SINCE Edward Gibbon finished the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1787, much water has flowed under the bridges and every country in Europe has experienced an industrial revolution; the twentieth century, indeed, has seen the rise of technology and the technological state. All of which has reacted on historical writing and focussed interest on the economic side of the transition from the Roman empire to the Europe of the new barbarian kingdoms, a subject much newer than the political history of the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries. To the study of the old historical sources, chronicles, histories, saints’ lives, letters, cartularies, etc., have been added a more intensive study of record material (such as the Egyptian and Merovingian papyri), and two new historical disciplines: the scientific study of archaeology and the history of art. Working thus largely upon archaeological material, and the papyrus records, M. Rostovtzeff made a distinguished contribution to the social and economic history of the Roman empire, and others followed him. The new interest in economic history and the new methods of historical study have, in fact, somewhat modified the story of the decline and fall of the Roman empire, as Gibbon saw it, and the last thirty years have seen a notable outburst of historical work on the transition and the actual point at which it occurred, in which German, French, English and Slav scholars, and Byzantines in general, have joined with the utmost zest and all the resources of scholarship.
The traditional view of the transition was that it occurred, with some sharpness, in the fifth century: that a single political society, an urban society, using coined money as a medium of exchange and enjoying large-scale commerce, was overthrown and succeeded by a natural economy under Germanic rulers. The barbarism of their social institutions was suggested by the violence of these kings: a rural society was held to have replaced civilized Roman institutions and to have been in the main Germanic. This statement over-simplifies the picture drawn by the nineteenth-century historians; but it is broadly true to say that they held that the change of society, the change of economic structure, came with the barbarian invasions of the fifth century.
The two main challenges to the accepted theory have been those of Professor Alfons Dopsch, and the late Professor Henri Pirenne. Professor Dopsch, a close student of archaeology as well as of social history, emphasized the continuity of Roman institutions in the new Europe, which, in fact, he hardly allowed to have been a new Europe at all. Archaeology had shown the continuity of habitation of the Roman towns on the continent, and he emphasized also the continuity of the imperial demesnes, the demesnes of the fisc, with those of the new Germanic kings and the continuity of the villa with the medieval manor. He first set forth his concept of a gradual evolution of the new Europe out of the old in his Wirtschaftliche und soziale Grundlagen, published at Vienna in 1918–1920.
Pirenne’s thesis, on the other hand, claimed (as of old) that there had been a catastrophic change between the old Europe and the new, but set it at a different point. Pirenne argued that large-scale trade, carried by the Mediterranean between eastern and western Europe, survived the bouleversement of the fifth century, and made the régime of the Merovingians substantially the same as that of the empire it had, in the west, replaced: ‘the Merovingian epoch is only the prolongation of antiquity and not the beginning of a new age’. It was the invasion of Islam, he held, which cut the Mediterranean basin in two, separated west and east, extinguished the great sea trade of the Merovingians, threw the land of the Franks back upon itself, substituted for a gold-using Mediterranean economy one with a much reduced medium of exchange, and made the rural demesne, the rural estate, an autonomous self-sufficing cell. ‘Then only did the true middle age begin.’ What contemporary economists were calling the ‘economic recession’ from the Roman world, with its money economy, to the food and services economy of early medieval Europe, Pirenne placed in the second half of the seventh century; he sought to establish the continuity of Mediterranean commerce between Byzantium, Smyrna, Sidon, Alexandria and Leptis Magna, with Ostia, Carthage and Marseilles alike in the imperial and Merovingian periods. He denied, in fact, any economic recession on the part of Merovingian Gaul. Syrian merchants, he claimed, travelled as before from the east to Gaul with their eastern wares: ‘the foundations in the fifth century of barbarian kingdoms in Italy, Spain, Africa and Gaul not only did not interrupt, but does not seem to have even sensibly changed, their relations with these countries’. This thesis Pirenne set forth in an article in the Revue Belge in 1922, in his Contrast économique. Mérovingien et Carolingien, 1923, his Villes du moyen âge, 1927, and in his Mahomet et Charlemagne. This book, containing his final and perfected views on the early Germanic kingdoms, the conquest of the Mediterranean kingdom by Islam, and the cessation of trade with the east under the Carolingians, he left finished just before his death, in 1935, and it was published in 1937.
