Stock Take VII: research I can’t do

This isn't the kind of international recognition @UniversityLeeds senior management will want. If they want the strikes to stop they need to tell their negotiators to reach an agreement with @ucu @unisontheunion @unitetheunion #ucuRISING (from @CGTNEurope)https://t.co/wDaeIOV1Ab

— Leeds University UCU (@leedsucu) February 16, 2023

The industrial relations situation between university employers and employees in the UK is getting increasingly surreal. On Friday, with more strikes called for next week, they were paused because progress in the negotiations had got to a point where some goodwill gesture was required. But because ACAS is involved, these negotiations are confidential. Now part of the University and Colleges Union regards this as capitulation with nothing concrete gained and is protesting against the Union leadership. Presumably at this point I am teaching on Tuesday, but it’s not clear. Meanwhile, I wrote most of this on Thursday, while quite angry, and then thought I’d better defang it after I’d slept, and the result is what you have below.

We are so close to real WINS for our most precarious members

Vote YES and keep the pressure on#ucuRISING https://t.co/JjM94D0e6s

— UCU (@ucu) February 18, 2023

Between 2007 and 2009, when this blog was very young and had not succeeded in its then-primary purpose of helping me land an academic job, I did occasional reflexive posts on my academic progress and projects, I guess in order to help me understand where I should be focusing my efforts. I think I would now tell that version of myself that I needed to focus on my actual applications and being positive about everything, but some sort of sense that I’m due another evaluation has been settling on me over the last little while, I suppose since the pandemic, when my employers first told us to stop research and focus on what really mattered, i. e. teaching. They never did rescind that instruction, I should say, but it has come up again during the current industrial dispute. Since this runs along with the threat of 100% pay deduction until the teaching has happened as well, despite the progress towards a settlement at national level, it’s clear where we have got to, and that’s here:

Not, I should say, that it seems as if many people in charge have seen that film. So I wondered, in the light of all this, how my research goals have fared and are faring since I started this job, since as you know it hasn’t all worked out. At first, I thought that the best way to do this would be first to see what had happened with the stuff in the last Stock Take post. Now, as it happens, firstly, that post was private, so you can’t see it; and secondly, most of the stuff in there on which I was seriously working came out in 2011-2013, and then a few more fell out in 2019-2021 because I used them to bargain passing my probation. But it didn’t seem worth going through that when they were all reported here. I also looked at my research goals file, which I hadn’t opened since 2019. The sad thing there is that, while I could now add new plans to it, and change some priorities maybe, nothing can be deleted; nothing in there has moved at all since then. And then I looked at what else has come out since 2011 which was not part of any of these plans, and found it to be two book chapters in Catalan, a book review, two numismatic conference papers (one in Chinese) and a numismatic article that I haven’t even mentioned here (must fix that!), all round roughly the same topic, and a collaborative historiographical article, plus one more book chapter currently in press. And I thought, I don’t need to list all these for you again and what would the interest be anyway?

So instead, I thought I would just take the projects which are in some sense on public record, because they have appeared in my sidebar here as things I am actually working on, and just say when they started, what state they’re in and what if any hope of publication they have, because this time, I’m not taking stock of what I ought to be working on; I’m taking stock of what I can’t. This is the stuff there’s no hope of me giving the world until the silly situation the UK academy has got itself into is at least partially resolved. It’s not going to make any minister cry, but it upsets me somewhat. So this is a vent; please forgive, and something more palatable will follow.

In setting this up, of course, even I have to admit that my plans are never completely realistic, and there is stuff in this list I probably haven’t even tried to work on since first mentioning it or presenting it. So I’ve divided this into two categories, and they express how I accept or don’t that unrealism…

Not My Fault (I Would If I Could)

