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”

Finding the Medieval in Rome IV: Teaching with the Crypta Balbi

This gallery contains 23 photos.

I mentioned a little while back that when I started in post at the University of Leeds I inherited a late antique survey module for first-year undergraduates which, indeed, I still run. That module has always ended with a class … Continue reading →

Fomenting New Islands Ideas

Staying where it was relatively safe in mid-2017, the workshop I’ve just described was only the first of three days’ funded activity, which Dr Luca Zavagno and I had scheduled to allow him to do everything we’d been given money for him to do in the UK in a single trip. Whereas the previous day’s work had been on my Frontiers project, we now turned to Luca’s one, The World of Byzantine Islands. Here we’d planned two things in Leeds, the first being a kind of consultation workshop with the most obviously interested medievalists on Leeds’s staff, and the second being a graduate seminar the day after. Actually, in retrospect, I think we might better have planned to do these the other way round, as the way the latter worked was that Luca effectively presented his project in a twenty-minute paper and then invited discussion, whereas in the former the presentation was much quicker, as for peers; I think that in theory he’d have got better discussion for the staff having had the extra day to think about his project having seen the fuller presentation. However, I say only in theory, because actually we got very little take-up for the graduate seminar – my own fault for late publicity as much as anything – and so it became an extension of the already-active discussion from the previous day. So maybe it all went as well as it could have done. Anyway, to write about it now probably means reprising Luca’s project brief, and then picking up on the same kind of points of interest as I did in the previous Frontiers post. There is inevitably some overlap, because several of the same people were involved and thinking with what they’d done the previous day, but I don’t think that was a bad thing either…

So, Luca has of course written about his own project and you can see the brief for it here. Plus which, we have subsequently published on it, together even, and you could also read that.¹ Because of all that I’ll be ultra-short here. Basically, Luca is contending with an established historiography that sees the islands of the Mediterranean as a frontier zone of the Byzantine Empire, and that largely in the sense of a defensive bulwark, peripheral, cut off and generally hostile, both to outsiders to the empire and, sometimes, to outsiders from within the empire.² Luca, whose research in this area started on Cyprus and has now spread, is however aware of an increasingly busy amount of archaeology which suggests that most of the Mediterranean islands remained quite vibrant, both in terms of their connection with the wider empire and of their own ecologies, economies and political self-determination within the imperial sphere.³ Where this leaves Luca is arguing that the islands, and particularly Cyprus, Sicily, Sardinia and the Balearics, maybe also Crete and Malta, all of which were Byzantine long after the land-ward coastlines that would be lost to Islam had been, were not an edge or somehow a central part of a landward territory but a kind of third space, whose characteristics he is now trying to define.⁴

View of the Mediterranean from the part-Byzantine Castell de Santueri (not this part, I suspect), in Felanitx, Mallorca, once a seat of Byzantine island government; image from Mallorca Tourist Guide, no copyright stated

So in the first of these workshops, as I say, Luca gave us less of this than he would in the graduate seminar the next day, I think because he didn’t want to exclude any approaches. As a result, he found himself in the midst of a kind of all-comers ideas tennis, in which the other players, apart from myself, were my colleagues Dr Alan Murray, who had been in on the previous day’s session too and who knew Luca independently, and Professor Emilia Jamroziak, then-Director of the Institute for Medieval Studies at Leeds, as well as Dr Rebecca Darley of Birkbeck, University of London, who is an affiliate of the IMS but was also the third partner in Luca’s project. (Alan and Rebecca also came along to the graduate seminar the next day, but I’m going to concentrate here on the workshop, because it’s there that, going back over my notes, I can see the roots of a lot of things the project ended up generating, and it thus helps to explain a bit what it is that we academics actually get out of the travelling to talk to each other that we’ve largely had to give up this year. I’m not sure if we could have got the same results though video-conferencing, I will admit…)

So. Because Luca had left relatively little defined, we spent the first part of the discussion trying to establish what made good parameters for the project. The high medievalists wanted to know what it was about Luca’s 7th- to 9th-century timeframe that made sense, which is of course the Byzantine-Islamic transition in the islands; but that meant working out what that transition was for the islands and when it happened to them. Even the conquest dates of some of them are not very clear, but there were arguably bigger, slower changes afoot anyway. Rebecca, for example, argued (following Chris Wickham) that the critical change in the government of the Mediterranean in late Antiquity was not that of Islam but of the Vandal capture of North Africa in the early 5th century and the Persian one of Egypt in the very early 7th, both of which broke tax spines that maintained Roman capitals (Rome and Constantinople respectively) and ended the Roman mare nostrum.⁵ Luca pointed out that the islands didn’t necessarily fall out of imperial orbits when the coastlines did, not least because of their role as naval bases, which tended to maintain other features of control too.⁶ Nonetheless, we coalesced around the idea that cultural change might have been happening at different times and in different directions from place to place, or even the same things happening for different reasons, such as settlement moving off the coasts, which could be either because fewer people were coming to these places across the sea, making trade less viable a living and port cities less useful (as may have happened in Malta) or contrarily because more people were coming by sea and they were dangerous (as is supposed to have happened in the Balearics—but see my subsequent article on that…).⁷

The citadel of Mdina, Malta, another erstwhile site of Byzantine island government, image by 5-five-5, copyright not stated, linked through

With the idea of variation sort of established, I tried to apply that favourite intellectual jemmy of mine, scale, to try and group the variations and thus be able still to say something general about the change.⁸ It seemed to me that not all the Mediterranean islands could have had the same range of options in the period: some were too small to defend themselves, and some too big to be closed off from seaward access. I still think this is important, but in fact in the subsequent publication, it was Rebecca who really took this point and made it useful, whereas I kind of dropped it, so I’m not sure how much credit I can take.⁹ Still, it is interesting to review the notes and see the sharing of ideas that generated those papers which became articles; as I say, it maybe justifies the whole endeavour…

Perhaps the most interesting idea, though, at least for me, came from none of the project partners but from Professor Jamroziak, who rightly said that none of the categories by which we seemed to want to define ‘islands’ managed to include all Luca’s test cases terribly well and that we seemed to need a new definition or category. If not, he might have to deal with the possibility that things which were not, geographically, islands, still shared all the important characteristics of them. This really sparked thoughts for me, as I started coming with Byzantine landward fringe settlements that might fit. I should have thought of the various city-states down the Adriatic coast, like Ragusa or Dubrovnik, which was still basically an independent town in the tenth century as Emperor Constantine VII records, but what I actually thought of was Byzantium’s Crimean outpost at Cherson and the Islamic military colony at la Garde-Freinet, near modern Saint-Tropez.¹⁰ And you can see that this sank deep from what I ended up writing for the project.¹¹ I don’t think I really gave Emilia the credit she was due for that thought in that piece, though; so, belatedly, I do so now. She started that hare, and my thanks to her!

Old city of Dubrovnik, Croatia, site of Byzantine coastal government but for a long time linked to Byzantium only by sea; ‘island’? Image by Diego Delso, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons

By the end of this workshop, then, we’d all more or less prevailed upon Luca to develop a more variegated model of change in his study area, to reconsider his chronological scope and to rethink his optimistic view of connectivity as always being sufficient to have much effect on society or, if it did, always being positive. This last argument was still going on in the publication, indeed, but the use of the workshop was pretty clear and when Luca’s book on all this emerges you’ll be able to see where we were any help!¹² This was not by any means what we spent most of that grant money on—in fact, we weren’t even able to spend all we’d got and had to give some back—but if I’ve shown you how it might have been usefully spent even so, then my purpose here is achieved, for today anyway…

---

1. Luca Zavagno, Rebecca Darley and Jonathan Jarrett, “Editorial” in Al-Masāq Vol. 31 (Abingdon 2019), pp. 129–139, DOI: 10.1080/09503110.2019.1596645.

2. Perhaps centred upon Elizabeth Malamut, Les îles de l’Empire byzantin, VIIIe‒XIIe siècles, Byzantina Sorbonensia 8 & 9 (Paris 1988), 2 vols.

3. For Luca’s work on Cyprus see Luca Zavagno, Cyprus between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (ca. 600-800): an island in transition, Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Studies 21 (London 2017).

4. See for an early take on these issues Luca Zavagno, “‘Islands in the stream’: toward a new history of the large islands of the Byzantine Mediterranean in the early Middle Ages ca. 600 – ca. 800” in Mediterranean Historical Review Vol. 33 (Abingdon 2018), pp. 149–177, DOI: 10.1080/09518967.2018.1535393; now see Zavagno, “‘No Island is an Island’: The Byzantine Mediterranean in the Early Middle Ages (600s-850s)”, The Legends Journal of European History Studies, Supplement 1 (Tokat 2020), pp. 57-80, DOI: 10.29228/legends.44375, and between the two one can set Zavagno, “‘Going to the Extremes’: The Balearics and Cyprus in the Early Medieval Byzantine Insular System” in al-Masāq Vol. 31 (Abingdon 2019), pp. 140–157, DOI: 10.1080/09503110.2019.1602375.

5. Based on Chris Wickham, ‘The Other Transition: from the Ancient World to Feudalism’ in Past & Present no. 103 (Oxford 1984), pp. 3–36, DOI: 10.1093/past/103.1.3, revised in Wickham, Land and Power: studies in Italian and European social history, 400–1200 (London 1994), pp. 7–42.

6. On the navy in the period see most obviously Salvatore Cosentino, “Constans II and the Byzantine navy” in Byzantinische Zeitschrift Vol. 100 (Berlin 2008), pp. 577-603, DOI: 10.1515/BYZS.2008.577.

7. Jonathan Jarrett, “Nests of Pirates? ‘Islandness’ in the Balearic Islands and la-Garde-Freinet” in Al-Masāq Vol. 31 (Abingdon 2019), pp. 196–222, DOI: 10.1080/09503110.2019.1600101 at pp. 199-204 for the Balearics and pp. 218-220 for Malta, largely based on Nathaniel Cutajar, Core & Periphery: Mdina and Ħal Safi in the 9th and 10th Centuries, ed. Godwin Vella, Medieval Malta 1 (Valletta 2018), for my copy of which I must thank the author.

8. My tools here come from Julio Escalona, “The Early Middle Ages: A Scale-Based Approach” in Julio Escalona and Andrew Reynolds (edd.), Scale and Scale Change in the Early Middle Ages, The Medieval Countryside 6 (Turnhout 2011), pp. 9–30, DOI: 10.1484/M.TMC-EB.3.4766.

