Name in Print XXXI: those aren’t folles

I owe apologies for sporadic blogging again; it’s been a difficult couple of weeks, is all I can say, and also that forthcoming posts need photographs I haven’t yet processed. But we’re getting there, and to start with here’s the post I realised that I hadn’t written in the last post, announcing my almost-most-recent publication. This is one of those insider stories, kind of. You may remember I gave a paper in China looking at the Emperor Anastasius’s reform of the Roman-or-Byzantine base-metal coinage and suggesting that it was not in fact a popular move at the time? If, for some reason, you’ve actually read that, which bearing in mind that the official version is in Chinese with English footnotes might, I grant you, be difficult—there is an English text online here—you’ll know that there’s a kind of throwaway section near the end suggesting that the reform coins of 40-nummi which we usually call folles probably weren’t called that at the time.¹

Copper-alloy 40-nummi coin of Emperor Anastasius I struck at Constantinople in 498-512, Birmingham, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, B0036

So that was as far as I had intended to take that. Every time I write something numismatic I think it will be the last thing, and then someone asks me for another paper and I can’t refuse them for some reason. This time the reason was that there was being constructed a volume of articles in honour of Miquel Crusafont i Sabater, one of the most important numismatists in Catalonia and someone whose work I helped see into English back when I worked at the Fitzwilliam Museum.² After presenting that work in Catalonia, I met Jaume Boada, who nowadays edits the journal of the Societat Catalana d’Estudis Numismàtics, Acta Numismàtica, which En Miquel started and was therefore the best place to publish essays in his honour, and Jaume very kindly thought I should be in it. That happened in mid-2021, and I thought that he was right and I should. But the only thing I even possibly had was the idea that folles weren’t called folles.

Cover of Acta Numismàtica Vol. 52, Homenatge al Dr. Miquel Crusafont (Barcelona 2022),

For some reason I was worried this wouldn’t make much of an article. By the time I’d worked it up, however, it had become almost 9,000 words, with a table and stuff, and had meant not just quite a lot of reading of really bad metrology (A. H. M. Jones was indubitably a brilliant historian – but never ever trust his sums!³) but also doing that thing that we can now do to perform an end-run on almost all older scholarship, that is, electronic search of digital corpora, which led me into having to handle both Greek and papyri, sometimes together, neither of which are things in which I have any real training. If this all worked out, it’s only because of the work of Roger Bagnall and because of two incomparable databases, Papyri.info and the Perseus Digital Library Word Study Tool, which have allowed me to mobilise the brains of others to patch what I don’t know in a way that scholars of twenty years ago just couldn’t have done.⁴ Even so I’ve already found one mistake, which I can only hope doesn’t get perpetuated, and rested part of my argument on an old article by Michael Hendy which I have subsequently learned is now considered not to be right, a rare thing for Hendy.⁵ But for all that, I think I might still be right, overall. So what does it say?

First page of Jonathan Jarrett, "Follis or follaron? The name of the Byzantine coin of 40 nummi" in Acta numismàtica Vol. 52 (Barcelona 2022), pp. 225–248

Well, here’s the abstract I sent in:

The standard term for a Byzantine base-metal coin is follis, but this word is older than the coins that numismatists so name, meaning especially a bagged amount of currency, a usage which overlapped with the coins. This article shows that when the first such coins were introduced, in the reform of Anastasius I in 498 CE, contemporaries in fact called them follares, not folleis. The article sets out the evidence for this, and disarms apparent evidence for the term follis as meaning coins. It concludes that numismatists and curators should probably abandon the term follis for coins before at least the reign of Justin II (565-85 CE).

World-changing? Perhaps not. But the people it was meant for liked it and that’s what counts. Of course, none of them are normally concerned with Byzantine coinage, and in that respect this was an odd place to put the article.⁶ But I wouldn’t have written it if these people hadn’t asked! So maybe by mentioning it here I can start getting the word out more widely. I haven’t actually put it online, which I realise doesn’t help, but for those that need it I can probably find a file to send you…

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1. 加莱特乔纳森, ‘拜占庭帝国的市场交易与阿纳斯塔修斯一世的货币改革’, transl. 张 月, in 王春法 (ed.), 货币与王朝: 国际视野下钱币的影响与改变 (北京 2021), pp. 266–276 at pp. 275-276.

2. Miquel Crusafont, Anna M. Balaguer and Philip Grierson, Medieval European Coinage, with a catalogue of the coins in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 6: The Iberian Peninsula (Cambridge 2013).