• Agent of Change: Count Borrell II of Barcelona (945-993) and his Times: well, you’ve heard this story, and this is still my official first priority; but there isn’t any more of it actually written than there was in 2017, there are a lot of documents still to process, as well as the reading which might get it past the reviewers…;
• “Aizó of Ausona: the identity of the rebel of Roda de Ter, 826”, first written as a blog post in 2009, already, but first properly researched and written up 2014, sent out 2015 and flat-rejected, my first time ever; I still think it’s basically sound, though, so it has had some peer feedback and minor revisions since then but not the final edit to make it ready for somewhere else; it basically exists, and was last revised January 2021, but now needs my new knowledge about the supposed Jewish garrison of Osona built in too;
• “Critical diplomatic: a tool for analysing medieval societies”, ultimately derived from the first chapter of my thesis of 2005, presented 2009 and sent out in that form, came back wanting major revisions which I then wasn’t equipped to do but now might be, the how-to-use charters several people have asked me to point them to but which doesn’t exist in English;
• “De Administrandis Marcis: The 10th-Century Frontier with Islam seen from Barcelona and Byzantium”, given as a conference paper in 2015, bound for the first Rethinking the Medieval Frontier volume if that ever occurs but ready to go in and of itself, after some minor updates probably;
• “Documents that Shouldn’t Survive: Preservation from before the Archive in Catalonia and Elsewhere”, first presented as a Problems and Possibilities of Early Medieval Diplomatic paper way back when, in 2007 I think, but not used for the resulting volume on the basis that I was only allowed one chapter (which was, I admit, the longest); revised 2011, since then I have been reading for it now and then, mostly of course the volume of which it might also have been part, and did a skeleton redraft in late 2021, but would have to read a bit more to make it go now; probably my second most practical to resuscitate;
• “Heartland and Frontier from the Perspective of the Banu Qasi, 825-929”, my second Rethinking the Medieval Frontier paper, presented 2016, basically complete, may actually now have a home to go to and of course I can’t do anything to send it there;
• “Keeping it in the Family? Consanguineous Marriage and the Counts of Barcelona, Reviewed”, arisen out of work on Agent of Change above, more or less a critical review of the early medieval part of Martin Aurell, Les noces du comte : mariage et pouvoir en Catalogne (785-1213), Série histoire ancienne et médiévale 32 (Paris 1995); needs more reading to make it clearer why it needs doing for anyone other than me, and hasn’t been brought together as a piece rather than as bits of a chapter about something else, but I’d still like to;
• “Miles or militia: war-service and castle-guard in tenth-century Catalonia”, first presented 2014; sent out as a probation requirement in 2017, and accepted but subject to revisions it’s never been possible to carry out the research for; this one is very much "not my fault";
• “Our Men on the March: middle-men and the negotiation of central power in three early medieval contexts”, 2017 Rethinking the Medieval Frontier paper, bound for the second of those volumes if that ever happens, which is at least some distance off for now;
• “Pictlands: rethinking the composition of the Pictish polity”: based in some sense on this blog-post, exists only as outline notes, and not something I’ve worked on properly for decades, but so much exciting new stuff has been happening in the field lately that I have been reading some of it, in my spare time (really), which makes it the only one of these obviously likely to emerge just now…;¹
• “The ‘Heathrow Hoard’: an emblematic case of antiquities trafficking”, as described here, something I would like to do more with but which derives ultimately from work by someone else whose cooperation I would ideally have and can’t get; exists as their work plus a catalogue by me that really needs checking against the collection, currently impossible.

My Fault (I Haven’t Even Tried)

• All that Glitters: the Byzantine solidus 307-1092: much blogged here, but not much advanced since then; it would ideally be both an article and a book/catalogue, but it means either coordinating six people or doing it rogue and so far I haven’t mustered strength or permission to do either;
• “Arabic-named communities in ninth- and tenth-century Asturias and León, at court and at home”, whose story was told here long ago and which hasn’t changed;
• “Brokedown palaces or Torres dels Moros? Finding the fisc in late-Carolingian Catalonia”, a paper given in summer 2013 and not touched since then;
• Churchmen and the Church in Frontier Catalonia 880-1010, a sort of holding title for a possible book based on the various papers I gave in 2013 about Montpeità and its priests, filled out with my other thoughts about monastery foundation and church structures in this area as a kind of partner to my first book; I haven’t done anything with this since May 2015;
• “Identity of Authority in pre-Catalonia around the end of the Carolingian succession”: to be honest, this is a more of a project folder than an actual work, though I would like to do something under this title at some point, perhaps as a book conclusion;
• “Legends in their own Lifetime? The late Carolingians and Catalonia”, presentation version of “The Continuation of Carolingian Expansion” as mentioned last post, presented 2008, sent out 2010 and has sat ever since that experience bar some updates in 2014; hard to blame anyone else for this;
• “Neo-Goths, Mozarabs and Kings: chronicles versus charters in tenth-century León”, basically the same as “Arabic-named communities” above;
• “The Carolingian Succession to the Visigothic Fisc on the Spanish March”, although presented in 2010 also more of a project than a paper and not one I’ve been pursuing.