9. See Rebecca Darley, “The Island Frontier: Socotra, Sri Lanka and the Shape of Commerce in the Late Antique Western Indian Ocean” in Al-Masāq Vol. 31 (Abingdon 2019), pp. 223–241, DOI: 10.1080/09503110.2019.1604930 at pp. 239-241.

10. Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De Administrando Imperii, ed. Gyula Moravcsik & transl. Romilly J. H. Jenkins, rev. edn., Dumbarton Oaks Texts 1 (Washington DC 1967; reprinted 1993 and 2008), cap. 29 (pp. 122-139) covers the various cities of the Dalmatian coast, including Ragusa, and for what it’s worth cap. 53 (pp. 259-287) gives an extensive and mostly legendary account of Cherson.

11. Jarrett, “‘Nests of Pirates’?”, pp. 212-218.

12. It should be coming out pretty soon as Luca Zavagno, The Byzantine Insular World: beyond the periphery (Amsterdam forthcoming).

Globalizing Byzantium from Birmingham

The last thing I promised I’d write about from the quarter-slice of 2017 through which this blog’s backlog is presently proceeding was the 50th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, from 25th to 27th March of that year. There are plenty of stories that could be told about this conference, starting with the whole story of the Spring Symposium, which has, as that title suggests, been happening for 50 years, rotating away from and back to Birmingham like a short-duration comet; or one could tell the story of its founder, Anthony Bryer, who had died the previous year and so was being extensively commemorated here; or how it had fallen in this year upon Professor Leslie Brubaker and my two erstwhile Barber Institute collaborators, Rebecca Darley and Daniel Reynolds, to organise it (which earns one the title of ‘Symposiarch’); but for me the chief story is probably always going to be how I arrived as a guest and was converted to presenter at twenty minutes’ notice and still more or less got away with it. So if that intrigues you, or if an international conference on Byzantine Studies does indeed, read on, and for the rest of you, since this post is long, I shall simply set out the running order of what I saw, then stick a cut in and expound at greater length beyond it. So! Here we go.

By now-ancient tradition, the organisation of the Spring Symposium wherever it is held is two-level, with keynote lectures and plenary sessions to which the whole gathering can go at one level, and at the other ‘communications’, these being shorter papers which run in parallel strands. On this occasion there was also a third part, in the form of a postgraduate workshop following the main proceedings. All this together means that my academic itinerary through the conference went like this:

25th March
• Michael Whitby, “Welcome”
• Leslie Brubaker, “What is Global Byzantium?”
• Catherine Holmes, “Global Byzantium: a Whirlwind Romance or Fundamental Paradigm Shift?”

Coffee break

• Rebecca Darley, “India in the Byzantine Worldview”
• Antony Eastmond, “Constantinople: Local Centre and Global Peripheries”
• Francesca dell’Acqua, “What about Greek(s) in Eighth- and Ninth-Century Italy?”

Lunch

• Matthew Kinloch, “Historiographies of Reconquest: Constantinople, Iberia and the Danelaw”
• Maroula Perisanidi, “Clerical Marriage in Comparative Perspective”
• Kristian Hansen-Schmidt, “Constantine’s Μονοχυλα: Canoe or Viking Ship?”
• Lauren Wainwright, “Import, Export: the Global Impact of Byzantine Marriage Alliances during the 10th Century”
• Jeffrey Brubaker, “What is Byzantine about ‘Byzantine Diplomacy’?”
• Adrián Elías Negro Cortes, “Tributes Linked to Military Actions in Both Ends of the Mediterranean: from Byzantium to Spain”

Tea

• Corisande Fenwick, “Forgotten Africa and the Global Middle Ages”
• Tim Greenwood, “Composing History at the Margins of Empire: Armenian Chronicles in Comparative Perspective”
• John Haldon, “A ‘Global’ Empire: the Structures of East Roman Longevity”
• Robin Milner-Gulland, “Ultimate Russia – Ultimate Byzantium”

Champagne Bus and Conference Dinner¹

26th March

• Liz James, “Byzantine Art – A Global Art? Looking beyond Byzantium”
• Hugh Kennedy, “The State as an Econmic Actor in Byzantium and the Caliphate c. 650-c. 950: A Cross-Cultural Comparison”
• Angeliki Lymberopoulou, “‘Maniera Greca’ and Renaissance Europe: More Than Meets the Eye”
• Henry Maguire, “Magical Signs in Byzantium and Islam: A Global Language”

Coffee

• Julia Galliker, “Silk in the Byzantine World: Transmission and Technology”
• Eduardo Manzano Moreno, “Attracting Poles: Byzantium, al-Andalus and the Shaping of the Mediterranean in the 10th Century”

Lunch and Auction

• Claudia Rapp, “Secluded Place or Global Magnet? The Monastery of Saint Catherine on the Sinai and its Manuscript Collection”
• Robert Ousterhout, “The ‘Helladic Paradigm’ in a Global Perspective”
• Arietta Papaconstantinou, “Spice Odysseys: Exotic ‘Stuff’ and its Imaginary”

Tea

• Hajnalka Herold, “How Byzantine was 9th-Century Moravia? An Archaeological Perspective”
• Nik Matheou, “New Rome & Caucasia, c. 900-1100: Empire, Elitedom and Identity in a Global Perspective”
• Alexandra Vukovich, “A Facet of Byzantium’s Ideological Reach: the Case of Byzantine Imitation Coins”
• Andrew Small, “‘From the Halls of Tadmakka to the Shores of Sicily’: Byzantine Italy and Sub-Saharan Africa in the 11th century”, read by Nik Matheou
• Flavia Vanni, “Transferring Skills and Techniques across the Mediterranean: Some Preliminary Remarks on Stucco in Italy and Byzantium”

Wine Reception

27th March

• Peter Sarris, “Centre or Periphery? Constantinople and the Eurasian Trading System at the End of Antiquity”
• Linda Safran, “Teaching Byzantine Art in China: Some Thoughts on Global Reception”
• Daniel Reynolds, “Jerusalem and the Fabrication of a Global City”

Coffee, then a closing round table session as follows:

• Fotini Kondyli, “Material Culture”
• Margaret Mullett, “Global Literature”
• Joanna Story, “The View from… the West”
• Scott Redford, “Byzantium and the Islamic World: Global Perspectives?”
• Naomi Standen, “East Asia”
• Chris Wickham, “Final Remarks”

That’s exhausting even to have typed out, and I certainly can’t come up with something to say about every paper at three years’ remove without basically repeating my already-somewhat illegible notes, so instead I’ll try to pull some general trends out of that list and then focus particularly on the theme and people’s approaches to it. What with me not really being a Byzantinist, that may mean a slightly odd selection, but you’re used to that, I know. Everybody involved deserves a better press than this will give them, but there just isn’t sensible space.² In any case, now you can see what the rest of the post may look like, this is a good place for the cut and then the deeply interested can continue at their leisure.

Chronicle VI: October-December 2016

University and College Union pickets at the University of Leeds

Well, just as with the last time I wrote one of these, we are still on strike again, so there is now time to write it. With the trip to Istanbul that immediately preceded the start of term now finally dealt with, it’s time again to look at my life academic as it stood at the current date of my backlog, sadly the end of 2016 but for once I am catching up, and take stock of what was going on and, of course, what of it still merits blogging about!

Frontiers Day at the 2016 International Medieval Congress

When, two posts ago, I recounted what still seemed worth recounting of the first three days of the 2016 International Medieval Congress at Leeds, you may have noticed that because of now being employed by the host university, I was involved in a lot more sessions as moderator than in previous years. This is the deal I get as staff, effectively; I can go to the Congress for free, because they can hardly charge me for coming to work, but they expect me to do my bit to keep it running. So my timetable for the Congress is now a lot more preset than you’d ordinarily expect. But on the last day of the 2016 edition, though my timetable was entirely fixed, it was down to me, because that was when the sessions I’d organised for my Rethinking the Medieval Frontier project happened, and since that was my doing and I was in them all it seemed worth giving them their own post.

1510. Rethinking the Medieval Frontier, I: Control and Authority in the Iberian Peninsula, 5th–10th Centuries

There are only three regular sessions on the last day of the Congress, and none of them are the slots you’d choose; the first one is early morning after the dance, so attendance is weaker and more woebegone than usual, and by the third, which is after lunch, most people have already set out for home. The second one is better than those, but still thinly populated. I couldn’t have planned for this, except out of bloody-minded certainty that I’d get the hangover slot, which has happened to me at a quarter of my IMCs (I have just counted) and two-thirds of my Kalamazoos, but as it happened I put the most Iberian-focused of my three sessions first, with me in it, and so hangover slot again it was but at least I had there most of the people I actually wanted to hear it. The more-or-less-willing participants and their titles were these:

• Sam Ottewill-Soulsby, “The Long Frontier: The Ebro Valley from the 5th to the 9th Centuries”

Sam started us off with the intelligent argument that the Christian-Muslim frontier on the Ebro valley from the eighth to eleventh centuries has an obvious, religious, dynamic to it but actually the area had been a frontier space for long before that, repeatedly in rebellion against the rest of the Visigothic kingdom when that was going, in rebellion against its own Muslim superiors when Charlemagne first led an army into it, and before long also in rebellion against his son Louis the Pious. There was something about the space that made it a unit that was hard to control from a distance, and Sam saw this as a brake on bigger changes that might want to affect it. I would have liked more on the last bit, but the main point was a sharp one that I have continued to think with.

• Jonathan Jarrett, “Heartland and Frontier from the Perspective of the Banū Qāsī”

This paper’s task was firstly to synthesize in English the quite large amount of recent scholarship there has been about the archetypal Muslim frontier warlord family, the Banū Qāsī, which was slightly embarrassing as the man who’d written much of that was in the audience to hear me repeating him back to himself.¹ Its point in the session was that the Banū Qāsī, with a position in that same hard-to-control space from which the Umayyad Muslim régime couldn’t easily displace them, so that they could only control it through them, and strong links to the nascent Basque kingdom at Pamplona which made the Banū Qāsī the sole agents of peace on that northern frontier, meant that they could choose where the frontier was—on the northern border of Pamplona when they were working for the régime, and on the south of the Ebro zone when they weren’t, switchable with a simple agreement. Their own frontier status was what made them powerful, and in the end, I argued, while the central régime wisely promoted an alternative family step by step into an alternative option for them, they also displaced the Banū Qāsī by aggressively marking the frontier to their south; once the family were placed outside, they lost their position as brokers for their northern allies and thus any value they could bring southwards.