3. And specifically the sums in A. H. M. Jones, “The Origin and Early History of the Follis” in Journal of Roman Studies Vol. 49 (London 1959), pp. 34–38, where for example over pp. 36-38 he had to found a sum on the premise that pork prices in Rome were the same in 363 and 452 (p. 36) despite the fact that he admitted massive inflation over the period (p. 37) and documented prices twice as high in Egypt in between (p. 38), and I’m afraid it’s almost all like that.

4. The Bagnall work specifically Roger S. Bagnall, Currency and Inflation in Fourth Century Egypt, Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists Supplement 5 (Chico CA 1985), found online here, a really helpful little book.

5. That being Michael F. Hendy, “On the Administrative Basis of the Byzantine Coinage c. 400-c. 900 and the Reforms of Heraclius” in University of Birmingham Historical Journal Vol. 12 (Birmingham 1970), pp. 129–154, which I now find overthrown by work such as Andrei Gandila, “Free Market, Black Market or No Market? Money and Annona in the Northeastern Balkans (Sixth to Seventh Century)” in Journal of Late Antiquity Vol. 14 (Baltimore MD 2021), pp. 294–334, not someone I carelessly gainsay! Neither was Hendy, of course, but as we have seen even Homer could nod.

6. Citation for you: Jonathan Jarrett, “Follis or follaron? The name of the Byzantine coin of 40 nummi” in Acta numismàtica Vol. 52 (Barcelona 2022), pp. 225–248.

Stock Take VII: research I can’t do

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

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

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

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

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

— UCU (@ucu) February 18, 2023

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

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

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

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

Not My Fault (I Would If I Could)

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

My Fault (I Haven’t Even Tried)

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

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

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

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

Look over there! A free article!

Solidarity forever! Fantastic march and rally by all the Leeds HE trade unions. #AngryLibrarians #ucuRISING pic.twitter.com/fwMcUuRcuU

— Dr Eleanor Warren (@elmwarren) November 30, 2022

Ladies and gentlemen, I have been a bit absent of recent days, nay, weeks, and I’m sorry. Even this is just a placeholder, to say that despite Action Short of Strike somehow I don’t seem to have more time but rather the reverse, that this semester was in theory lightly loaded but has still nearly done me in, and that the week before last I had the partial excuse of actually having been out picketing – I’m in that trail above somewhere, but I still don’t have my pension back somehow – and then this week we’ve had no home internet for a lot of the time, which now seems to be fixed – just in time for the work internet to break down, in fact! But I still haven’t actually written you a proper blog post (and I warn you, when I do, it will be gloomy, sorry; events have again taken over my program).

But, one small slice of good news first! You may remember I wrote an article a little while back about how all the scholarship that says early medieval crop yields were dismal is unfounded, that the maths on which that assessment rests was always meaninglessly bad but we can do better, and that all this means that founding a medieval progress narrative on technical progress in agriculture just doesn’t work and we need a better reason for any progress narratives we still want for the period? But perhaps you didn’t then immediately snap it up because it was only available behind a paywall? Well, it has emerged, and you can now download it for free by the good graces of the British Agricultural History Society, here:

Click to access 67_1_Jarrett.pdf

So, you know, by all means do that! It is probably still the most important thing I’ve written…

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You don’t need the citation, probably, but just in case, it is: Jonathan Jarrett, “Outgrowing the Dark Ages: agrarian productivity in Carolingian Europe re-evaluated” in Agricultural History Review Vol. 67 (Reading 2019), pp. 1–28.

Name in Lights XI

It seems to have been rather a while since I last used a subject header in this series, so it might be worth explaining to those who’ve started reading since 2015 (!) that, by long if not necessarily sensible tradition, this is how I report digital-only publications (by analogy with my other self-congratulatory series, Name in Print). From this you will immediately realise that I have one to report, but it’s quite an unusual one, being firstly historiographical and secondly heavily collaborative, and I want to tell you a bit about how it came about. It’s a new piece in the journal History Compass, one of several ‘Compass’ journals started by the publishers Blackwell just before their absorption by John Wiley & Co., which aim to provide rapid article-length introductions to what’s going on the history-writing of particular fields, for people trying to pick them or recover mastery of them for research or teaching purposes. They’re very useful, and quite high-profile, but of course since they are not original research we in the UK system aren’t really encouraged to produce them, except sometimes by our own dire need in teaching.