And so at the end of that, what do we conclude? Well, to me it looks as if, though some things I’d like to do have just been stopped for a long time, I was still generating new work till 2017 or so, still able to generate conference papers on new topics until about 2018, and in numismatics until 2019 somehow, and then everything bogged down and hasn’t got better. I’ve managed to finish a few things already in process, and I can carry on doing that if pressed, but I’m not making more.

It also, of course, looks as ever as if I think I am working on far too many things at once and feel as if I am working on none. But it is frustrating, to have this many things one would like to say, and to find one’s mouth stopped by other duties too far to say them as anything other than Internet asides. I don’t see how even the current crisis can solve this problem of the university sector; but I do wonder how anyone else is still managing.

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1. The most obvious things that have changed the picture here is the work of the Northern Picts Project, whose work is mostly collected in Gordon Noble & Nicholas Evans (edd.), The King in the North: The Pictish Realms of Fortriu and Ce. Collected Essays Written as Part of the University of Aberdeen’s Northern Picts Project (Edinburgh 2019), but there’s also Alice E. Blackwell (ed.), Scotland in Early Medieval Europe (Leiden 2019) and quite a few monographs, none of which as far as I can tell from abstracts and descriptions say what I want to say, but I will have to, you know, check.

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”

Name in Print XXX: the other parcel from China

A short bonus post for the celebratory weekend, celebrating, well, me again I’m afraid, plus ça change… You remember a few posts ago I wrote about receiving a fairly unexpected Chinese translation of one of my conference papers in the post? If you do remember, one of the reasons it was unexpected was that while I heard nothing about its progress into print, I had heard lots about the progress of another conference paper I’d given in China some time before, in a story I have already told. Well, a few weeks ago that one also arrived with me.

Cover of Sven Günther, Li Qiang, Lin Ying and Claudia Sode (edd.), From Constantinople to Chang’an: Byzantine Gold Coins in the World of Late Antiquity. Papers Read at the International Conference in Changchun, China, 23‒26 June 2017, Supplements to the Journal of Ancient Civilizations 8 (Changchun 2021)

Although it’s not as much of a shock as the previous one was, this too has wound up looking rather different from what I’d expected. The original plan was for the papers we’d all presented in Changchun to emerge as a special issue of the Journal of Ancient Civilizations which is edited in the Institute for the History of Ancient Civilizations that had hosted us.

The same volume next to vol. 32/1 of the Journal of Ancient Civilizations, like large child with small parent

The actual year of appearance, however, was originally to be 2020, which unhappily coincided with that pandemic of which you may have heard tell, and of course that fell on China first. So everything there became difficult, and not just for that reason. In any case, the perpetual shuffling of this special issue was messing up the journal timetable, it was also a lot more material than they usually publish in an issue, and there is also a series of supplements to the journal. So, at some point very late on in the process, it became clear to me that that is what would be happening with ours, that the covers would be red and cloth not blue and paper, and this is what I now have.

Opening page of Jonathan Jarrett, "Coinage in the Western World at the End of the Roman Empire and After: Tradition, Imitation and Innovation" in Günther, Qiang, Lin and Sode, Constantinople to Chang’an, pp. 31–74

Now, this doesn’t necessarily make the paper more accessible; the book is more expensive than the journal would be and even if your library has a subscription to the JAC – which some do, don’t be like that now – they probably don’t get the supplements. And yet I do want people to be getting hold of this, because the paper I wrote I wrote fully intending it to be nothing less than an up-to-date, thought-provoking, student-accessible and copiously-illustrated guide to what happened to coinage in the various zones of the Roman Empire over the period about 400 to 700 CE which I could set to my own students (and you could set to yours!). It checks in on the coinage at the turn of the years 400, 500, 600 and 700, observes changes descriptively, and then addresses major issues like continuity and imitation, and there are seventy-odd illustrations, for which I laid out an entire year’s research expenses, in order to create the for-now-definitive one-stop article-length introduction to coinage in the late and post-Roman worlds. Mad, they called me, mad, I who have created numismatics! And so on. But dammit, it is rather good.¹

