, but he inherited the financial situation, he didn’t create it.¹¹) This would be exactly that distinction between economic and financial crisis Hendy was griping about, I guess. So, OK, let us suppose, as part of another of these untestable models, that, say, the top 5% of the Empire’s population was effectively immune from serious taxation, but that the rest was not. In that case, wealth that accrues to those possessors was effectively amortised from the state’s resources. If the economy grows in such a way that the aristocrats do well out of it, as it seems to have done in the Byzantine tenth century, the figures might work out in such a way that the population overall got richer but the state still got poorer. Now, obviously, one solution might indeed be to try and boost the commercial side of the economy and make up the difference on tolls and sales tax, but since the big aristocrats were essentially autarkic, or could be, that would not liquefy their wealth back to where the state could siphon it off again. So instead, the solution that probably works best for the state is actually to slow the economy down, to encourage deflation and to generally attack the value of wealth until the status differential between the aristocracy and the state has been restored. In that case, overtaxing would not be a desperate tactic to which a bankrupt government was forced despite the damage it must cause to the productive sector; that damage would actually be the point and overtaxing the whole strategy.

The expedient to which the state had been reduced: a supposedly silver trachy of Emperor Alexios I Komnenos struck at Thessaloniki in 1081-1092, Birmingham, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, B5532

In all of that case, then, it could be very much in the interests of a state constructed as we’ve just imagined to hurt its own economy, in order to be able to appropriate more of what was left. Perhaps that is in fact what Alexios I was doing when he reformed, causing what must have been great expense and considerable monetary shortage, that duff coinage!¹² It’s obviously not a very capitalism-compatible model, but I think it’s where Hendy was pointing. That he didn’t get there may have as much to do with the arrangement of the book—in which, within six pages from here, he was having to say, “It may be thought that I have wandered far from the customary or even proper preserve of the numismatist, in discussing such questions as erosion, predominant forms of land-use, and twelfth- and thirteenth-century frontiers – and so, perhaps, I have…”—as any capitalist sympathies of his own.¹³ I’m not even sure it matters what he was ideologically, because what concerned him was how this other society had worked. The political climate of the age may be why no-one else picked up this idea, and maybe I would not have spotted it lurking before 2008 either. But what are we doing this study of the past for, if not to find alternate ways for human societies to do things? I’m not saying this one’s an obvious winner—though I often have to remind my students when they write about the inevitability of the Empire’s decline that it lasted more than a millennium, however variable its health in that time, so its ways of managing politics and change might still work out better than ours—but at least it is one of those alternatives that we are now, maybe, able to see and think with.

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1. Michael F. Hendy, Studies in the Byzantine Monetary Economy, c. 300-1450 (Cambridge 1985).

2. Jonathan Jarrett, “Middle Byzantine Numismatics in the Light of Franz Füeg’s Corpora of Nomismata” in Numismatic Chronicle Vol. 177 (2017), pp. 514–535, which uses Hendy quite a lot.

3. Hendy, Studies, pp. 221-251 on the economic bases and 554-602 for the trade situation.

4. Ibid., pp. 157-220 for the budgetary reconstruction and pp. 613-618 for a worked-out comparison to the Ottomans, on the basis of the same figures he used to construct the Byzantine budget, a circularity he doesn’t seem to have considered. The person who had misapplied Fisher’s Equation is not named by Hendy, but it’s pretty likely that he was referring to Cécile Morrisson, “La dévaluation de la monnaie byzantine au XIe siècle : essai d’interpretation” in Recherches sur le XI^e siècle, Travaux et Mémoires du Centre de recherche d’histoire et civilisation de Byzance 6 (Paris 1976), pp. 3–47, reprinted in eadem, Monnaie et finances à Byzance : Analyses et techniques, Collected Studies 461 (Aldershot 1994), chapter IX, which does indeed apply Fisher to the eleventh-century valuation and which Morrisson was still defending as such an application in eadem, “Money, Coins and the Economy” in Paul Stephenson (ed.), The Byzantine World (London 2012), pp. 34–46 at p. 41 n. 33.

5. Hendy, Studies, p. 3; but Cécile Morrisson, J.-N. Barrandon and Jacques Poirier, “La monnaie d’or byzantine à Constantinople : purification et modes d’altérations (491-1354)” in Morrisson, Claude Brenot, Jean-Pierre Callu, Barrandon, Poirier and R. Halleux (edd.), L’or monnayé I : purification et altérations de Rome à Byzance, Cahiers Ernest Babelon 2 (Paris 1985), pp. 113–187, the same year demonstrated that the debasement had in fact begun at a lower level in the late tenth century and that the eleventh-century tipping point was an illusion presented by the written sources.

6. Hendy, Studies, p. 5.

7. Ibid. p. 7.

8. For me, the archetypal case of this is Keith Hopkins, “Taxes and Trade in the Roman Empire (200 B.C.–A.D. 400)” in Journal of Roman Studies Vol. 70 (London 1980), pp. 101–125, which is so obviously and openly founded on no evidence except the author’s own expressed preconceptions that I don’t understand how it got published, let alone became a standard reference.