So I wouldn’t have written this article by myself, probably, but in recent years I have become part of a group of mostly young or mid-career scholars of the history of the early medieval Iberian Peninsula, from several disciplines and countries, imaginatively called Early Medieval Iberia. We have a website and everything! I was originally asked to participate as someone the others knew who worked on Catalonia in the period, but we’ve expanded since then and have genuine cross-border cooperation going on now, which is amazing. The first thing we all did together was a set of sessions at the 2018 International Medieval Congress, far enough back that I’ve actually reported on it here; those papers are now on their way to press as a book, and we have other things afoot, but in between times we have done this article! Its purpose is basically to say to anyone interested, hey: not only are there really a lot of charters from early medieval Iberia, but also now a great proportion of them are published, in good editions, and you can do some really good work with them; some people already have, but the possibilities are now much greater. And we did this, basically, by each sending in a short section on our particular patch, and then Álvaro Carvajal, André Marques and Graham Barrett, especially Álvaro, painstakingly stitching it all together into a single piece and then us all revising it through Google Docs, several times over, and then sending it in. And once we did that, it was accepted pretty much without changes and then typeset and online almost before we’d had time to breathe, and so I can announce it to you! It is Open Access, which was kindly paid for by the Universidad de Salamanca, and the full citation is:

Álvaro Carvajal Castro, André Evangelista Marques, Graham Barrett, Letícia Agúndez San Miguel, Ainoa Castro Correa, Marcos Fernández Ferreiro, Jonathan Jarrett, David Peterson, Rosa Quetglas Munar, José Carlos Sánchez Pardo, Igor Santos Salazar & Guillermo Tomás Faci, “Towards a trans-regional approach to early medieval Iberia” in History Compass Vol. 20 (Chichester 2022), e12743, DOI: 10.1111/hic3.12743.

As a result of this rapid process, the statistics on this one are kind of unbeatable. It went through 12 drafts, says the Google Docs trail, but I contributed to only four of them and that didn’t take me long – I guess it took the three lead writers a bit longer, of course – and we sent it in at the very beginning of February this year and had it accepted before the end of April. If I ever see a publication turnaround faster than this, I’ll be delighted. And meanwhile, I can very much cope with this collaborative mode. Thanks to my co-authors, and especially Álvaro, André and Graham, for making it so easy to be part of something really useful!

Making things official without officials

For my second post for the weekend, I hope you’ll forgive me if I point you at some blogging I already did elsewhere. This, as with so much of my posting, goes back to 2019, when I managed to get a probation-saving article out in the fairly well-regarded journal Social History. Shortly after that had happened, they sent me an invitation to write a blog post about it, to boost its readership, and I probably thought something like, “just done that, mate” and the idea got lost in the flow of ongoing employment. But this year, with so much time working to contract, I’ve actually had time to get my e-mail more under control again, and found the offer at what had become the bottom of my INBOX. And I thought, “if they’re still interested, maybe this would be cool”. And they were, so I did it.

http://socialhistoryblog.com/official-records-without-officials-by-jonathan-jarrett/

It’s about a document, a double document in fact, whose job it was, I quote myself, to “create a social memory of the transaction which might later be called on when needed”. But do go and see how it did it and why that matters… I may not be able to post next week or maybe the week after, so hopefully this is some compensation!

Why not syndicate with ACI?

Some time ago now, I got an e-mail from someone offering to publicise this blog for me. This happens now and then, and is usually either search engine optimisation or someone trying to launch some kind of aggregator platform that they want me reciprocally to advertise. In all these cases I decline; the blog already ranks high enough in web searches and, if it doesn’t rank as high as it used to, that’s actually good in some ways. Quite apart from the sometimes inexplicable nature of some of that traffic, it’s a pain searching for images for your teaching or blog posts and finding that the best, but still wrong, hits for what you want are things you already put on the web yourself. Anyway, this is a post about such an offer which I also declined, back in 2019, but which I had to think harder about, because it may not have been a scam as such, but I thought at the time that it was still doing things wrong in some ways, and I think I still do. But it deserves thought.

The company in question was called ACI Information Group, though it began and now still exists as Newstex, and what they offered was not being on a page of links with a hundred competitors, but something more curated, which was firstly, syndication, so that anything I posted would be passed to databases of scholarly blogging apparently being maintained by several providers, including LexisNexis and (at that time, but no longer) ProQuest, against each of whom I have slightly irrational animus. Secondly, however, and more powerfully, they would register each of my posts with a DOI (digital object identifier) so that it could more easily be cited. It was actually the second of these that deterred me. As I say, the blog is pretty findable anyway and although I have a fraction of the page-views here I once had (approximately a hundredth of the glory days of 2009-11), I have close to 800 subscribers, some whom I suspect of actually reading the thing, so my publicity machinery probably works about as well as anyone’s can who stays off Twitter, Facebook or Instagram (to name the platforms of the moment; come back in twelve years and see which of these names needs changing…) So the syndication probably wouldn’t have got me much. But they obviously thought that the treatment of my blogging as if it were a scholarly resource would attract me and it had the opposite effect, so, why?