Figures 49–60 of Jarrett, "Coinage in the Western World", pp. 70–71

So, if this sounds like a thing you would want to read, or to make others read that you might educate them, and you have an institutional budget to support you, please try and get hold of the book; I am far from the only interesting thing in there, especially if you care about Byzantine (or Sasanian) coinage out of place, and IHAC does good work, including supporting foreign scholars and encouraging East-West dialogue, in an area of China far from Beijing or Shanghai.² If you just have spare cash and like well-made books of interesting content, consider buying it too maybe, because the country which invented paper does make pretty nice books (and this is one). But if you don’t have the money and feel you might still benefit from my dubious expertise here, you can also find the article in a reduced-quality version on my Academia.edu page, with IHAC’s permission, so do feel free to enjoy that instead (or as well!). I’m pretty pleased with it and hope you will be too.

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1. Full citation, as per, is Jonathan Jarrett, “Coinage in the Western World at the End of the Roman Empire and After: Tradition, Imitation and Innovation” 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. 31–74. Of that, a slightly frightening pp. 52-61 is bibliography and pp. 62-74 are figures, so it’s not as frightening a read as that makes it sound. I owe tremendous thanks to many people for making images available, but especially Maria Vrij at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham, whence came most of them, and to the British Museum, CGB Monnaies, the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Harvard College and Ruth Pliego for not charging for their images.

2. Admittedly, right now I admit I can’t find any way that you can buy it, but hopefully that situation will ease and if people want it I can try and find out how that can be done in present circumstances; leave a comment or send me mail and I’ll do what I can. Meanwhile, other tempting highlights might be Pagona Papadopoulou, “The Gold of the Emperor: Imitations of Byzantine Gold Coins in the Mediterranean (5th-7th Centuries), pp. 1–30, Rebecca Darley, “Byzantine Gold Coins and Peninsular India’s Late Antiquity”, pp. 135–169, Li Qiang, “Trends and Dynamics in the Study of Byzantine Coins and their Imitations Unearthed in China: 2007‒2017”, pp. 193‒206, Guo Yunyan, “Classification of Byzantine Gold Coins and Imitations Found in China”, pp. 207‒240, Lkhagvasuren Erdenebold, “East-West Relations and Nomads: a Short Introduction to the Tomb of Shoroon Bumbagar, Bayannuur Soum, Mongolia”, pp. 241–257 for those Sasanian finds, or Brigitte Borell, “Coins from Western Lands Found in Southeast Asia”, pp. 277–314.

What to remember from the 2018 International Medieval Congress?

Although I feel that it probably is a sign that I am catching up on my blogged past, I have to admit that I face the fact that the next thing in my blog pile is the International Medieval Congress of three-and-a-half years ago with a certain unwillingness. I mean, I’ve spent much of the last two years either trying to stay off or being told I can’t go onto the campus where it happened, for a start, so there is definitely a sense that this is deep past which doesn’t have so much to do with time as experience. But I’ve done all the rest and the format for them seems pretty well worked out now, and so I will give it a go.

Postcard advertisement from the IMC website

This was, I am reminded as I fish the programme off the shelf, the 25th International Medieval Congress, and the programme is the fattest of all the ones on that shelf. I can’t actually work out how many sessions there were: it says that there were 392 sessions on the conference theme of Memory, 9 keynote lectures and 394 further sessions, plus 4 lectures, so I think it’s 799, but firstly I’m not sure if that was everything and secondly, that was the programme as initially published, not the result of all the subsequent changes you find in the also-thick booklet of changes when you register. And in any case, however many sessions there are, you still can’t go to more than 17 because that’s how many slots there are in the programme, which is massively parallel, and most delegates won’t manage that because of their feeble needs for food and sleep or because of wisely placing socialising with people you otherwise never see over more direct forms of academic engagement. I do like, however, how this means that it’s probably mathematically possible for more paths through the Congress to exist than there are attendees, since there were this year 2,545 attendees and, if my GCSE maths does not fail me, 1 x 53 x 1 x 54 x 54 x 13 = 2,009,124 possible combinations of sessions just on the Monday not including any of the receptions. How would we know if it got too big? Anyway, this just means that what I have done the last few times, just listing my own path and then offering a few remarks where things still stand out for me, seems like the best approach still, because I can’t give an impression of 2 million plus possible other Congress experiences in one blog post, now can I? So mine is below the cut, day by day with brief commentary on each day to lighten the data dump. As ever, I’m happy to try and answer questions about the papers if people have them, but I will try and stay short unless you do. Here we go!