The work of Herr Dopsch and Henri Pirenne inspired much later work by their pupils and other savants; almost no writer on the period could, indeed, afford to neglect it. Madame E. Patzelf, a pupil of Professor Dopsch, contended with Pirenne’s views in Die Frankische Kultur und der Islam, 1932; and among those who, accepting Pirenne’s views in general, elaborated some point of them or criticized them in some detail, may be mentioned Professor F. L. Ganshof, F. Vercauteren, H. Laurent, F. Lot, G. J. Brantianu (who adopted the reign of Heraclius († 641) as the terminus of Byzantine antiquity), G. Ostrogorsky, P. Lambrecht and F. Olivier-Martin, who accepted Pirenne’s views of the persistence of Roman legal institutions in his Précis d’Histoire du Droit Français, 1932. The late Professor Eileen Power assessed the contemporary, and probably the final views of historians in the matter in the Economic History Review of 1940; she accepted the ‘economic recession’ in Europe after the Arab conquests, but regarded it as having started earlier: economic stability had received many hard knocks previously. Professor Norman Baynes, similarly, has been a little unwilling to accept the uninterrupted relations of Gaul with the east Mediterranean under the Merovingians: he has held the Vandal fleet responsible for partly, if not wholly, interrupting such relations.
It should be noticed that economic historians so far used the phrases ‘money economy’ and ‘food and services economy’ as self-explanatory, and the transition from one to the other as the root cause of much social change. It is now usual to admit the use of some coined money even in very early societies usually described as having a ‘natural economy’ or a ‘food and services economy’. This is stressed by Professor M. M. Postan in an article in the Economic History Review, vol xiv (1944); he also points out that movement towards or away from a money economy was less continuous and less general than has been imagined, and that the barbarian nations in many cases preferred to put their supply of the precious metals into plate and ornaments. These considerations do not, however, invalidate the use of the phrases, providing the limitations are recognized. There would seem to have been a far greater number of transactions by means of coined money or credit in the Greco-Roman empire than among the early Anglo-Saxons or the Carolingian Franks.
Turning from those who have written about this economic change to the economic phenomena themselves: the whole evidence for the transition, sudden or gradual, cannot be discussed here, but some obvious signs may be mentioned. First, those for the existence of a money economy and large-scale commerce in the Roman empire and even the late Roman empire; secondly, for the continuity of large-scale commerce and a money economy in the Merovingian age; and thirdly, that for the disappearance of trade and a money economy after the Arab conquests, and in the succeeding Carolingian period.
The money economy in the Roman empire rested on the maintenance of good and plentiful currency, and on the reputation of the Roman merchant for good, honest dealing. The state mints existed all over the empire and turned out a bronze, a silver, and above all, a gold currency: since Julius Caesar had established the solidus aureus as the imperial unit of exchange, with silver tied to it in a definite proportion, Roman merchants had been able to trade even with Asia. For the first 200 years of the empire there was, it appears, a favourable balance of trade with the east, so that the gold and silver supplies of Europe were increased by those of the other continent. Asia, in antiquity, would appear to have been much richer in the precious metals than Europe: metal urns or vases were used in India where a Frankish or Anglo-Saxon peasant would have used pottery, and sheets of metal laid over wooden frames could even be used for roofing; as, for instance, in the double- or single-curved roofs of towers and minarets. In Europe, the use of even lead for roofing was late and expensive: Edward the Confessor’s church at Westminster was roofed with curly earthenware tiles, such as are still seen on old English barns. The gold and silver ornaments of the great in Persia and India witness to an ampler supply of the precious metals than that of Roman or medieval Europe. It would seem, then, that even a small favourable balance of trade, in the days of la haute empire (the first and second century), would bring in a considerable accession of the precious metals to Europe. Most historians believe that the change in the fourth and fifth centuries to an unfavourable balance of trade with the east was a sign of, or even a cause of, the fiscal embarrassment of the Roman state.
Rome had, however, in la haute empire, very considerable resources of the precious metals in Europe. The state, in the person of the emperor, owned all mines, sometimes working them directly, sometimes letting them out to individual merchants to work, or to gilds (collegia) of merchants. The western part of the empire was, in the first and second centuries, richer than the eastern half: Spain was much the richest province of the empire in all minerals, including lead, iron, copper, silver and gold; the richest mines lay around Carthago Nova, in Baetica, and in Galicia and the Asturias. These Spanish mines were scientifically managed by the Romans, the engineering and draining was good, and the shafts ran deep into the mountains. Galicia produced some 20,000 pounds of the precious metals annually; and the Ebro valley and the Cantabrian highlands were great industrial centres, where Spanish swords, breastplates and armour were made for the Roman army and for commerce. Much tin and a little silver was mined in Britain, some silver in Aquitania, and copper and silver in the Balkans, especially in Dalmatia. The gold once mined in Asia Minor and the silver in Greece had long since been exhausted. There is evidence, however, that increased care was given to the mines in the eastern part of the empire in the third and fourth century: a comes metallorum was appointed for Illyricum, and a praepositus metallorum for the Levant.