Well, two things. Firstly there’s the economics of it, and secondly there’s the question of blogging as scholarship. Economics is easier to explain, as it’s basically the great Internet maxim, “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” Registering DOIs costs a lot of money, so the only reason it makes sense for someone to do that for me is because it makes it easier for them to sell my content to LexisNexis and ProQuest. Likewise, it only makes sense for those concerns to buy that content if they are themselves then selling subscriptions to the databases. Now, electronic subscription costs are the biggest millstone around the neck of academic information; they rise every year and if you cut them, you lose the lot, nothing on the shelf to keep, nothing except spare budget from the vanishment of information you used to have. But this case would have been especially annoying, as the content these people would have been paying for was on the web for free in the first place; all ACI and then their patrons were charging for was putting it in front of people so that those people didn’t have to find it themselves. Firstly, I’m not sure that actually would have got me any new readers; but secondly, it puts me in the position of the authors whose ancient books go onto the web for free and then wind up for sale on Amazon and so on as print-on-demand copies made from the free PDFs their printers hope people won’t find. I didn’t want to endorse that economy.

But as I say, that wasn’t actually my big objection, and the second one takes more explaining because it involves the question of whether blogging counts as scholarship.¹ Now, you might argue that anyone who will cheerfully perpetrate multi-thousand-word blog posts with twenty-plus footnotes each is in a bad place to argue that it’s not; and certainly I hope that my blogging is at least scholarly. But really, unless I’m actually writing about stuff I was researching for some other purpose, I don’t have time to research stuff that goes up here very deeply, and long-term readers will know that this sometimes catches me and I have to make corrections. But those updates and corrections never go out to susbcribed readers, who just get the initial, faulty version dropped into their feeds or INBOXes. I have occasionally done library work to substantiate a blog post, but I do try not to have to. I link to sources I would not cite in fully academic writing, and I check fewer things in general. It’s not done to the same standard.²

You might say in response to that that some of the things I’ve posted here have actually become scholarly publications, so must have been pretty like scholarship and may even have been it. But let’s look at that more closely. In 2007 I had a short conversation with Jinty Nelson about crop yields and she repeated to me something from her excellent book Charles the Bald that set me onto the question of how far I believed Georges Duby’s old story that early medieval crop yields were really poor.³ I wrote something about that here in 2010 which was the germ of the argument which became my 2019 article on the subject.⁴ But the 9-year gestation time was really important. In the course of it, I got a small grant to support presenting the research at Kalamazoo; I got important feedback there; I then read a lot more and in 2013, I think, I sent a draft off to Chris Wickham (whom I had by then met and indeed worked with), who told me other things I needed to read, which not only provided vital missing data but also led me massively to shrink a whole section of the argument about experimental archaeology. And then, of course, I actually submitted the thing and it went past expert reviewers who also made suggestions about further reading and changes. The eventual 2019 version, therefore, had had masses more packed into it, some other stuff dropped or shrunk, and had been past numerous different experts all of whom knew stuff I didn’t. It was better, it was different and I still think it’s right and one of the most important things I’ve written. And yes, it started here, but that really was only the start. The central idea is the same but the explanation of it changed hugely. I wouldn’t now want anyone citing the old blog post when they could be citing, you know, the good version. I’m not averse to having the blog in general cited, at all, but only when there’s nothing better; the main reason I footnote is so that you, the reader, might know what there is that’s better.

So what I’m essentially saying, I suppose, is that real scholarship, the stuff you can hopefully rely on, comes from possibly-years of work and emerges in conversation with others; you can’t just blag it. I’m not necessarily singing out for the efficacy of the peer review system here, about which I (like everyone who’s been through it, probably) have my doubts; but something like it needs to happen. If a writer of a scholarly proposition isn’t willing to listen to other people’s doubts and suggestions, there really isn’t any mechanism by which everyone else, or even the writer themselves, can differentiate that proposition from personal delusion. Some would doubtles argue that the academy just reinforces the delusions it likes to maintain collectively that way; but there’s got to be some checking process before something can proceed to acceptance. And when this offer was made to me, I just felt that sticking a DOI on anything I might have come up with an afternoon was cutting that pathway to acceptance too short, even if it hadn’t also meant someone else getting to charge money for work out of which I got nothing.