9. Hendy, Studies, pp. 201-220.

10. See Peter Frankopan, “Land and Power in the Middle and Late Period” in John F. Haldon (ed.), The Social History of Byzantium (Chichester 2009), pp. 112-142.

11. The politics are best retold in Peter Frankopan, The First Crusade: the call from the East (London 2012), pp. 42-70, but on the finances specifically, see, with care, Cécile Morrisson, “La Logarikè : réforme monétaire et réforme fiscale sous Alexis Ier Comnène” in Travaux et Mémoires du Centre de recherche d’histoire et civilisation de Byzance Vol. 7 (Paris 1979), pp. 419-464, repr. in eadem, Monnaie et finances, chapter VI.

12. The more normal position on this is summarised, with references, by Alex Nobes, “The economic and monetary policy of the Byzantine Empire under Alexios I Komnenos” in Rosetta Vol. 11 (Birmingham 2011), pp. 56–71, online here, good work for an undergraduate journal. However, I disagree with him (and indeed Morrisson, “La Logarikè”, on which he rests here) that Alexios’s coin and tax reforms increased state revenue fourfold; I’ve run those numbers as best I can and I’m pretty sure that they come out meaning that he managed to return the levels of taxation to roughly pre-debasement levels by shifting them onto originally supplementary levies that were now paid in the new coin, rather than the debased valuations of the old core taxes; but the roughly thousand-fold increase in notional tax liability that resulted probably amounted to a slight decrease in overall revenue, that’s how bad things had got. So the reform’s purpose can’t have been just that, or you wouldn’t bother, and I don’t see why it shouldn’t have been deflationary as well as stabilising.

13. Hendy, Studies, p. 13.

First Trip to China, II: Numismatists Gather in Changchun

Despite the tourism so cheerfully recounted last post, I was in fact in China in 2017 for academic purposes. The formal cause was a conference at North-East Normal University in Changchun, by name the International Symposium on Byzantine Gold Coins in the World of Late Antiquity. If I can be Aristotelian about this, then I suppose the material cause of this was that, one way or another, there are a reasonable number of Byzantine solidi and, maybe more interestingly, imitations of them, that have come to light in China, and this is one of the major research areas of Professor Lín Yīng of Sun-Yat Sen University, whom I had had the pleasure of moderating at a Leeds International Medieval Congress two years before.¹ But she is not the only Byzantinist in China by quite some way; I suppose an ancient empire likes to know about its contemporaries… And a number of people with such interests hang out at North-East Normal, because it runs an Institute for Ancient Civilizations, which was the hosting organisation for this conference, under the particular auspices of its Vice-Director, Dr Sven Günther. In fact, North-East Normal also boasts a Medieval History Research Centre, and you’d think that they would be my obvious point of contact, but because, you see, the efficient cause was that Professor Lín knows me as a Byzantine numismatist, because when she met that’s what I was, professionally, and of course I have not completely left that identity behind.² I guess if you come in through the door marked ‘Byzantinist’, you’re a Byzantinist, but if what that means is that (assuming we get to a stage where this is possible again) I get invited halfway across the world and shown round the local wonders, then I guess I can come up with a paper about Byzantine coins for you…

Gathering of delegates, with yours truly awkwardly central

Now, ever since I hit the time buffers on this blog in 2017, I have been reporting conferences by listing the papers I went to and then sticking my other remarks below a cut for the interested reader to follow up if they wish. On this occasion, however, I want to write at least something about the actual experience of the conference first, because it had some important and impressive differences from the Western format to which I’m used. Firstly, I suppose, everything was paid for; I remember when that used to be possible in the UK, just, but it was a while back, certainly before this blog. One can get into arguments about where taxpayers’ money should be going, I guess, but it is salutary to realise that the answers aren’t necessarily fixed.³ However, the differences that really struck me could be grouped under two headings, those being tea and languages. And the greater of these, for me at least, might even be tea. For look: if you examine this photo…

Session in progress

… you will observe that everyone, even the beardy foreigner in the pale jacket with his pen in his mouth close to the back of the middle of the picture, has a nice porcelain mug with a lid in front of them. When we entered the conference room those mugs had small piles of auspicious green leaves in them; before we started attendants went round and poured lately-boiled water onto those leaves and put the lids back on; and then, every hour or so thereafter, they came round again and topped them up, because of course for decent green tea you don’t need, or even want, boiling water, and it will sustain several infusions. Indeed, I understand that with some teas you just throw the first one out because what you’re really after is the subtleties that come out in the second one, but dear reader, I digress. During lunch new mugs were set out and we were set up again for the afternoon. When I compare this to the desperate scrabble between sessions for the inadequate coffee at most Western conferences, it is hard not to feel that we were guests of a more anciently civilised culture than our own, I tell you. The coffee breaks were still there, but the caffeine was now a vestigial part of them because what they were really for was to enable the conversations between papers that are actually the important part of the academic conference. So this all worked rather well.