• Albert Pratdesaba, “Battlefront Ter-Llobregat: Traces of Carolingian Forward Operating Bases in Catalonia”

Lastly in this first session, Albert, whom I’d met on my then-recent trip to l’Esquerda where he was then digging, got us down to the ground of this frontier we were all three discussing, looking for place-names of fortification on the Carolingian edge and matching those that have been dug up to any wider patterns going. At all of l’Esquerda, Roca del Pujol and Savellana they’ve found post-holes that could have supported a wooden guard-tower, such as which they have subsequently attempted to reconstruct at l’Esquerda.² The initial Carolingian line of defence is now quite closely mappable, if these places are indeed on it, and while there’s a danger of circularity here the more places they dig and find stuff that matches, the less dangerous that guess will get.

The reconstructed watchtower at l’Esquerda, Roda de Ter, Catalunya

Because I was in it I don’t have notes on the discussion, which is sad. My memory is that all went well, but that the audience was definitely larger for the second, late-morning session.

1610. Rethinking the Medieval Frontier II: Defining and Dissolving Borders in the Late Roman and Byzantine Empires

Although my own frontier of reference is indubitably in the Iberian Peninsula, the ones that have arguably generated the most thinking other than those of modern nation-states are those of the Roman Empire.³ When it became clear we had three papers offered, all of which were about how people in the Empire, in its Roman or later, ‘Byzantine’, phases, understood and strove to define its borders, it was obvious that they belonged together. These were they:

• Thomas Kitchen, “Fatal Permeability: the Roman Frontier in Late Antiquity”

Tom, a friend of mine from back in Cambridge, had been coaxed into returning to the academic sphere for this paper and completely justified my certainty that this would be good by laying out for us a subtle thesis in which Roman borders, geopolitical or social both, were usually very clear but meant to be permeable, with legitimate ways for people and ideas to cross them and be accepted on the more Roman side, even if they retained roles and origins from outside. Tom’s argument was that it’s visible in the writings of contemporaries that this permeability exposed the Empire to identities and sources of status alternative to its own hierarchies with which it became less and less able to compete, often embraced on a temporary basis to survive a certain crisis but never again adequately rivalled by what survived of the older Roman patterns. The most emblematic one of those changes is the adoption of kings where an emperor had once ruled, but it wasn’t the only one and might have been one of the last. The writers of our sources still saw the empire around them, as they walked the same streets and did business in the same buildings, but we can see in their works the changes they wanted to ignore. This was one of those papers that set the audience all thinking whether their own teaching versions of this story could exist alongside this one or needed changing; it seemed clear to everyone that he must be at least sort of right. I was very pleased by this outcome.

• Rebecca Darley, “Trading with the Enemy across the Byzantine-Sasanian Frontier”

This paper had grown out of Rebecca’s persistent encounter with an idea that the Persian Empire was deeply invested in controlling and profiting from international trade.⁴ She went after the best-documented border, that with the Roman/Byzantine Empire, and argued that the sources we have, especially the treaties between the powers reported in Byzantine histories, saw this border as closed and trade across it as a problem, which might feed either of resource or information to a mistrusted enemy. Even the most optimistic communications between the two empires don’t discuss trade as an outcome of their peace, and there isn’t actually any proof that either state took toll at its borders with the other. Highly-placed people whom they could track, like ambassadors, were allowed to do some business on the side, but otherwise they wanted trade happening in certain places under careful watch, if at all. It could always be dispensed with, though: Rebecca pointed to Emperor Justinian I’s blockade of Lazica as an effective sanction on a place that relied on imports, but one which had arisen because of a Persian conquest that was itself possible because of an imperial governor having previously established a monopoly on several of those imports, i. e. excluding the operation of other traders, apparently using state power but to private ends.⁵ Trade was, in other words, not worth it for the state even where, as here, there was literally a captive market, and so it was done on the side even when the state did it. Rebecca argued that we should see these empires as more or less suspicious of and hostile to commerce, rather than reading modern global capitalism back onto their operations.

• Alexander Sarantis, “The Lower Danube Frontier Zone, 441-602”

On the other side of the same Empire, meanwhile, and touching also on Tom’s paper, came Alex Sarantis, looking at the Byzantine border along, and sometimes across, the Danube. He viewed this border in a way that sat between the two other speakers, being a site of local interaction around fortresses but not moving much across it any distance, though some, and being home to a highly militarised, somewhat less civil, Roman culture that nonetheless still stopped at the actual front-line, with roads and cities behind and decentralised rural settlement before. This border was a space with a hard line at one edge, therefore, and a fuzzy one at the other, and as far as they could do so the Romans aimed to soak up and stop movement, both military and commercial, within the space between those lines rather than letting it escape into the Empire. And this more or less worked! The barbarian groups who arrived there all went west in the end, because the border was closed to them.

Two of the questions I had initially posed to the speakers of these sessions, in a sort of agenda document (which you can read here), were whether their borders of concern were open or closed, and whether people crossed them. The response in the two Byzantine cases here seemed clearly to be, ‘closed, but people crossed anyway even though it was risky, and the state could close them properly for short whiles’, whereas Tom had seen the Roman ones as ‘open, with limits’. Modernity suggests that it’s really hard for a state actually to close a border, but our Byzantine sources here are really thinking in terms of bulk trade, ships full of salt rather than a few chickens from a village on the ‘wrong’ side for grandma’s birthday—as so often, scale is a factor—and I can’t help feeling that if all three were right, the Byzantine Empire might here have learnt from its western progenitor’s errors.⁶ Anyway, there was clearly more to be got from getting these people talking to each other!

Entrance to the remains of the Byzantine citadel at Berat, in modern Albania, with a thirteenth-century church guarding rather older fortifications. Image by Jason Rogers – originally posted to Flickr as Berat, licensed under CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

1710. Rethinking the Medieval Frontier, III: Frankish Frontiers, Internal and External

Then, after lunch, fell the slot that nobody wants, in which nonetheless I had three brave speakers and, actually, more audience than I’d feared, because several of the earlier speakers and some of the audience stayed to hear more. I guess we were doing something right! And the beneficiaries of this were these:

• Arkady Hodge, “The Idea of Aquitaine in the Early Middle Ages”

This was a longue durée study of an edge-space for a great many polities, running from the Phoenicians up to the Carolingians, and arguing that while there was quite possibly some consistent core identity here its edges were defined differently by each successive over-power that ruled it, and that its position on the edges of those powers let it alone to remain unchanged in ways that other more central provinces couldn’t. As is often the case with Arkady’s work, it drew on such a broad frame of reference that I wanted to check half a dozen things I’d never heard about before, but it certainly made comparison easier because of that breadth.

• Jakub Kabala, “Rewriting the Border in Carolingian and Ottonian Historiography”

Kuba, our furthest-flung international guest star this time, arguing that borders are mainly mental constructions upon space, decided to look at the same border, the one of the East Frankish kingdom with Slavic-speaking polities, through two sets of eyes, one that of the Carolingian recorder of the Royal Frankish Annals and the other that of Thietmar of Merseburg.⁷ The Annals also have the advantage of going through progressive rewrites as they were adopted as the cores of other texts, and Kuba saw the border becoming clearer in each rewrite, a linear division in development. For the Ottonian writers, however, the border is indefinite, with even Germany only coalescing an edge when barbarians throw themselves against it. He thought that this might be because by then Poland, being on the way to Christianization, represented the outer edge in a way that the Carolingians hadn’t had available, but I thought it might be seen as an attempt to claim an open frontier, into which the Ottonians still hoped to expand as the Carolingians increasingly hadn’t.⁸

• Niall Ó Súillheabáin, “Building Power on Feudal Frontiers: the Case of Landric of Nevers”

Lastly, after these two wide-ranging studies, we ended with a micro-study of an internal frontier, with the Nivernais sitting on the edges of both Burgundy, by the 980s more or less separate from the developing France, and of its old master kingdom in the west, but having also been held in subordination to Aquitaine against both in the recent past. Niall took us through the history of the area’s rulers and their contested loyalties until in the 990s our boy Landric became the first count of actual Nevers, a sort of independence with his own following of locals and a station of enough respect to broker deals between outsiders who thus accepted him as their equal. Nevers managed to become such a space because it could successfully be converted into a buffer everyone around it needed more than they needed the conflict that controlling it would have meant.

The final formal discussion, naturally, spent a while considering whether internal and external frontiers worked the same way, which our sources also seem to be unsure about, but for me mainly emphasised how our sources will tend, naturally enough, to redefine how a border worked according to their particular needs. That is only as much as to say that a critical approach to our texts is needed, and at the end of this session we were well equipped to provide that for each other. Thereafter the session decamped to the bar, where I think the informal discussion was even better. If Catalonia ever starts making whisky it will be because of us, take note…

Still made in Scotland, sorry, doesn’t count

So that was 2016, that was the second year of these sessions and by the end of it we’d had 15 papers on such issues, all quite good. The previous time I attempted anything like that there was a book of the papers out within two years of us finishing; you might ask what’s going on this time. Well, I have had some money for the project, but what I ain’t had is time, and I have also repeatedly had to put work on this aside for higher-profile publications. It is still my intent to get one or two volumes of essays out of Rethinking the Medieval Frontier, not least because some of the people on these panels both deserve and need the exposure, but I’ll have to get external money before that can happen. The rub is that to get that money I’d ideally have some results to show from the project so far… and there, the Catch-22 of modern academia. But, as future posts will occasionally note, the absence of results or even a decent research plan doesn’t preclude people getting quite large grants, so that will have to be the hope for now. Even if I don’t manage to get things up to date here, the project blog on the Leeds website will reflect it quickly when there is any such news to report, and there is more that has already happened that needs reporting here, but as with All That Glitters, something will have to change before I can do with these projects what should be done, i. e. publish them. I continue to work towards that change…

---

1. That being Jesús Lorenzo Jiménez, author of 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. I. Ollich-Castanyer, A. Pratdesaba, M. de Rocafiguera, M. Ocaña, O. Amblàs, M. À. Pujol & D. Serrat, “The Experimental Building of a Wooden Watchtower in the Carolingian Southern Frontier”, Exarc.net, 25th February 2018, online here; for more on the site and area in English see now Imma Ollich-Castanyer, Montserrat Rocafiguera-Espona and Maria Ocaña-Subirana, “The Southern Carolingian Frontier in Marca Hispanica along the River Ter: Roda Civitas and the Archaeological Site of l’Esquerda (Catalonia)” in Neil Christie and Hajnalka Herold (edd.), Fortified Settlements in Early Medieval Europe: defended communities of the 8th-10th centuries (Oxford 2016), pp. 205–217.