Furthermore, one might also want to consider what else would be in those databases that would have been the end product of all of this. My blogposts probably imitate the scholarly form too much, but others might do so too little. I’ve read some actually really good analyses on blogs I still can’t cite, because as they themselves don’t make it clear where their information comes from, I can’t be sure it’s not just repeated from somewhere else without attribution. If a huge pile of those became a searchable resource being sold to academic libraries as credible scholarship, well, anyone could be in there repeating stuff from anywhere. Curation might obviate this, but you’d never be sure without resorting to outside checks (though ordinary academic publication is getting pretty hard to filter like this anyway).⁵ Who are an electronic information company to judge whether I know what I’m talking about? Or anyone else? Of course, there is definitely still a problem, despite open access, in making the knowledge of tested and acknowledged experts available to everyone who wants it, even other experts—and companies like ProQuest have their share of blame to bear for that—but since this would be a subscription resource, it isn’t solving that problem.⁶ It’s all a bit of a threat to the idea of expertise to entertain this devil’s bargain. And without the idea of expertise, to be honest, the academy is sunk anyway; it is one of the many planks without which our ship will not sail. So when I saw someone trying to cut that plank short on my own ship, I told them no. I hope that still makes sense.

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1. Of course, I have pedigree disagreeing with others on this: see Alex Sayf Cummings and Jomathan Jarrett, “Only Typing? Informal Writing, Blogging, and the Academy” in Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki (edd.), Writing History in the Digital Age (Ann Arbor MI 2013), pp. 246–258, online here.

2. I should say that the exception to almost everything I say here about my blog is my ancient piece “Material Motivations for Participation in the First Crusade” in A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe, 13th January 2007, online here, which isn’t actually a blog post but an article I could never find a home for and put here instead. It wasn’t peer-reviewed in any sense when I posted it except that I’d asked one senior Crusaderist to look over it and he’d called it OK; but since then I’ve, rather flatteringly, had colleagues want to cite it because no-one else quite says what it says. And also, it’s open to comment, the comments are part of the 15-year record it has and I don’t intend to do anything else with it, so you may as well cite it if you want to. But for the rest of the blog, it’s either not worth citing or I’m working on a better version…

3. Janet L. Nelson, Charles the Bald (London 1992), p. 27; Georges Duby, “Le problème des techniques agricoles” in Agricoltura e mondo rurale in Occidente nell’alto medioevo, Settimane di studio del Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo 13 (Spoleto 1966), pp. 267–284; Duby, L’économie rurale et la vie des campagnes dans l’occident médiéval (France, Angleterre, Empire, IX–XV siècles) (Paris 1964), transl. Cynthia Postan as Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West (London 1968), pp. 25–27 of the translation; Duby, Guerriers et paysans, VII–XII^e siècle: premier essor de l’économie européenne (Paris 1973), transl. Howard B. Clarke as Duby, The early growth of the European economy: warriors and peasants from the seventh to the twelfth century (London 1974), pp. 25–29 of the translation.

4. Jonathan Jarrett, “Outgrowing the Dark Ages: agrarian productivity in Carolingian Europe re-evaluated” in Agricultural History Review Vol. 67 (Reading 2019), pp. 1–28.

5. Jeffrey Beall, “What I learned from predatory publishers” in Biochemia medica Vol. 27 (Zagreb 2017), pp. 273–278.

6. Nigel Vincent & Chris Wickham (edd.), Debating Open Access (London 2013), online here; Rebecca Darley, Daniel Reynolds & Chris Wickham, Open Access Journals in Humanities and Social Science: a British Academy research project (London 2014); Plan S and the History Journal Landscape, by Margot Finn, Guidance Paper (London 2019), online here.

Name in Print XXX: the other parcel from China

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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1. Full citation, as per, is Jonathan Jarrett, “Coinage in the Western World at the End of the Roman Empire and After: Tradition, Imitation and Innovation” in Sven Günther, Li Qiang, Lin Ying and Claudia Sode (edd.), From Constantinople to Chang’an: Byzantine Gold Coins in the World of Late Antiquity, Supplements to the Journal of Ancient Civilizations 8 (Changchun 2021), pp. 31–74. Of that, a slightly frightening pp. 52-61 is bibliography and pp. 62-74 are figures, so it’s not as frightening a read as that makes it sound. I owe tremendous thanks to many people for making images available, but especially Maria Vrij at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham, whence came most of them, and to the British Museum, CGB Monnaies, the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Harvard College and Ruth Pliego for not charging for their images.