The evidence for a massive use of currency in the period is varied and convincing. The Roman legionary was paid in coin, and even the higher officers and the civil servants received their stipend in coin: e.g. a ducenarius. The Roman state was a great user of coins and precious metals. The large coin finds found buried all along the frontier regions were probably the sums sent for the pay of the army and the civil service, hastily buried in disturbed times, particularly round the turn of the fifth century. Other evidence of the relative plenty of gold is that of the very large gold medallions, presented by the emperors as a mark of honour: medals about five inches in diameter which could be worn on the breast or melted down for their considerable intrinsic value. The very number of the Roman mints argue a large output of coins and their situation, near great mercantile towns like Pavia, or Trier, or Antioch, show that a large currency was needed for trade, as well as paying the army.
The very large sums in gold that eastern emperors could afford to pay to the Huns and other barbarians are also a sign that the imperial gold supply was not yet exhausted at the end of the fourth and the first half of the fifth century. The Hun Uldis defeated the German Gainas and his followers in 401, and was rewarded by alliance with the emperor Theodosius and the promise of an annual tribute, or retaining fee. Aëtius’ military success was partly due to his ability to hire, or get rid of, the Huns by money ‘gifts’; when he induced some 60,000 of them to return home in 425, the sum must have been large. Priscus of Panium, a reliable authority, states that the emperor in 430 agreed by treaty to give Rua the Hun a tribute of 350 lb. of gold per annum; in 435, this tribute was doubled. In 443 a treaty was signed with the Huns by which 6,000 lb. of gold was to be paid in a lump sum against arrears of tribute, and the annual payment was to be, in future, 2,100 lb. of gold. (That these payments were very large is shown by the fact that in the late Roman empire the gold pound was worth 72 solidi aurei, coins of roughly the same weight and size as the English sovereign; the Byzantine empire at the period was run mainly on a coinage of gold and bronze.) These imperial payments did not cover the whole of the drain of gold and silver to the barbarians, for individual ransom money paid for prisoners must have amounted to a large sum. Uldis had had so many prisoners that he sold them off at one gold solidus per head; but by 443 the price had risen, and Roman prisoners fetched 12 solidi per head, while important individuals paid as much as 500 solidi. All this was in addition to the enormous amount of gold ornaments and silver plate looted by barbarians in east and west.
The revenue, the immense revenue, of the Roman state was also collected partly in coin. The revenue from the demesnes of the fisc was transported to the capital in coin; the varied tolls (telonia) were also collected in coin. In la haute empire the tax for provisioning the army, the annona militaris was assessed in kind (on wheat, wood, wine, etc.), but might be paid in cash by the adaeratio. The receipts of Egyptian tax collectors in the period of Diocletian and Constantine show that the annona militaris was still levied, and the tax paid in money: one Aurelios Isidoros paid items like 800 and 400 (silver) drachmas several times, in the period just before Constantine’s reform of taxation. After that reform, other local officials paid 4,000 drachmas, 3,600 drachmas, 800 drachmas, and many items as large, as well as smaller transport charges for getting taxes paid in kind to the troops. After the Constantinian reform, it is true, the wheat for the annona civica, for the feeding of Rome and Constantinople, was for the time paid in kind; but the large payments in drachmas later suggest that the Egyptian taxpayer might commute the render for a money payment, plus the transport charges. Egypt was a rich province: most of the eastern trade came through Alexandria: and it may be that in other provinces the money collected in taxes amounted to less: there are unfortunately few papyrus tax receipts extant for the rest of the empire; but such evidence as does exist points to a large supply of currency in all the provinces. It is clear that in the difficulties of the second half of the fourth century the government, particularly in the reign of Julian the Apostate, made a resolute effort to maintain a system of payments in natura, and that this effort failed. The army and the civil service were averse to it: they insisted on the principle of the adaeratio, and by their insistence prevented a recession to a natural economy. The partial recession of the early fourth century had showed itself in government transactions and requisitions, but had never been adopted in commerce.