3. I’m thinking here especially, as so often, of Edward Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, from the first century A.D. to the third 40th Anniversary edn. (Baltimore MD 2016), opposed by Charles R. Whittaker, Frontiers of the Roman Empire: a social and economic study (Baltimore MD 1994). As you can tell from that, sadly, Luttwak’s work has shown better holding power…

4. This seems more or less to begin with David Whitehouse and Andrew Williamson, “Sasanian Maritime Trade” in Iran Vol. 11 (London 1973), pp. 29–49.

5. The primary source here is Procopius, printed in Procopius, History of the Wars, Books I and II, transl. H. B. Dewing, Loeb Classical Library 61 (London 1914), online here, II.XV.

6. For modern cases, see for example Sahana Ghosh, “Cross-Border Activities in Everyday Life: the Bengal borderland” in Contemporary South Asia Vol. 19 (Abingdon 2011), pp. 49–60, or Margaret E. Dorsey and Miguel Diaz-Barraga, “Beyond Surveillance and Moonscapes: An Alternative Imaginary of the U.S.–Mexico Border Wall” in Visual Anthropology Review Vol. 26 (New York City NY 2010), pp. 128–135.

7. Translations in Bernhard Walter Scholz and Barbara Rogers (edd. & transl.), Carolingian Chronicles: Royal Frankish Annals and Nithard’s Histories, Ann Arbor Paperback 186 (Ann Arbor MI 1972), online here, and Thietmar of Merseburg, Ottonian Germany: the chronicon of Thietmar of Merseburg, transl. David Warner (Manchester 2001).

8. On such language the best recent thing seems to me to be Juan Carlos Arriaga-Rodríguez, “Tres tesis del concepto frontera en la historiografía” in Gerardo Gurza Lavalle (ed.), Tres miradas a la historia contemporánea (San Juan Mixcoac 2013), pp. 9–47.

Leeds International Medieval Congress 2016, reflected upon from a distance

Somehow Action Short of a Strike still looks a lot like a really hard week—the contract I’m working to doesn’t have fixed hours—so I find myself blogging very late on a Sunday. Both because of that and because of the topic, I don’t want to write a long post (though when I say that it never works, not least because of parentheses like these…): what can there be to say about a conference three years ago? On the other hand, in so far as this blog is my academic record, I don’t want to miss it out: I was there, I did things I hope will matter, and I was for the first time able to host friends for it at the house then ours in Leeds, so it was a sociable occasion worth remembering. Indeed, I made quite a few new friends at Leeds 2016, looking back, so some sort of record is needed. I’ll restrict it, however, to a list of the papers I went to and limited commentary where I have some memory or good notes, and I’ll put it behind a cut so as not to bore those who think this a touch too obsessional. If I don’t feature your paper, please blame my memory, not your content; it was a long and tiring conference, as it always is. But I will take the last day in a separate post, because it was sort of a conference within a conference for me, for reasons that will become obvious in that other post. So this is 4th to 6th July 2016 in my world, as it unfolded…

From the Sources XV: Trading in nostalgia in 11th-century Pavia

Posting here with any regularity continues to be difficult; the gaps pretty much coincide with the arrival of marking, and last for as long as it does. None of this is reducing the queue of things I want to talk about, but this post will at least get something out of it. I’ve been meaning to write something about this particular source for three years or so, since my second semester here at Leeds in which I found myself the convenor of an old module that I still run, called ‘Empire and Aftermath: The Mediterranean World from the Second to the Eighth Centuries’. This is more or less a late antique survey of essentially political content, with some pauses to consider other issues, and one of these other issues is the venerable Pirenne thesis, the argument of the early twentieth-century historian of towns Henri Pirenne that despite its political breakdown the Roman world remained an economic and cultural unit until the rise of Islam cut northern and western shores of the Mediterrean off from eastern and southern and ended the commerce on which the whole thing ran.¹ I used to worry about teaching the Pirenne thesis, because it seemed to me like a dead debate and I think focusing on those artificially is a bad illustration to students of what we do, but a recent article by Bonnie Effros has revived it somewhat or, at least, shown why it’s still current, and coincidentally makes a great key secondary reading! But the question I was faced with was what to use as a primary source. How do you show a class with no foreign languages a large-scale economy over the course of a century from which there’s very little relevant written evidence?

Sixth-century imported kitchenwares on display a few stories above the rubbish pits in which they were found in the Crypta Balbi, Rome, photo by yours truly. I have honestly thought of compiling these photos, dodgy though they are, and transcriptions of the museum captions into a source-pack, but thankfully have so far stopped myself. Why isn’t there such a write-up?

Obviously, you have to focus on a case study. My first thought was that I wanted a short clear piece of English writing about the ceramic deposit from the rubbish dump in the Crypta Balbi in Rome, which dramatically shrank then stopped over the seventh century. As far as I can see, though, there isn’t such a piece of writing: I could find use of it as an explanation of stratigraphy in a two-page appendix on ceramics in the period in general, or else just diagrams, and everything else is in Italian.² I even asked someone knowledgeable at the British School of Rome and the best they could suggest was the museum guidebooks, which I duly ordered and were, alas, no use at all for my purposes.³ (The photos came later, and I’ll tell that tale in due course.) So, in the first year I went with the list of travellers from the appendices of Michael McCormick’s Origins of the European Economy, but they’re almost impossible to understand out of the context of the book.⁴ Next year, inspired by a then-recent paper of Chris Wickham’s, I used the letters of Pope Gregory the Great that talk incidentally about Mediterranean shipping, but that wasn’t ideal either because Gregory was pre-Islamic, so could only show a before, not an after.⁵ Now I use a charter supposedly issued by King Chilperic II about tolls on shipping at Marseille, and that sort of works, but it took me a while to find it and it’s still not quite ideal because of its complex textual history and some dubious features.⁶ But this post is about none of these things—though any suggestions and comments would be most welcome—but something I found while looking. (Pirenne does come back at the end, though, there is a plan of sort at work here, honestly.)

This is not the right charter of Chilperic II, but it does do some of the same things; this is a grant to St-Denis from 716 that survives as Paris, Archives nationales, K3/17, image from ARTEM via Wikimedia Commons

If you are a teaching medievalist, or even just a determined enthusiast, you will of course be familiar with that marvellous phenomenon, the old source reader. While either Patrick Geary’s or Barbara Rosenwein’s big newer ones serve teaching purposes very well, the tradition in which they stand is a very long one.⁷ If you’ve really looked at the Internet Medieval Sourcebook you may have noticed quite how much of it has names like Henderson, Thatcher, Ogg and so on attached to it, and to be honest while he’s added to the basic corpus, so does Geary’s in many places, and so indeed does pretty much every other modern anthology I’ve used.⁸ And while the commonest ones are all from the early twentieth-century USA and carry pretty much the same basic content, with a religious and constitutional focus unsurprisingly enough, when you start poking around not only does each of them have one or two things in that only their translators thought were interesting, but also there are some specialist ones constructed because of that thematic focus, these usually being economic.⁹ And in those latter there’s some really interesting stuff, things that not only have people not translated but which not that many people know exists.¹⁰ At least, I didn’t (which I realise is not the same thing). And this post, he finally announces three paragraphs down, is about one of those.

Cover of Robert S. Lopez and Irving W. Raymond (edd./transl.), Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World

The anthology in question is about medieval trade, and like most sourcebooks it’s out to provide documentation for a historical argument—I guess they all are, really, if one accepts that ‘these are the roots of our culture and liberties’ is an argument. That argument is the one of the so-called Commercial Revolution, and accordingly the sourcebook is by the man who came up with that, Robert Lopez, along with some help from one Irving W. Raymond.¹¹ And while the things you’d expect to be there—bits of Genizah documentation, letters from Genoa and so on—are here, so is some really interesting other stuff. I was going to do a run of From the Sources posts about these, but then remembered that because there is a second edition of this book, updated by the late lamented Olivia Remie Constable, they’re all still under copyright.¹² So you can’t have the Lombard slave sale I thought was such a clear example of people-dealing in the early Middle Ages, but I do want to say something about what Lopez and Woodworth bill as ‘Regulations from the Royal Court at Pavia’.¹³ I can’t give it you in full translation, because as I say what Lopez and Raymond gave of it is protected by law, but they didn’t use all of it, so I can give you the rest, and when you have that it starts to look like quite a different, and fascinating, but awkward, source. So, here are some rules that someone in Pavia wanted written down, with the bits that Lopez and Raymond covered in square-bracketed summary with references.¹⁴ As ever this translation is fast and could probably be improved, but I hope it’s accurate enough to justify the argument I’m going to pull from it.