And then languages. At this point I had no functional Chinese (and even now I can manage very little more than greetings and very basic questions about menus), and a good few of the speakers had no functional English. This is not to say that people here didn’t know languages: one professor gave a very rough greeting speech in English but was able to introduce one of the Western speakers in fluent Greek, I guess because that was what he had needed to learn for what he wanted to do in his career. In general, though, English was not the default second language, which was salutary and a bit challenging, and if that wasn’t enough, a couple of the papers were delivered in Mongolian, which is another thing again. So any two people did not have great odds of understanding each other. But, this didn’t matter too much, because the other thing that there were people doing was immediate, translated summarisation of each paper after it was given, Chinese into English, English into Chinese, Mongolian into both. Questions were also translated this way during discussion. This responsibility was distributed around so that no-one had to do more than two, it was timetabled into the sessions, and it meant that the language barrier, while still very present, could pretty easily be hurdled, or at least messages flung across it in mutually satisfactory fashion. I could go off into speculation about how this worked in previous eras when other people crossed into China – the importance of the intermediary became really obvious in this meeting – but I could probably again be accused of digression. After all, we were here to talk about coins. So what were people talking about? I will list them!

24th June 2017

• Zhāng Qiáng, “Introduction”
• Xú Jiālíng, “Welcome”
• Claudia Sode, “Welcome”
• Wàn Xiáng and Lín Yīng, “Trade Pattern of 1-4 c. CE Silk Road – A Preliminary Study Based on Kushan Coins”
• Stefan Heidemann, “The Islamic Late Antiquity in Western Eurasia: Concepts, Transformation and Monetary Organisation”
• Stefanos Kordosis, “Some Remarks on the Term ‘Fromo’ of a Late 7th-Early 8th c. Bactrian Coin Inscription ‘Fromo Kesaro’ (Caesar of Rome)”

Coffee

• Sven Günther, “The Migration of Motifs as a Qualitative Approach to the Question of Connectivity in Late Antiquity”
• Pagona Papadopoulou, “The Gold of the Emperor: Imitations of Byzantine Coins in Gold in the Mediterranean (5th-8th Centuries)”
• Jonathan Jarrett, “Separated by the Past: Western Coinages from Pseudo-Imperial to Quasi-Independent, 5th to 7th c. AD”

Lunch

• Aleksandr Naymark, “Roman and Byzantine Coins and their Reproduction in Western Central Asia”
• Stefan Heidemann, “The Transition of the Monetary Situation of Khurasan and Transoxiana between the Islamic and T’ang Empire between 600 and 800 A.D.”

Coffee

• Lĭ Qiáng, “The Dynamics of the Studies on the Byzantine Coins and their Imitations discovered in China, 2007-2017”
• Guō Yúnyan, “On the Byzantine Coins Unearthed in China”

Dinner

25th June 2017

• Ankhbayar Batsuui, “Regarding a Coin”
• Erdenebold Lkhagvasuren, “West-East Relations and Nomads: A Study on Coins Discovered in Shordon Bumbagar, Bayannur, Sum Mongolia”
• Odbaatar Tserendorj, “Sassanid Period Silver Coins Collection at National Museum of Mongolia”
• Yngve Karlsson, “Main Features of Sasanian Silver Coins, with Examples from Mongolian National Museum”

Coffee

• Rebecca Darley, “Byzantine Gold Coins in India in Late Antiquity”
• Brigitte Borell, “Coins from Western Lands found in Southeast Asia”
• Li Jinxiu, “Silver Coin and Silver Trading Circles: the Differing Destinies of Persian Silver Coins in Tang Times”⁴

Lunch

• Shi Yang-Xin, “Collection of Ancient Coins from the Silk Road in Xi’an Tang West Market Museum”⁵
• Wang Yongsheng, “Silk Road Coinage: its Definition and Research Value”

Coffee

• Aleksandr Naymark, “Byzantine Influence on Sogdian Monetary Type”
• Responses by Zhang Xushan, Stefan Heidemann, Aleksandr Naymark, Claudia Sode and Lín Yīng

Closing Ceremony and Farewell Drink

It’s harder than usual to write up this conference, because it was so frequently telling me things I had just not previously known. Lín’s article is a neat introduction to the problem that brought us together, but is focused quite reasonably on some particuar Silk Road tombs, and there was so much bigger a picture being put together here, by experts from zones and on zones thousands of miles apart and linked more by sharing an era than by anything else. So it seems best, rather than to comment on individual papers, to try to write some kind of synthesis of what, by the end, I thought I knew about what was going on with coinage eastwards of Byzantium and, for the most part, northwards of India, over the mostly-fifth to more-or-less-ninth centuries. Predictably, given the size of the zone and the number of actors in it, this turned out to be very confusing, but, to me at least, also really interesting, and it got added into my teaching very quickly once I came back.