But all this massive use of currency in the empire, down to the end of the fourth century, was not the only medium of exchange: credit transactions were widely used all over the empire, and bankers were numerous. M. Rostovtzeff has demonstrated this from the papyrus records of Egypt (mainly), and it should be noted that only in the warm, dry air of Egypt have papyri survived on any large scale. Papyrus is very friable material, rots in the damp, and is easily destroyed by fire; the day-to-day records of merchants were needed for practical purposes for some few years, but were never intended as permanent memorials: no special care was taken to preserve them. Yet papyrus was the writing material used all over the empire for every purpose, except the writing of such solemn and valuable volumes as the works of Vergil, and, later, the Christian scriptures and the Digest, which might be written on expensive parchment. That all this immense volume of papyrus receipts, the rolls or registers of the municipal curiae, and the accounts of bankers, has, in the main, perished does not, however, render less valuable such papyrus records as have survived: and they attest certain conclusions. In the west, inscriptions recording the votive offering of some banker, and even carvings in relief of the banker and his table, accord with the Egyptian evidence. On part of a funerary monument at Trier, a banker and his two assistants, all in Roman dress, and clean shaven, receive payments from bearded Celtic peasants: they are depositing coins in a wide shallow basket, already well filled.
Credit and credit operations were certainly fully developed in the cities of the empire, as is shown by Roman commercial law and legal treatises. The Egyptian papyri attesting the different forms of contract, and the existence at Alexandria of an institution that served both as a land register and a record office for storing statistics about the fortunes of all residents in the district, both illustrate a highly developed economic life. The important grain supply of Egypt, her unique papyrus industry, her cotton and linen industries, all demanded accounts and book-keeping and the Egyptian merchants, writing the rapid cursive hand on their own papyrus, dealt with their correspondence, bills and account rolls themselves.
The growth of trade, and the number of rich landowners living in the cities, made necessary large amounts of currency, and credit transactions to supplement it; private ventures in local and foreign trade, and money-lending, were profitable both to rich men and to the professional banker. Such men transacted complicated business, accepted money on deposit, paid interest on some of the deposits, and effected payments by mere transfer from one account to another. Transfers of money from one city to another were sometimes carried out through the medium of the local banks, and customers were accommodated with loans for the payment of taxes. The Roman fisc was the greatest of all bankers and did very profitable business. The banking system had come to the west from Greece and the Greek east, and such evidence as we have shows that the banks of Rome, Italy and the provinces had much the same range of business as the banks of Egypt. In short, credit operations everywhere supplemented the metal currency.
Large-scale trade with Asia was carried out by individual Roman merchants, though some imperial care was given to fostering it: as when, in the time of Claudius and Nero, Roman stations were established at Adana and Socotra, in the Indian Ocean. The greatest sea trade with the east, in la haute empire and later, was not merely a luxury trade: it passed chiefly through Alexandria, a sea-borne trade carried on by Alexandrian merchants with the merchants of Arabia and India. Cotton, and perhaps silk, were imported by way of the Red Sea, and worked up in the factories of Alexandria: in exchange, the Alexandrian merchants exported glass, metal ware, linen, corn and timber. Roman gold and silver coins have been found in India; but these may have been carried thence over the caravan routes, where no other method of payment was possible; and their number decreased in the second century, showing the development of a favourable balance of trade. There was certainly a large-scale trade with the east in bulky goods through Alexandria.
While bulky goods necessarily followed this sea route to India (for uncertain relations with the kingdom of Parthia had rendered uncertain the route by caravan to Palmyra and thence by the Persian Gulf), luxury goods of light weight reached the east Mediterranean by caravan route. Of such goods, the spices of India and the east were in constant demand, not only as a flavouring and as medicine, but for the curing and pickling of winter supplies of meat, and, in the later empire, for incense for the Easter ceremonies of the churches and the Easter and Whitsun baptisms. The embroidered vestments and silks of Persia and all the varieties of precious stones reached the west by caravan, as did the carpets, woollen fabrics, and red-dyed silks of Armenia. Furs and leather goods, and even arms and goldsmiths’ work, found their way to the west, as did the famous dried, black plums of Damascus. The caravan routes went along the coast of Syria, from Gaza, Tyre and Antioch to Edessa, between the upper waters of the Tigris and Euphrates, and then on through the hill country of Armenia with its green, fertile valleys, to Trebizond on the Black Sea, to Ctesiphon, the summer palace of the kings of Parthia, and eastward through the mountains to Tashkurghan, where the Oxus rises in the northern ranges of the Hindu Kush. Here, three civilizations, three cultures met: those of the Greco-Roman world, of India and of China.