“In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, ever-eternal God. These institutes of the kings of the Lombards, these royal fasces, these honours of this ancient city of Ticinum should be fixed in solid white marble, lest long age should anywhere succeed in abolishing them. This city, the first to hear Christian words and on this account blessed with the Lord among other cities, Saint Syrus did bless at the beginning of his introduction and said: ‘O blessed city, read! No little, but greatly and copiously shall you be called upon within the limits of cities among other towns, praise shall come to thee from the furthest mountains.’ Rome named Pavia and called it her daughter. And just as Rome crowns the emperor in the church of San Pietro with her pope, so does Pavia with her bishop crown the king in the church of San Michaele Maggiore, where there is one round stone with four other round stones. The royal palace is in this city of Pavia, to which and to the royal presence therein are bound to and should come all the princes of Italy, for so fortune stirred up from the deeds of Ausonia councils to be celebrated with mature deliberation and whatever should have been deliberated in the said council to be observed under the beneficence of the king. For Pavia ought to have counts of the palace, who should hold audiences or courts of law for the whole of Italy in every place as if it were before the emperor and to do justice unto everyone; and she should have a missus of the king, and he should resolve disputes throughout Italy according to precept. Pavia should have a royal advocate and palatine judges. Moreover all the judges of Italy should settle cases by sentence. For they used to come to the general school of this blessed city of Pavia from all the cities of Italy to study in the civil law and to learn the laws, and the best and most honoured were the judges of Pavia. The bishops of Pavia stand out from all the cities of Italy. From all the priests of the church of San Siro, from all the clergy who were of this city, there were vouchsafed many divine graces and blessings.
1. “All of you whom touch the love, utility and honour of the kingdom of Lombardy, hear with light and equable spirits, how all of the duties that pertain to the royal chamber and palace and all the royal rights of the Lombards were instituted in ancient times!”
2. [Merchants entering the kingdom paid a tenth of most sorts of produce (horses, slaves, cloth, some metals) at any (maybe all?) of a range of listed toll stations; pilgrims to Rome are exempt.¹⁵]
3. [Anglo-Saxon merchants were also exempt, because they raised so much trouble and complaints that a treaty was brokered by which their king sent a load of luxury goods (silver, dogs (wearing silver), cloaks (probably silver-embroidered…), shields and so on) to the Lombard king every year instead.¹⁶]
4. [Venice had a similar arrangement by which fifty pounds of silver deniers annually and a big cloak buys their merchants free access to all Lombard ports.¹⁷]
5. [Despite that, Venetian merchants coming to actual Pavia paid every fortieth solidus they carried to the monastery of San Martino there, and a delegation from Venice still brings the royal treasurer a pound of pepper, one of cinnamon, one of galanghal and one of ginger annually, plus a comb and mirror or twenty deniers for his wife.¹⁸]
6. [Salerno, Gaeta and Amalfi had the same deal for access to Pavia.¹⁹]
7. [Pavia’s own merchants carry an imperial safe conduct which should get them trouble-free access to all markets in Italy, on pain of a payment of 1,000 mancuses.²⁰]
8. [Pavia’s mint is farmed out to nine masters each year, who are in charge of the moneyers and pay 12 pounds each to the royal treasury annually for the privilege, and another four to the count of the palace; they are to cut off the right hand of any moneyer making false coin.²¹]
9. [Milan can make coins on the same standard as Pavia as long as they pay twelve pounds of them to the royal treasury in Pavia every year; the same rules about forgers apply.²²]
10. “Also there are all the gold-panners who send a levy to Pavia, and they never ought to sell gold to anyone under oath, and they ought to consign it to [the king] and the chamberlain. And they ought to buy all that gold at a rate of two solidi, that is an eighth of an ounce, that is two and a half deniers, for sixteen solidi, that is eleven ounces, in the rivers where they pan for gold, which are these: Padus, Ticinus, Dorica, Sicida, Stura, Misturla, Octo, Amalone and Amalona, Celo, Duria, Blavum, Urba, Salvus, Sesedia, Burmia, Agonia, Ticinus from the Great Lake that runs into Padua. There are also these rivers: Abdua, Oglius, Mentius, Sarno, Adexe, Brenta, Trebia. And they ought to pan for gold in all the other rivers aforesaid.
11. “There are moreover fishermen in Pavia, who should fund one master from all their goods, and they should have sixty ships, and for each one of the ships they ought to give two denari every Kalends; the which kalendular denari they should give to their master, and they ought to make such savings that, when the king is in Pavia, they may use those denari to buy fish and at the same time bring them honourably daily to the court and to give fish to the chamberlain every Friday.
12. “There are also twelve tanners, makers of hides, with twelve juniors, and they should make twelve of their hides from the best cows every year and give them to the royal chamber, so that no [other] man be allowed to make hides. And whoever infringes this, let him pay a hundred Pavian soldi to the royal chamber. And when any one of these tanners first enters, the greater ones ought to give four pounds, half to the royal chamber and half to the other tanners.”
13. [The local boatmen and shipowners also appoint masters, from whom the king and queen each have pre-emption of one ship when they are in Pavia, along with a smaller pilot vessel to clear their passage, all of whose expenses are borne by the court.²³]
14. “And there were soapmakers in Pavia, who used to make soap, and who gave a render every year to the royal chamber of a hundred pounds of soap, and ten pounds of soap to the chamberlain, so that no-one else should make soap in Pavia.
15. There is also a custom with those women, who are rich, but who do not have tutors or guardians, and who wish to marry, that they should come and entreat the chamberlain, so that he may act for god and for the soul of the king, and give them a tutor or guardian and license to marry whom they wish, according to his law; and that woman ought to offer there a best-quality shield and lance, to give to the chamberlain.
16. “There is moreover in the church of San Siro a brass lamp, where the chamberlain ought thrice yearly, at Christmas, Easter and Pentecost, for each one of those festivals, to give a pound of Pavian denari in oil, so that that lamp may be filled and lit for the soul of the king. And the twelve retainers who are wardens in the church of San Siro, ought each one to receive linen clothes and each one a pair of boots and at Easter each one a cloak and cord shoes, so that they guard the emperor’s light well; and as many times as the king enters the church of San Siro in procession, thus he ought to give to those same twelve retainers every year for the king’s soul, so that God may answer their prayers. And two of the retainers of San Michaele Maggiore should receive clothes, just as do the retainers of San Siro.”
17. [No-one is allowed to undertake any of these roles without license from the court, on pain of the bann, and Pavia’s merchants always get first choice in the markets here.²⁴]

Lopez and Raymond stopped there, but actually there’s a load more, and it’s metaphorical gold:

18. “And the abovesaid men, who hold these duties, which are written above, ought not to arrange or hold any meeting except before the king or the chamberlain.
19. “And of all these duties, which are written above, the tenth part belongs to the royal chamber, as a benefice, note, the tenth as a benefice of the king, and from all those same duties that pertain to the king, his wife the queen ought to have the third part.
20. “Know you this, that Gisulf the chamberlain, who was noble and rich, received all those same duties with all honour in the time of King Hugh and his son King Lothar, husband of Adelaide, and in the time of the first King Berengar and in the time of the first Emperor Otto. Once that Emperor Otto was dead, that Gisulf held the chamberlain’s office and his son Ayrald held it after him with all honour, just as did his father, up till the second and third Emperors Otto. With Ayrald the chamberlain having died, Agisulf his son ought to hold the chamberlain’s office, just as his father did.
21. “Then there came that devil who is named John the Greek, who was a very apostate and a heretic, the Bishop of Piacenza, and he was a counsellor of the Greek empress and her son the third Emperor Otto, who was a child, and the king bestowed all those same duties on John the Greek, and he wanted to hold all those same duties which belonged to the royal chamber in his own hand. And he emplaced two of the Greek empress’s slaves, one of them named Siccus and the other Nanus, and gave them all those duties that are written above. And then that accursed John the Greek did not know the difference between the honours of the chamber and the profits of the royal chamber. And then that John and the bad ministers of the Greek empress with her son Otto, who was a child king and a young man, began to put the royal duties up for sale and to give them out in perpetuity and to disperse all those same duties, and those same duties were never afterwards honourable. And Emperor Henry sold many duties, which, since he had no son, the chamber should have inherited as a royal honour. And if he had been a prudent and honourable emperor, such as the empire should have, he would have had all those grants that have been made from these duties of the chamber cut up and the royal chamber assured of its status and permanence, just as it was from ancient times.

“All these honourable duties and very many others should be in Pavia, with the mercy of God and Holy Mary and Saint Syrus, who sends her bishops to Rome so that they ought to receive blessing and unction and consecration from the hand of the Pope. Just as the Apostle who raised the dead is in Rome, so there is Saint Syrus in Pavia who raised three men from the dead and gave sight back to a blind man, which we have never heard that any of the apostles did, and he did other beautiful and marvellous miracles too. In Rome there is one of the four doctors, Saint Gregory. In Pavia is another holy doctor, Augustine. Also by the mercy of God there was a bishop of Pavia who was from the apostolic see in Rome, who was called Peter by name. O glorious city of Pavia, endowed with a hundred and twenty-seven churches and sixteen monasteries, which are well staffed by night and by day and busy praying to the Lord, so that thou may always be saved with the men and women who are in thee, and with the animals and all the goods!”

You see, isn’t it more interesting when you know how it ends? So, let’s consider here. Lopez and Raymond billed this as “a nostalgic list of the rights and incomes lost by the royal treasury in Pavia”, and seamlessly stitch it together with a tale of burgeoning economic forces that made such royal control of trade impossible: the free market and the communes were coming, and tradition could not stand in their way!²⁵ They offer it, therefore, as a source for what had once been, which apparently included royal trading treaties not unlike ones we’ve looked at here before and a variety of things we might reasonably call guilds, somewhat precociously. Predictably, as we can see, Lopez and Raymond were much more interested in anything that was sold or shipped than anything that was not, especially if it looked like royal throttling of free market exchange; their story was of the triumph of the market. But once you have the coda, it’s clear that that was not what the compilers thought was going on. I think, given how much he comes up, it is clear that those compilers were at the church of San Siro, and it looks rather as if they had somehow wound up either inheriting or championing the claim of the would-be third-generation chamberlain Agisulf to whatever rights they themselves didn’t get, which is why we have this odd mish-mash of commercial and ecclesiastical prerogatives. Clearly, what they thought had happened is that a foreign regime with no respect for their rights had barged in and sold all the offices off. They were still out there, the duties were still being charged as far as we can tell; those sailors were probably still paying their denari, the fisherman were still likely piling up money for fish for the court and for all we know twelve really good hides were still dumped at the palace every year, but San Siro and Agisulf weren’t seeing the profits, and that was the real issue.

The Romanesque church of San Michele Maggiore di Pavia, as rebuilt at the end of the eleventh century, a fact that will shortly become significant! Image by Slawojar and licensed under Creative Commons via Wikimedia Commons

What does this mean for the source as used by Lopez and Raymond? Well, firstly it means that since the rights were no longer held by the people who claimed them, we can’t be sure that they all ever were. Presumably they did exist, or granting the claim would mean setting up new infrastructure to try and exact them, and there are other sources we’ve looked at here showing extensive market trade in tenth-century Pavia; but lots of these things might not actually have been effective royal claims. For Lopez and Raymond that maybe didn’t matter; as they said, “it commemorates a regime that was already doomed as the document was drafted”.²⁶ And they may have been right about that, but they were also wrong, or (since Lopez knew his Italian history) more likely quietly misleading, about why it was doomed.