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

Name in Print XXIX: at long last Casserres

Last post I promised news as well as olds, and here is the first of them. (I’m not saying they’re all publications – but they might be!) You would have to have a really long memory of this blog to remember the beginning of this story, but the goods news (in a way) is that I’ve blogged pretty much every dogged step of the way except the very first one, which took place in 2004, ante bloggum and therefore time immemorial. In summary, with links, the story goes like this:

1. Your humble author, having had his first ever article accepted very easily, sent another one out hoping for the same, and got a pretty thorough revise-and-resubmit, which, being a student still, he took badly and sat upon for years. The bit that stung particularly was reviewer #1 saying, more or less, “it’s not clear that this author has ever seen any of the original documents”, and this stung because, although I still don’t think it made any difference to the argument, it was true. I therefore fomented a plan to publish something using unpublished material – if only I could find some…
2. A little later, in 2006, I no longer know how, I discovered that the charters of Sant Pere de Casserres were in fact such an unpublished cache, and my target was set. In 2008 I finally got to see them, and discovered that the sequence of originals only starts in 1006, but also that the earliest ones in that sequence have some decided peculiarities, and that therefore there was a paper here.
3. I started work on that paper, but it became more complicated when the inestimable Catalunya Romànica explained to me that there also survives an altar slab from the monastery church, which is covered in scratched-on names, which the relevant authors thought were of my period.¹ This opened up the possibility of matching the names on the slab, such as they were recorded, to the ones in the charters, which as I thought, only I knew. And I wrote that all up and presented it at the International Medieval Congress in 2009, and decided that I had to go and see the place.
4. But at this point, the first two complications arose. Firstly, in that 2008 trip to Catalonia I had got my own copies of the volumes of the Catalunya Carolíngia volumes for Osona and Manresa, and by now I was slowly working through them.² And this exposed to me that, while the original documents for Sant Pere de Casserres did indeed only start in 1006, in the 1980s an 18th-century manuscript containing abstracts of earlier documents from the archive had been found in a Tarragona bookshop, and was now available for consultation in Vic. Lots of the documents were in the Catalunya Carolíngia, but obviously I couldn’t know how many were not without going to see. So I started planning that.
5. Before I could, though, a second complication solved the first, which was that Irene Llop Jordana published an edition of the Casserres charters, and because it was free to the web I found it.³ In one sense this was great, as it included the 18th-century abstracts and the original material so obviated the immediate need for a trip to Vic; but in another it was very annoying, as firstly I quite like trips to Vic, and secondly and more importantly the whole point of the project, to use unpublished documents, was now removed. As it happened, Dr Llop had not spotted the problems I had with the 1006 charters and did not consider the altar slab, so I still had a paper; but it made it all seem a bit less important.
6. Nonetheless, by 2011 I was working through Llop’s edition and discovered what was new, and a bit more about the parchments I hadn’t seen because of deciding they were too late. I also made an attempt to see the altar slab, and that was in one way fairly easy as it was and is on display in the Museu Episcopal de Vic, as it then was; but in another way not so much, as gallery lighting isn’t great for epigraphy and they wouldn’t let me see it out of visiting hours.⁴ They did send me a reference image, which helped a bit, but in the end I got more out of it just by crawling round the thing with a camera hoping a security guard wouldn’t come past, which indeed they did not. Still, not my most fun research moment.


The altar stone of Sant Pere de Casserres, set up in front of a reconstruction of the apse of Sant Martí del Brull, with its original fresco artwork, in the Museu Episcopal de Vic, also visible here, but this photo by your author

7. However, on the same trip I did get to the actual site, by a series of odd outcomes, which helped a lot with understanding the difference between the castle which the documents mention and the church.


Sant Pere de Casserres viewed from the vistor centre, photograph also by me

8. But, almost as soon as I thought I had things under control, a third dose of unexpected evidence arrived – or rather, didn’t. Instead, someone at the 2011 IMC told me it existed and then wouldn’t tell me where. He had his reasons, but it was not what I wanted at that stage. Now, after a bit of work I knew that I could get at the missing evidence in Toledo, which also sounded like a trip worth making, but for various reasons, not least language, it was difficult, and there were easier things to do.
9. So there things rested for a short while. I gave versions of the paper in Australia and in Exeter, but there was only so far it could go till I untied the knot around the extra charters.
10. Finally, in 2017, the missing evidence was actually published, again free to the open web, and I therefore fell upon it, only a few months later, and it turned out I hadn’t really needed it, at least for this project. And that’s where we run out of previous blog.
11. But it was now possible to finish the dratted thing, and in April 2018 I did so. Then, having had a long time to think about it before this point, I got in touch with the editor of Studia Monastica. He was agreeable to seeing the paper, and it turned out, once he’d seen it, agreeable to publishing it. A pause then ensued, for reasons I don’t need to go into, and in February 2020 it was officially accepted. I persuaded the editor without difficulty to delay its publication till after the REF census, for which I was more than fully equipped already, and it thus came out in March 2022. But physical evidence of this only reached me about three weeks ago. And here it is…