While the eastern trade was profitable to the empire, the main large-scale Roman trade was inter-provincial, and a trade conducted along the frontiers of the empire with the tribes beyond. The Roman legionaries themselves traded with the frontier tribes, and swarming commercial suburbs, cannabae, grew up outside the frontier camps and walled towns. Barbarian movements, however, disturbed frontier and inter-provincial trades before the foundations of the barbarian kingdoms; towns were looted and burned, industries were wrecked and the mechanism of commerce dislocated.
Examination of archaeological finds has shown this very clearly in the case of Gaul. The second half of the third century was a period of barbarian irruptions and fiscal devaluation: prices between 256 and 280 rose some 1,000 per cent: trade was interrupted and towns reduced the area within their boundary walls. The collegia disappeared, flourishing villas were abandoned, and barbarian chiefs carried off to Germany the riches of Gaul. Gallic industry, moreover, collapsed: the bronze workers and the potters, who had exported their wares to the farthest parts of the empire, could no longer export profitably. It is certain that after the great invasion of 276 the potteries of the Argonne no longer made Samian ware (terra sigillata). Precise research has made it equally certain that the bronze exports of Gaul which had found their way en masse to the Danubian provinces no longer did so.
But after this half century of collapse, in the beginning of the fourth century, certain branches of Gallic industry saw a remarkable renaissance. From c. 350 (but not earlier) the potters of the Argonne again began to turn out terra sigillata, clearly to be distinguished, however, in form and decoration from the earlier make. This pottery renaissance lasted till the barbarian inroads of 406–407, a disaster that put a lamentable end to the kilns that had again been exporting their products to Switzerland, Bavaria, Austria, Hungary, Holland and Britain. Even more important was the fate of the Gallic glass industry. In the fourth century it had attained a very large production and diffusion: glass ware became cheap and began even to take the place of pottery: from Strasbourg to Cologne, along the length of the Rhine, in Belgica Secunda (Normandy) and even on the Atlantic coast, glass was used in profusion, until the industry suffered the same interruption as that of pottery. It recovered, however, with the fourth century. After the fearful economic dislocation of the third century, Gaul did not experience continuous economic recession: there was a remarkable recovery in town life, and a period of economic revival.
This period of recovery in northern Gaul coincided with a movement of the centre of gravity in Gaul from the south to the north. The third century had found the towns of the Midi much larger, more Romanized and more prosperous than those of the north. Then came the danger to the northern frontier, the disasters of the mid third century, the period of Septimius Severus when everything was subordinated to the needs of military defence, and when immense payments by the Roman state were made to the armies defending the Rhine and its hinterland, the basin of the Moselle. Trade moved to the north, with the Roman merchant who supplied the army and the civil governors of north Gaul. The towns of the Midi declined, as inscriptions show, between 250 and 300, and the glass industry of the Rhone valley, originally introduced from Carthage, passed to the north and never recovered the leadership. Examples of the splendid glass of fourth-century Cambrai have been found in Pannonia, Scandinavia, Russia and even in Asia.
The swing of the political pendulum from Provence to the north followed the creation of the Gauls into an independent praetorian prefectship in 368, with the fixing of the prefect’s residence, not in the Rhone valley, but at Trier. The army disposed in Belgica Secunda and along the Rhine had to be fed, clothed, armed and paid, and much economic activity followed. All the traffic of the Rhine met that from Brittany, Britain and the Seine valley at Trier, and met also that coming north from the Rhone valley. There was a rich, Romanized bourgeoisie at Trier: from 368 Trier was the official residence of the western emperor: Jews and Syrians in some numbers brought their wares to Trier, ivory, textiles, incense, precious stones, papyrus, fruits and oil. The city had, for the period, a very large area and circuit walls, and the remains of several dozen pagan temples found near-by attest a rich bourgeoisie. St Jerome visited Trier and called it a second Rome. When the Franks settled in the modern Belgium and north Gaul, they were settling in a province ravaged by earlier barbarian raids in the fourth and fifth century but in one that had once been the economic and political focus of Gaul.