Byantine ivory showing Christ crowning Emperor Otto II and Theophanu in 982, Paris, Musée de Cluny, image by Clio20, licensed under Creative Commons via Wikimedia Commons

The deeper context here, you see, is not economic at all.²⁷ As the source says, Otto III succeeded as a child after his father’s untimely death in 997, and his mother, the Byzantine princess Theophanu, became regent. Perhaps, indeed, she and her cronies didn’t understand how great and magnificent Pavia was supposed to be—from the beginning and end of the source it seems like maybe no-one really can understand this enough. But the problem was not that they gave in to market forces and the clamouring demand for capitalist liquidity; it’s that they didn’t hold court at Pavia. In fact, no-one had done that with any regularity for quite a while. Hugh and Berengar I did, but kings from over the Alps then became Kings of Italy as well as Kings of the Germans with the Ottonian takeover, and obviously then they weren’t there as much. Otto III actually set up in Rome (whose apostles, as we are told here, aren’t a patch on Saint Syrus) and Henry II was barely in Italy at all. Furthermore, when he first came, it was provoked by the need to remove from it a new local king, Arduin, who had been crowned guess where? In Pavia, in San Michaele Maggiore to whose churchwardens the king should be giving fresh linen three times a year but which was actually at this point lying partly ruined after its destruction in 1004, hence the Romanesque rebuild shown above! (You’ll notice there’s no mention of that, or of Arduin, in our source…)

I mean, you can see he had his hands full… Coronation image from Henry II’s own sacramentary, now München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 4456, fol. 33, image public domain via Wikimedia Commons

So Henry was understandably not friendly with the royal city of the Lombards and in any case, he was largely busy elsewhere. Pavia had just ceased to be a major royal centre. The king or emperor didn’t come and eat the fish any more, no-one needed the hides; even the Anglo-Saxon silver, if it was still being sent, was presumably being sent somewhere else. The disconnection and disenfranchisement of the old capital would become such that, as very very long-term readers may remember or else maybe you already know, in 1037 the citizens would actually burn the palace and then claim, when called to account for it, that since there had been no king at the time there was no blame attached to such actions. King Conrad II thought otherwise, and in so judging sort of invented the idea of the king’s two bodies, but that would be a story for another time.²⁸ The thing is, it wasn’t economic change that had made a backwater out of Pavia, it was good old-fashioned royal dynastic politics. Lopez’s Commercial Revolution has quietly stood the test of time nearly as long as Pirenne’s thesis with which we began this post (remember?), but it’s things like this that make me wonder whether, if we poked it, it would begin to come apart in the same way. It makes you wonder why no-one has tried, doesn’t it…?

---

1. Referring of course to Henri Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne, trans. Bernard Miall (London 1939). For historiography on it (huge!) see Bonnie Effros, “The Enduring Attraction of the Pirenne Thesis” in Speculum Vol. 92 (Cambridge MA 2017), pp. 184–208, with many many references.

2. Stratigraphy training: Olof Brandt, “Interpreting the Archaeological Record” in Philip Rousseau (ed.), A Companion to Late Antiquity (Oxford 2009), online here, pp. 156-169 at pp. 160-161; diagrams in Simon Loseby, “The Mediterranean Economy” in Paul Fouracre (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History volume I: c. 500‒c. 700 (Cambridge 2005), pp. 605–638 at p. 609. I think the Italian work of reference would be Daniele Manacorda, Lidia Parola & Alessandra Molinari, “Diletta Romei: la ceramica medioevale di Roma nella stratigrafia della Crypta Balbi” in La ceramica medievale nel Mediterraneo occidentale: (Atti III Congresso Internazionale della Università degli Studi di Siena) (Firenze 1986), pp. 511-544, but I will admit I haven’t read it.

3. I got Daniele Manacorda, “Excavations in the Crypta Balbi, Rome: a survey” in Accordia Research Papers Vol. 1 (Firenze 1990), pp. 73–81 and Daniele Manacorda et al., Crypta Balbi: Museo nazionale romano. English edition, trans. Joanne Berry and Nigel Pollard (Milano 2000), but while both are good, I was after something quite specific.

4. Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, A. D. 300-900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 799-810.

5. Now best found, despite some reservations, as John R. C. Martyn (trans.), The Letters of Gregory the Great, translated, with introduction and notes, 3 vols (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004).

6. Theo Kölzer, Martina Hartmann and Andrea Stieldorf (edd.), Die Urkunden der Merowinger, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Diplomata regum ex stirpe merowingicarum) (Hannover 2001), 2 vols, I doc. no. 171.

7. These days available as Patrick J. Geary (ed./transl.), Readings in Medieval History, 5th edn. (Toronto 2016) and Barbara H. Rosenwein (ed./transl.), Reading the Middle Ages: Sources from Europe, Byzantium and the Islamic World (Toronto 2014), so Toronto profit whichever you buy!

8. Referring respectively to Ernest F. Henderson (ed./transl.), Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages (London 1903, many reprints), online here; Oliver J. Thatcher and Edgar Holmes MacNeal (edd./transl.), A Source Book for Mediæval History: Selected Documents illustrating the History of Europe in the Middle Age (New York 1905), online here; and Frederic Austin Ogg (ed./transl.), A Source Book of Mediæval History: documents illustrative of European life and institutions from the German invasions to the Renaissance (New York 1907), online here.

9. The one of these I’m not using here, hard to get hold of but very interesting, is Roy C. Cave and Herbert H. Coulson (edd./transl.), A Source Book for Medieval Economic History (New York 1965).

10. Though none of them seem to contain the Raffelstetten Inquest. Why not? You’ll just have to carry on getting it here I guess…

11. Robert S. Lopez & Irving W. Raymond (edd./transl.), Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World: Illustrative Documents Translated with an Introduction and Notes (New York 1967). From this would soon come Robert S. Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950–1350 (New York 1971), which is therefore I suppose an example of teaching-led research.

12. Robert S. Lopez, Irving W. Raymond & Olivia Remie Constable (edd./transl.), Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World: Illustrative Documents Translated with an Introduction and Notes, 2nd edn. (New York 2001).

13. Leeds only has the first edition, so the following cites all come from Lopez & Raymond, Medieval Trade, not Lopez, Raymond & Constable. In that first edition the slave sale is doc. 13, pp. 45-46, a Lombard sale of a “boy from the Gallic people”. The “Regulations” are doc. 20, pp. 56-60.

14. The Latin can be found in A. Hofmeister (ed.), “Institvta regalia et ministeria camerae regvm longobardorvm et Honorantiae civitatis papiae” in H. Kaufmann, Hofmeister, G. Leidinger, W. Levison, G. Smidt & E. Assman, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores in folio XXX.3 (Leipzig 1934), pp. 1444-1460, online here.

15. Lopez & Raymond, Medieval Trade, doc. 20 at pp. 56-57.

16. Ibid., pp. 57-58.

17. Ibid., p. 58.

18. Ibid.. I have to admit that this seems very very early to me for galanghal to be coming west, which might make us want to ask about the fourteenth-century preservation of this apparently-eleventh-century text (acknowledged Lopez & Raymond, Medieval Trade, p. 56 n. 26). But I’m not going to ask about it now, because this post is already a massive monster…

19. Ibid., pp. 58-59.

20. Ibid., p. 59.

21. Ibid..

22. Ibid., pp. 59-60.

23. Ibid., p. 60.

24. Ibid..

25. Ibid., p. 56, inc.: “The new economic forces help the bishops undermine the power of the emperor and king, but at the same time they also prepare the future downfall of both bishops and imperial officials and the victory of the free Commune.”

26. Ibid..

27. For what follows see most simply Guiseppe Sergi, “The Kingdom of Italy” in Timothy Reuter (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History volume III: c. 900–c. 1024 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 346–371, and more deeply Giovanni Tabacco, The Struggle for Power in Medieval Italy: structures of political rule, transl. Rosalind Brown Jensen (Cambridge 1989), pp. 144-222.

28. For this, as well as Tabacco, I’d still cite Hagen Keller, “Das Edictum de beneficiis Konrads II. und die Entwicklung des Lehnswesens in der erste Häfte des 11. Jahrhunderts”, in Il Feudalismo nell’alto Medioevo, Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo Vol. 47 (Spoleto 2000), I pp. 227-261, though I realise that that’s not a massively helpful reference to the casual enquirer.

From the Sources XIV: the Raffelstetten Inquest on Toll

Jumping out of the chronology of my backlog for a moment, as I settle into my largest ever teaching load this term I am very glad to be re-running at least one course, my Rule and Reform under Charlemagne and his Successors. Even that has changed, however, and it has just struck me that the changes mean that I will not this year be doing a seminar using the Raffelstetten Inquest on Toll. So I have the translation I used last year sitting around doing nothing, and I thought it could just as usefully go up here where others may be able to use it. What, you may patiently be asking, is the Raffelstetten Inquest? And fair enough if so, because you’d have to be quite deep into Carolingian history to catch even mentions of it.¹ There is a quite reasonable Wikipedia page at the time of writing, but even that doesn’t provide a translation, because as far as I can see there isn’t one.

We are talking about more or less here, Raffelstetten being on the southern shore behind the Ausee, the lakelet at centre left; note that this is still a place where stuff is stuck across the river, though I don't know for what reason...

So, briefly, Raffelstetten is in modern-day Austria in the town of Asten, on the Danube river, and in about 900 it was on the very edge of the freshly-fragmented Carolingian Empire. To wit, it was on the edge of East Francia, under the rule of a king we now know as Louis the Child, son of King Arnulf, himself illegitimate son of King Carloman II, son of King Louis the German, son of Emperor Louis the Pious, son of Charlemagne. Louis ruled 899-911 and was the last Carolingian ruler of anything we could really call Germany, and between 903 and 906 his officials turned up at Raffelstetten, which was at this time a toll station for goods moving up and down the Danube, and recorded for the king what regulations were in force there. This, as you can imagine, is gold-dust for economic historians of the period, who usually have almost no data about types or volumes of trade except what they can intuit from other forms of evidence, but here we have a government actually demonstrating that it attempted to control bulk exchange across its borders.² But, when you look at it, it does begin to appear that their priorities were not necessarily ours, and that was why I was using it to teach with. So, let me put it before you and see if you see what I see.³

Inquisition on the Tolls of Raffelstetten

Let the industry of all of the orthodox faithful, present indeed and future, know that the request and demand of all the Bavarians, namely the bishops, abbots and all of the counts, who were making journeys into eastern parts, had reached King Louis [the Child], saying that they were constrained and coerced by unjust toll and unfair exchanges in those parts. Hearing this with benign ears he, indeed, according to the custom of the kings his ancestors, ordered Margrave Arbo, along with the judges of the easterners, by whom let this be recorded, that he should look into the toll laws and the custom of toll; and he gave power to his messengers Archbishop Theotmar [of Salzburg], Burchard Bishop of the Church of Passau and Count Otachar, to correct this justly and legitimately in his place. And these are the people who swore about the toll in the county of Arbo: the vicar Walto, the vicar Durinc, Gundalperht, Amo, Gerpreht, Pazrich, Diotrich, Aschrich, Arbo, Tunzili, Salacho, Helmwin, Sigimar, Gerolt, Ysac, Salaman, Humperht, another Humperht, Englischah, Azo, Ortimuot, Ruotoh, Emilo, another Durinc, Reinolt, the vicar Eigil, Poto, Eigilo, Ellinger, Otlant, Gundpold, another Gerolt, Otperht, Adalhelm, Tento, Buoto, Wolfker, Rantolf, Kozperht, Graman, Heimo. These and other men, who were nobles in these three counties, having been interrogated (after swearing the oath) by Margrave Arbo in the presence of Archbishop Theotmar and Burchard Bishop of the church of Passau, with Count Otachar sitting with them, in the court in the place which is called Raffelstetten, reported on the toll places and the custom of the toll that used most justly to be paid in the times of Louis and Carloman and the other kings.