Offprint of Jonathan Jarrett, "On Stone and Skin: Inscription of Communities at the Foundation of Sant Pere de Casserres" in Studia Monastica Vol. 63 (Barcelona 2021), pp. 269–302

Actual paper offprints! It’s always nice to see somewhere still doing them. Anyone want one? I have lots. I suppose it might help you to make up your mind to have the abstract:

The history of the Benedictine monastery of Sant Pere de Casserres, in modern-day Catalonia, is relatively well-studied, but includes an acceptance that it became a monastery in around 1005 by the agency of Viscountess Ermetruit of Osona. Before that, however, the site had been home to a church, whose congregation and priests are partly recorded in inscriptions preserved on an ancient altar-slab from the site. A critical re-examination of the monastery’s supposed foundational documents, and their comparison with the slab and other surviving charters from the church’s and monastery’s archive, establishes that the conversion from church to monastery was neither quick nor simple, and probably contested by the church’s old congregation. This article performs that re-examination and suggests what the power dynamics and solidarities in the area may have been that could explain the record as we now have it. In so doing, as well as questioning both Ermetruit’s role in and the traditional 1005 date for the monastic conversion of the site, it suggests that recognition by the would-be founders of the congregation’s investment in their traditional place of worship was crucial to the eventual success of the foundation, a situation perhaps repeated in other times and places.

I’m really quite pleased about this one. It’s my first dalliance with epigraphy, it is the second of what is probably three studies I will eventually have about ways to start a monastery which don’t conform to the normal standard picture, it is clever in places, it has identified me as a scholar to the Montserrat community (which has great potential application), and most of all, as you can see from the above, it was a right pain to do and I did nonetheless do it. Admittedly it damps the old publication statistics a bit, as even if I hadn’t delayed it it would have been two years five months between submission and publication; but since actually the timings work fine for me, I don’t care. I’ve been working on this for years and now it exists.⁵

Opening page

For that it exists, by the way, I owe thanks to quite a few people, but especially and more or less in order, the staff of the Biblioteca Universitària de Barcelona’s Biblioteca de Reserva, my family in Palautordera who put me up while I did the work in that library, the Arxiu Comarcal d’Osona even though in the end I didn’t visit them, Dr Mark Handley for advice on and references to scratched-up altar slabs, the Museu Episcopal de Vic’s documentation centre, Dr Kathleen Neal and Steven Joyce for comments and encouragement during the low period, Dr Rebecca Darley for making a late draft make the kind of sense that I could submit, and, in the end, Dr Francesc Rodríguez Bernal for providing the last of the evidence. All of you have prevented this being a worse article than it is. Obviously, as it is conventional to say, the faults that remain are my own fault; but this one has needed more help than most and it’s nice to be able to close the story with that acknowledgement.

Signature page and acknowledgements

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1. Antoni Pladevall Font, Joan-Albert Adell i Gisbert, Xavier Barral i Altet, Enric Bracons i Clapes, Marina Gustà i Martorell, Montserrat Hoja Cejudo, María Gràcia Salvà Picó, Albert Roig i Delofeu, Eduard Carbonell i Esteller, Jordi Vigué i Viñas and Roser Rosell i Gibert, “Sant Pere de Casseres”, in Jordi Vigué (ed.), Catalunya Romànica II: Osona I (Barcelona 1984), pp. 354-391, pp. 382-384 by Bracons, Gustà, Hoja and Gràcia, specifically at p. 384.

2. These being, of course, as what blog post of mine would be complete without a citation of them, Ramon Ordeig i Mata (ed.), Catalunya Carolíngia IV: els comtats d’Osona i Manresa, Memòries de la Secció històrico-arqueològica LIII (Barcelona 1999), 3 vols.

3. Irene Llop Jordana (ed.), Col·lecció diplomàtica de Sant Pere de Casserres, Diplomataris 44-45 (Barcelona 2009), 2 vols.

4. This is ironic, because I was by now already citing an article about the slab whose author also complained that the Museu wouldn’t let him see it; see Pere de Palol, “Las mesas de altar paleocristiana en la Tarraconense” in Ampurias Vol. 20-21 (Barcelona 1958), pp. 81-102 at p. 87.

5. Jonathan Jarrett, “On Stone and Skin: Inscription of Communities at the Foundation of Sant Pere de Casserres” in Studia Monastica Vol. 63 (Barcelona 2021), pp. 269–302.