My first keynote address was about frontiers (of course)

As warned, this is a slight post, which I hope to make up for tomorrow. Its slightness is because after the previous post from my academic life of the past, I looked at what was next and discovered it was something which, for professional reasons, I’d already written about, and what that was a postgraduate conference that happened in May 2018 entitled Boundaries and Frontiers in the Middle Ages, at the University of Nottingham.

Cover image of the conference materials, apparently a colourised version of a woodcut of the city of Constantinople from the 1494 Nuremberg Chronicle; thanks to Gary Vellenzer for the attribution!

Now, you may reasonably ask why I was interested in a postgraduate conference, being rather far in years from that status by now, and indeed, I usually avoid them since I assume that they are in some sense supposed to be safe space where scary senior academics don’t turn up and frighten people. (As a phenomenon, they rather postdate my own postgraduate studies, but even then I figured that if one had to pay for a conference, one should at least pay to meet people who could help you up, so I stuck to the full-strength ones.) But in this case I’m very glad I did go, and the reasons I was interested were threefold. Firstly, frontiers, obviously. Secondly, one of the organisers was now-Dr Marco Panato, who had spoken in my own frontiers conference but a month before. And thirdly, they’d asked me to deliver the keynote…

Now, as you can deduce, I had never been asked to be a keynote speaker before, and I have to say, they made the experience an extremely good one. But! I did already write about this, by way of generating material for the Rethinking the Medieval Frontier blog back in 2018 itself. So if this interests you, you can go and read more about what was said there. Here is the link:

Further conferring on frontiers

And just so that you have some reason, I’ll give the running order of the other papers below. And then I’ll leave you to make your own decisions and be back again tomorrow with a report on a day-workshop we did at Leeds about working in the heritage sector. So tune in again then!

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Faith-Based Boundaries

• Esther Lewis, ‘The Parish, Suburb and City: A Discussion of Boundaries in the Pious Lives of Fifteenth-Century Bristolians’
• Tim McManus, ‘The Disgusting Languedoc: Boundaries of the Mind and the Revival of Heresy in the 12th Century’
• Virgina Ghelarducci, ‘Behind That Wall: Jewish Communities and Ambiguities of Neighbourliness in Medieval Spain’

Occupational Boundaries

• Mark Robinson, ‘Men of Blood: The Church’s Textual Response to Mercenary Violence, 1179-1215’
• Christopher Booth, ‘Physician, Apothecary, Surgeon or Quack? The Medieval Roots of Professional Boundaries in Later Medieval Practice’

Dividing and Connecting Polities

• Alessandro Carabia, ‘Living in a Frontier Region in Late Sixth Century Byzantine Italy’
• Callum Watson, ‘Crossing the Boundary Between Scottish and English in Barbour’s Bruce‘
• Carl Dixon, ‘The Teeth of the Taurus: Understanding the Frontiers of Asia Minor, c.650-950’
• Alex M. Feldman, ‘Bullion, Barter and Borders in the Rus’ Coinless Period, 11-14th c.’

“Real” Boundaries

• Christopher Tinmouth, ‘Frontiers of Faith: The Impact of the Insular British Frontier upon the Identity of Furness Abbey’
• Harry Wilkinson, ‘Between Day and Night in Anglo-Saxon England’
• Robin Alexander Shields, ‘The Epirote Frontier – the Republic of Venice and Carlo II Tocco’
• Katherine Rich, ‘High Paths, Poetic Feet: Walking the Boundaries in Saga Verse’

Conceptual Boundaries

• James Aitcheson, ‘Dreams Come True: Predicting the Future in Late Anglo-Saxon England’
• Julia O’Connell, ‘Emotional Boundaries in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess’
• Markus Eldegard Mindrebø, ‘Boundaries of Female Agency in the Ynglinga Saga’

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.

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.