1. Ships, indeed, which from the western regions, should afterwards have come out at the wood of Passau, and should wish to beach at Rosdorf or anywhere else and make trade, should give a half-drachm in toll, that is 1 scoto; if they should wish to go downriver to Linz, let there be paid three half-modii per ship, that is three scafils of salt. For slaves and other things let them pay nothing there, but afterwards have license for beaching and trading as far as the Bohemian forest, wherever they shall wish.
2. If anyone from Bavaria should wish to move his salt to his own house, and the ship’s steersman affirms this with an oath, let them pay nothing, but go without trouble.
3. If moreover any free man should have carried out a legitimate trade, paying or saying nothing there, and then this shall have been proved, let him be tolled for it both by ship and by goods. If moreover any slave perpetrates this, let him be bound there, until his lord comes and pays off his fine, and afterwards let him be permitted to leave.
4. If moreover Bavarians or Slavs of that same country should have entered the selfsame region to obtain victuals with slaves or horses or cattle or other furnishings of theirs, let them buy what things are necessary without toll wherever they should wish in the selfsame region. If moreover they should have wished to cross to the selfsame marketplace, let them go halfway across the shore without any constraint; and in other places of the selfsame region let them buy what things they are able to without toll. If it please them better to trade in the selfsame marketplace, let them give the prescribed toll and let them buy whatever they should wish and however much better they can.
5. On the salt paths, moreover, which cross the river Enns by the legitimate street, let them pay a full scafil at Url and let them be forced to pay nothing further. But let the ships there that are from the Traungau pay nothing, but cross without tax. This is to be observed with respect to the Bavarians.
6. The Slavs, indeed, who came out from the Russians or from the Bohemians for purposes of trade, let them have marketplaces wherever [they want] on the bank of the Danube or wherever in Rotthales or in Ried, two lumps from one mule’s load of wax, of which both shall be worth 1 scoto; from one man’s load a lump of the same price; if indeed one should wish to sell slaves or horses, 1 tremissis from one female slave, similarly from 1 male horse, 1 saiga from a slave, similarly from a mare.
7. Also of salt-ships, after they shall have crossed the Bohemian forest, let them have license to buy or sell or beach in no place before they arrive at Ebersburg. There from each legitimate ship, that is one which three man sail, let them pay 3 scafils of salt, and let nothing further be exacted from them, but let them reach Mutarim or wherever shall then have been constituted the salt-market at that time; and let them pay similarly, that is 3 scafils of salt, and no more; and afterwards they shall have free and secure license to sell and buy without any comital fine or the restraint of any person; but however much better a price the buyer and seller should wish to give for their property between themselves, let them have free license in all things.
8. If moreover they should wish to cross to the marketplace of Marahorum, let them pay 1 solidus per ship, according to the estimation of the market at that time, and cross freely; on returning, moreover, let them be forced to pay nothing legitimate.
9. Let merchants, that is, Jews and other traders, wherever they should come from in this same country or other countries, pay the just toll as much for slaves as for other goods, just as they always did in the times of previous kings.

There are many things that interest me about this document, but I don’t really have time to dig into them just now; there’s a lecture that needs finishing. So, just a list of talking points, maybe.

• The tolls really only concern a few sorts of goods, salt most of all but also slaves and wax, horses too, and these are the only named goods. It seems clear that other stuff is being traded, but the state cares much less about it; these are the things for which toll levels are set.
• Those tolls are to be paid in kind, where the goods are salt or wax, but otherwise in cash, except that none of the words used for that money, semidragma, scoto, tremissis, solidus, saiga, are actual Carolingian coins. (Solidus might just be, but it’s unlikely; none had been struck for nearly a century.) It’s not actually clear what people are paying in, but presumably at least some of the time it must have been goods to the agreed value of these units we can’t identify, as it says, “by the estimation of the market at that time”, iuxta estimationem mercationis tunc temporis. Pursuing that point a little distance usually makes peoples’ heads spin. How do we know what a pound, dollar, or whatever, is worth? Is that what’s happening here? And so forth.
• There are ethnicities in play here, but they are not legal categories. There are Slavs on both sides of the river, and those from ‘Bavaria’ as it is here counted have the same rights as the Bavarians, those from Rus’ and Bohemia (the former being a long way to travel!) have different ones. Certainly, it seems to be better to be a Bavarian in these exchanges, but that’s unsurprising given that that’s the side that is running the toll station, and it seems to have been the erosion of that special status that led to the enquiry in the first place, so it obviously wasn’t what everyone wanted.
• It is repeatedly stressed that if people can cut a better deal than these terms give them elsewhere, good luck to ’em. It’s interesting therefore that enough of them felt it was still worth coming to these controlled marketplaces. This tells us something about the opportunities for trade in this world. As with emporia in the West somewhat earlier, these tolls seem only to be practical if buyers were so few that sellers had to go where they were even if it cost them something to do that.
• Another reason for the focus on this place, and for the prominence of salt in the details here, may be that a major route for salt seems to have crossed the Danube here (see no. 5 above), which is presumably why the toll station was where it was (which is, you’ll notice, never actually specified—Raffelstetten is just where the enquiry was held). The idea that salt moved along fixed routes is one we find elsewhere, but I’m not sure anyone’s really thought about why; if it cost you to go these ways, why not go others? The cost must presumably have been quite carefully balanced.⁴
• Lastly, for now, that last clause is interesting, isn’t it? I can see how it could be read as evidence that Jews were dominant in long-distance trade, but to me what it actually seems to say is that there was a class of (professional?) traders, mercatores, among whom Jews were a recognised category, and indeed that all Jews here concerned could be assumed to be such traders, but that these people were actually separate from the normal business operations up and down the Danube here, even though people were apparently trekking all the way from the modern Ukraine to traffic. Is the difference here between people who live by trade and by people who trade what they make or get by other non-market means? If so, what does that do to our picture of early medieval trade, if it mostly wasn’t traders doing it? Yes, I know, generalisation from a single datum, but it’s such an interesting one…

I should leave it there, anyway, but I could go on, and one place I’m conciously not going is into the chronology and whether you’d have seen something like this if you’d been at, say, Frankfurt, a century before. Instead, I invite you to, if you like, and maybe put it before students and see what they see. Enjoy!

---

1. I first found out about it from François-Louis Ganshof, “Note sur l’« inquisitio de theloneis raffelstettensis »” in Le Moyen Âge : revue d’histoire et de philologie Vol. 72 (4^e Séries Vol. 21) (Bruxelles 1966), pp. 197-224, which I was reading just because I had the volume out in order to read something else entirely (probably Lina Malbos, “L’annaliste royale sous Louis le Pieux”, ibid., pp. 225-233) and checked the contents page. I wish there was still time to do this with every volume I borrowed from a library, because you learn so much by doing it…

2. I’m thinking here, of course, of Michael McCormick, The Origins of the European Economy: communications and commerce 300-900 (Cambridge 2001), of which whatever you may think of it it can fairly be said the bulk of its evidence is not actually about trade.

3. Usually in these posts I give the original text in a footnote, but since here that original text is Alfred Boretius & Victor Krause (edd.), Capitularia regum Francorum, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Legum sectio II: Capitularia regum francorum) (Hannover 1897, repr. 2001), 2 vols, II no. 253, which is online here, I won’t as you can just check it yourself. The translation is all my own and if you spot any errors please do say so!

4. There is some work on salt roads in England at least; I know of John Maddicott, “London and Droitwich, c. 650-750: trade, industry and the rise of Mercia” in Anglo-Saxon England Vol. 34 (Cambridge 2005), pp. 7-58, but there must be stuff for the Continent I haven’t found too. On emporia, I suppose we still see Richard Hodges, Dark Age Economics: the origins of towns and trade AD 600-1000, 2nd edn. (London 1989) but a quick search now produces Sauro Gelichi & Hodges (edd.), From One Sea to Another: trading places in the European and Mediterranean early Middle ages. Proceedings of the International Conference, Comacchio, 27th – 29th March 2009 (Turnhout 2012), which I didn’t know about and should obviously look at.

Anglo-Saxon England and the European Union

It is a time of weighty decisions in this part of the world right now. I don’t just mean in the Academy, although today and tomorrow much of the UK one is on strike because of pay that has not kept pace with inflation for some years and personally I am in the middle of quite a lot of marking, some of which will affect people’s fates in ways I can’t foresee but can still worry about. No, I mean that on June 23rd the UK will be turning out to express its opinion about whether it should be in the European Union any longer, even on the rather specialised terms we currently enjoy. As with every political issue these days this has become a matter of men in suits insulting each other and making up random stuff to frighten their electorates, and in some cases other people’s electorates: the President of the USA and the Prime Minister of Canada have both weighed in effectively to threaten Britain, apparently not realising how much of the ‘Leave’ campaign is being driven exactly by a resentment at other countries seemingly intervening in Britain’s decisions. Perhaps they’re actually trying to make sure the ‘Leave’ vote wins. In any case, it all has me wondering what perspective a historian can take on it all. Sheffield’s excellent History Matters blog has a Brexit category but so far only one post under it, and I feel as if more can be said.

Map of the Carolingian Empire under Charlemagne

It seems to me that this is one of the rare episodes where the most relevant parallels are from the early Middle Ages, because there is really only one point prior to the twentieth century when Europe could be considered a single political entity and, importantly, its ruler had not declared an intent to add the British Isles to that (as in the times of Carausius, Napoleon or the guy with the moustache and the painting qualification). That time is the period of the Carolingian Empire, albeit with some pre-echoes under the Carolingians’ Merovingian predecessors, and actually there are some thought-provoking parallels. There’s nothing really new in what follows except its application to now, but I still think that’s worth doing.¹

Obverse of a silver penny of King Offa of Mercia, struck in London by Ethelwald around 785

For a start, we can look at English-European relations in a time of breakdown here and see what happened. In around 796 Charlemagne, King of the Franks and Lombards and Patrician of the Romans, had a letter sent to King Offa of Mercia.² At this point in time Offa was pretty much number one king in England; not only did his Midland kingdom stretch from the Welsh border and the Hwicce (around Gloucestershire) to Lindsey (modern Lincolnshire) but he also held control over Essex, East Anglia (just about), the south-eastern Home Counties and the city of London and had marriage alliances with both King Beorhtric of Wessex and King Æthelred of Northumbria.³ This put him in charge of quite a chunk of the Channel coast and its ports, and whether either side liked it or not that put him in contact with Charlemagne.