Name in Print XXVIII: a large parcel from China

Although for the most part I enjoy the distance this blog usually occupies from the present, which means that I have a good safe perspective on what I cover, it is occasionally awkward to be detailing things that happened to me years ago, as for example when something that is immediately worth reporting comes about from earlier events I haven’t yet reported. Such a one is this, a paper that resulted from my second trip to China. So far I have been to China twice and each time, though it wasn’t my explicit plan, it’s resulted in a publication: the conference at Changchun on which I reported has made up a supplement to the Journal of Ancient Civilizations and I will eventually report on a conference I went to the next year in Beijing, entitled ‘The Influence and Change of Coins from an International Perspective’. The convenors of that conference asked me for a text of my paper, which I sent, and then just got on with it. The editors of the JAC, meanwhile were in frequent touch about the lengthy progress of the volume to press, and finally, a little while ago, let me know that it existed both digitally and in print, enclosing copies of the former and promising copies of the latter, which were to be shipped any day. Meanwhile, I was assured by one of these same people that the other conference was also in press, but since I’d heard nothing from the actual editors, seen no proofs and so on, when I received a large parcel from China with an ISBN prominently printed on the packaging, I fairly naturally assumed it was the JAC supplement, perhaps in more copies than I’d been expecting. But in fact it was the other one.

Cover of 王春法 (ed.), 货币与王朝: 国际视野下钱币的影响与改变 (Beijing 2021)

It is an extremely handsome and heavy volume, and after spending some time with Google Translate I’m fairly sure it contains not quite all the papers presented and another eleven that weren’t. But the extra ones fill up range very usefully. If you read Chinese – and I don’t, though I have a few words of the language such as a foreigner can learn by online tuition – this is actually a pretty good review of most aspects of currency as it has been known in China and its neighbours up till at least the Ming era. Almost everything in it is by Chinese scholars, or at least scholars with Chinese-viable names in Chinese institutions. The four foreigners involved come from Azerbaijan (1), France (1) and the United Kingdom (2), and 1 of those 2 is me, explaining what I think about the coin reform by which Emperor Anastasius I brought in marked-denomination multiple-value copper coins to end the reliance of market transactions in the Roman-or-Byzantine Empire on notionally-slightly-silver coins of such tiny effective value that they had to be used in bagged-up bundles valued by weight. What I think is, very summarily, that this was an unpopular measure that probably inserted a fiduciary currency into a system that still notionally ran on bullion value, and it was not intended to make market transacting easier, as some scholars seem to believe, but to make paying the army, or rather the army’s paying for things, easier, at the cost mostly of the poorest in the empire.

Title page of 乔纳森加莱特, ‘拜占庭帝国的市场交易与阿纳斯塔修斯一世的货币改革’, in 王春法 (ed.), 货币与王朝: 国际视野下钱币的影响与改变 (北京 2021), pp. 266–276

Now, I’d say that if you want to know more you can read the paper, but if you look at that quickly you will see that the text is in Chinese, so even if you can, I can’t.¹ I didn’t know that was going to happen, though apparently I have one Zhāng Yuè to thank for it and such bits as I’ve run through Google suggest that I have been pretty clearly understood. If you look closer, though, you will see that the footnotes remain in English, which was apparently the policy for all the foreigners. I guess that they thought that so much of it was non-Chinese citations that there was no point rendering the discursive content into Chinese around it. But as it is, I do wonder how many people in the world can read all of it, and consequently I have put the English-language draft up on my publications webpage here, in case anyone should be interested.²

Nonetheless, I’m delighted by it. At this point, Chinese scholars have a reason to think of me as one of the current thinkers about early Byzantine coinage. I probably don’t deserve that renown but even to have it undeserving among a catalogue of Chinese luminaries of numismatics is pretty cool.

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1. So, citation as it appears on the page is 乔纳森 加莱特, “拜占庭帝国的市场交易与阿纳斯塔修斯一世的货币改革”, transl. 张 月 in 王春法 (ed.), 货币与王朝: 国际视野下钱币的影响与改变 (北京 2021), pp. 266–276. If, like me, you can do something in Pinyin but not in Hanze, then it’s Qiáonàsēn Jiā Láitè, “Bàizhàntíng dìguó de shìchǎng jiāoyì yǔ ā nà sī tǎ xiū sī yīshì de huòbì gǎigé’, and in English that would be Jonathan Jarrett, “Market exchange in the Byzantine Empire and the currency reforms of Anastasius I”.

2. The draft bears the original title, “‘He will ruin many from among the people’: market exchange in the Byzantine Empire and the reform of Emperor Anastasius I.”

From Ankara to al-Masāq in eighteen months or so

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

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

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

21 February 2018

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

22 February 2018

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

23 February 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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