A Mayen quernstone, of the sort that Charlemagne probably refers to in his letter to Offa

In that letter Charlemagne was responding to one of Offa’s that we no longer have, and had a number of queries to answer. The letter is thus very revealing about the kind of things that kings dealt with in this era: the free movement of pilgrims from England through Francia, and how to distinguish them from merchants who disguised themselves as pilgrims to escape paying toll; the proper treatment of merchants who admitted as much, and should be protected by the Frankish king according to an old agreement; a renegade priest whom Offa feared had come to Charlemagne to spread accusations about Offa at the Frankish court, but whom Charlemagne had sent on to the pope at Rome; and black quernstones which had until recently been imported into England and which would now be again, as long as Offa would make sure that those exporting English wool cloaks to Francia made them at the old, full length rather than a new shorter one that the Franks didn’t like.⁴ Charlemagne also sent ceremonial clothing to both Offa and Æthelred with which their churchmen could hold memorial services for the recently-deceased Pope Hadrian I, whose death had, we know, grieved Charlemagne deeply.⁵

More black stone, Charlemagne’s epitaph for Pope Hadrian I, still on display in San Pietro di Roma

A lot of this doesn’t seem too far from the modern day, suggesting that some issues keep coming up: we have a kind of Schengen Agreement for certain kinds of travellers, but not those with goods to declare; a certain sort of acceptance of responsibility for foreign nationals; some controversy over appeals to the European court system (here manifest as the king and the pope, but still); and fine-detailed specifications of goods with which, just like the fabled EU regulations on the curvature of certain vegetables, one is surprised and even dismayed to see the European world’s top legislators wasting their time when warfare, migrants and agricultural crisis all needed dealing with.⁶ We know from other letters that Offa and Charlemagne had at one point been sufficiently at odds for Charlemagne actually to close the Frankish Channel ports to traders from Offa’s territories, which will hopefully remain unparalleled whatever happens but reminds us that access is not guaranteed, and Offa was also persistently bothered about Charlemagne playing host to powerful exiles from England, either from Kent or from Northumbria (where King Æthelred would be killed later in 796, making Charlemagne extremely cross with the Northumbrians).⁷ Offa himself would die later that year, indeed, which reminds us that the people who make such treaties tend not to last as long as the consequences, but if you remember the furore about Julian Assange taking refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London you can probably understand that people being protected from vengeance by foreign powers is not a phenomenon that’s stopped nowadays.

Map of England in the time of Offa’s rule, c. 795; I think we could argue about Sussex, but it gives you the idea…

There are also plenty of things that damage the comparison, of course. One of the other things that Offa and Charlemagne seem to have argued about was a possible marriage pact between their children, in which the problem was which side got the other’s daughter for their son.⁸ The UK still has its royalty, of course, but if one of them married into a European royal line (if they could find one with whom they aren’t already consanguineous) it would no longer make a massive difference to the UK’s relations with Europe. That should serve to remind us that whatever the things the early medieval situation shares with the current one, democracy was not one of them; not only would Offa and Charlemagne both have been bewildered by the concept of a referendum, but once you’d explained it they would have thought it subversive and dangerous, and maybe even illegal, and there the modern parallel is really elsewhere in Europe. There’s also important differences in the scale of trade revenue involved, which for our kings might have been significant but was still only a tiny part of their kingdoms’ economy.⁹ And finally, of course, among many other objections that could be raised, the England of Offa was a patchwork of uncomfortably allied rival kingdoms of varying size and strength, all of whom could negotiate with the Franks separately as our letters show, and so is almost more like the European Union of now in structure than like the unified, monarchic and hardly-devolved kingdom of Charlemagne, despite the rough territorial match.

So does the parallel I’ve set up actually tell us anything about the current situation? I think that it does, at least, bring some particular aspects of the situation out that are perhaps not as obvious as they should be. The first of these has already been mentioned, that whatever the outcome is on June 23rd it’s hard to believe the arrangement it sets up will last for long before being modified; all the people who made it will be out of power before very long, and the new lot will have a choice about how much continuity they want. The UK has tinkered with its relationship to Europe every few years for as long as I can remember, after all. The second thing we might take from all this is the reminder that even if the UK does leave the EU, relations with Europe will not just stop dead; the migrant crisis, the continuing importance of NATO, and the simple fact of Europe’s being right there and linked to the UK by a tunnel and high-speed rail link all mean that some kind of relationship between the UK and most of the Continental European states must continue. The referendum will help decide what kind of relationship that will be, but it won’t end it any more than Charlemagne closing the Channel ports ended trade relations between the two powers. That did, however, apparently make quernstones impossible to get for a few years and some parallel to that is very easy to imagine. What European foods do you currently eat you’d be sorry to go without?

My personal candidate: looks horrible, tastes magnificent. By Luigi Versaggi – Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=397091.

But the last thing we might not think of without this prompt is the rôle of Northumbria. Obviously, now that’s part of England, but Scotland is not, and while in Charlemagne’s time the Picts were a whole separate quantity (albeit also in contact with the Continent) now we might be reminded by Offa’s rival kings that Scotland may yet be in a position to reach its own agreements with Europe, when the current alliance falls apart as did that between Mercia and Northumbria and the campaign for secession heats up again.¹⁰ What would that mean? When Scotland looked like devolving properly last time many people talked about moving there to benefit from various more friendly aspects of its fiscal system and so on; if the UK left the EU and then a subsequently separated Scotland rejoined, I think a lot of businesses might look to relocate, and Scotland’s economic case for devolution start to look a lot more survivable. I can’t quite imagine it doing to England what Wessex eventually did to Mercia, but this, and the other points above, might all serve to remind the uncertain voter that there are more voices in this dispute than just UK voters and Brussels.¹¹ Whatever your own priorities are, it might be worth thinking before you vote about Offa, Charlemagne, pilgrims, exiles and even quernstones, and considering just which bits of history we’re about to repeat.

---

1. There are two obvious books that cover this theme, Wilhelm Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century: the Ford Lectures, 1943 (Oxford 1946) and Joanna Story, Carolingian Connections: Anglo-Saxon England and Carolingian Francia, c. 750-870 (Aldershot 2003); both of them offer much more context for all of what follows than I can give here.

2. The letter was probably written by the Northumbrian cleric and teacher Alcuin, since it survives in collections of his other letters, but it went out in Charlemagne’s name. It is printed in Ernst Dümmler (ed.), “Alcuini sive Albini Epistolae” in Dümmler (ed.), Epistolae Ævi Karolini II, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Epistolae in quarto) IV (Berlin 1895, repr. Hannover 1994), online here, pp. 1-481 at no. 100, and translated in Steven Allott (transl.), Alcuin of York, c. A. D. 732 to 804: his life and letters (York 1974), ep. 100, and in Dorothy Whitelock (transl.), English Historical Documents, vol. 1: c. 500-1042, 2nd edn. (London 1979), doc. no. 197.

3. For background on Offa see most quickly Simon Keynes, “The kingdom of the Mercians in the eighth century” in David Hill & Margaret Worthington (edd.), Aethelbald and Offa: two eighth-century kings of Mercia. Papers from a conference held in Manchester in 2000, Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon studies, British Archaeological Reports (British Series) 383 (Oxford 2005), pp. 1-26.

4. On the black stones, see Meinrad Pohl, “Quern-Stones and Tuff as Indicators of Medieval European Trade Patterns” in Papers from the Institute of Archaeology Vol. 20 (London 2010), pp. 148-153, DOI: 10.5334/pia.348, whence the illustration (fig. 1).

5. Charlemagne’s biographer Einhard tells us of the king’s grief at this event in his Vita Karoli, ed. Oswald Holder-Egger as Einhardi Vita Karoli Magni, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi) XXV (Hannover 1911, repr. 1965), online here, trans. David Ganz in idem (ed.), Two Lives of Charlemagne: Einhard and Notker the Stammerer (London 2009), pp. 17-44, III.19. I’m not sure where the memorial is edited, but it is translated in Paul Edward Dutton (transl.), Carolingian Civilization: a reader, 2nd edn. (Peterborough ON 2005), no. 9.4.

6. Admittedly, the obvious migrants, the Vikings, hadn’t really started migrating as yet, though as we have seen here they were a danger; as to the agricultural crisis, 792 and 793 had been famine years in the Carolingian Empire, as is recorded in the Royal Frankish Annals, printed as Friedrich Kurze (ed.), Annales regni Francorum inde ab a. 741 usque ad a. 829, qui dicuntur Annales Laurissenses maiores et Einhardi, Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Scriptores Rerum Germanicum) VI (Hannover 1895; repr. 1950), online here, transl. in Bernard Scholz & Barbara Rogers (transl.), Carolingian Chronicles: Royal Frankish Annals and Nithard’s Histories (Michigan 1972), online here, pp. 35-125, with commentary pp. 2-21, s. aa 792 & 793.

7. In addition to the works in n. 1 above see here Janet L. Nelson, “Carolingian Contacts” in Michelle P. Brown and Carol Ann Farr (edd.), Mercia: an Anglo-Saxon kingdom in Europe (London 2001), pp. 126-143.

8. The source here is the Gesta Abbatum Fontellanensium, printed as Fernand Lohier & Jean Laporte (edd.), Gesta sanctorum patrum Fontanellensis coenobii (Rouen 1936), but I don’t have a detailed cite, only the knowledge that the relevant extract is translated in Whitelock, English Historical Documents doc. no. 20.

9. Opinions differ here, of course: see Chris Wickham, “Overview: production, distribution and demand” in Inge Lyse Hansen & Wickham (edd.), The Long Eighth Century: production, distribution and demand, The Transformation of the Roman World 11 (Leiden 2000), pp. 345-377.

10. On Scotland’s connections to Europe in this era see Patrick Wormald, “The emergence of the ‘Regnum Scottorum’: a Carolingian hegemony?” in Barbara Crawford (ed.), Scotland in Dark Age Britain: the proceedings of a day conference held on 18 February 1995, St John’s House Papers 5 (St Andrews 1996), pp. 131-160; Edward James, “The Continental Context” in Sally M. Foster (ed.), The St. Andrews sarcophagus: a Pictish masterpiece and its international connections (Dublin 1998), pp. 240-249.

11. Simon Keynes, “Mercia and Wessex in the ninth century” in Brown & Farr, Mercia, pp. 310-328.