In examining the problem of how far a breach of social continuity, a change from a money to a natural economy, occurred in the Merovingian period, Pirenne devoted himself mainly to demonstrating the continuity of the trade between the east and west Mediterranean; though he also dealt with the less disputed survival of Roman money, weights and measures, institutions, the area of the acceptance of Roman Law, and the continuity of the Latin language and learning. The survival of a money economy was closely connected with that of foreign trade, for the supply of precious metals in Europe was insufficient to maintain the necessary currency for two hundred years, apart from outside supplies of gold obtained by commerce or other means. On the question of the gold supply in Merovingian and Carolingian times, the distinguished historian, the late Professor Marc Bloch, shed much light (see p. 133).
As to the Mediterranean trade, it is accepted that the Byzantine empire did succeed in protecting the commerce and sea ways of its own coasts. Till the Arab conquests of the seventh century, Syria and Egypt were its provinces, and the east Mediterranean a Greek lake; it was possible to ship cargoes in safety from Naples, Otranto and Aquileia to Byzantium. Pirenne collected evidence that it was also possible to sail from Byzantium to Marseilles and Narbonne, and that, in fact, the west Mediterranean trade continued also uninterrupted. He stressed the focussing of the economic life of the new kingdoms on the Mediterranean, and contended that the Syrians, often mentioned in the writings of Gregory of Tours and in early saints’ lives, carried the papyrus, oil, embroidered tunics from Persia, purses from Phoenicia, spices, precious stones and ivories as before to Gaul: the ports of the Tyrrhenian Sea were as open to eastern commerce as before. Gregory of Tours mentions the colony at Orleans of Syrians and Jews who acclaimed Lothar I in their own tongues going out to greet him with their standards and vexilla. An early life of St Geneviève speaks of St Simon Stylites as hearing the report of her holiness from merchants euntes ac redeuntes between Egypt and Gaul. A rich Syrian at Bordeaux possessed a house with an oratory well furnished with relics of eastern saints; and Gregory of Tours mentions others. Caesarius of Aries composed hymns in Greek as well as Latin for the use of the Christians of the Rhone valley.
Apart from such references to Syrians and spices, mainly from Gregory of Tours, Pirenne’s argument rested on the evidence he collected for the wide diffusion of eastern goods in Gaul, and a use of coined money as great (he argued) as in imperial times. He established that the Merovingian kings maintained a storehouse of the fisc (cellerarium fisci) at Marseilles and at Fos near the Moselle: a parallel to the Great Wardrobe of the Tower in later English history. The Byzantine emperors in the sixth century maintained such a royal store house; both the Greek and the Frankish celleraria go back, in fact, to a Roman model.
For the nature of the goods stored at the cellerarium of the fisc at Fos, and available for supply at the royal command, Pirenne commented on two interesting Merovingian texts. One is a trattoria for the formulae of Marculf (see p. 313), that is, a direction to the king’s agentes in rebus to supply the ‘apostolic man’ and the ‘illustris’ whom the king is sending on a legation to such and such a place with the following food and commodities. The high rank of the envoys should be noted: illustris would be the title of a count or duke, and, though ‘apostolic’ may mean no more than bishop, it probably implies a metropolitan or bishop of importance. Every day of their journey coming from and going to the king, they are to be supplied with suitable transport, and so much white bread, wine, beer, lard, flesh, pigs and piglets, lambs and pheasants, hens and eggs, fodder for their horses and —these presumably from the fisc—cinnamon, pepper, spices, mastic, pistacchio, almonds, etc. The different spices are carefully specified by name, and must have come from the east. The other list is that of a yearly allowance of commodities to be supplied from the fisc at Fos to the abbey of Corbie, by grant of Lothar III (657–673), confirmed later. It comprises 10,000 lb. of oil (which must have been transported from Provence, Spain or Africa), 20 lb. of rice, 10 ‘skins of Cordova’, 50 rolls of papyrus, 50 lb. of dates, 100 lb. of figs, and a carefully specified variety of spices. While in the trattoria of Marculf the eastern goods are all light in weight, the Corbie list mentions goods of considerable bulk, such as the oil, dates and figs. Papyrus is light, and the dates need only have come from Africa. The two lists certainly establish a certain continuance of the eastern trade, but not much more than a luxury trade, plus that in papyrus, which would be needed for all letters, books and account keeping. Of all these commodities, papyrus, which certainly came from Egypt, and in some bulk, is perhaps the most important as evidence of a surviving trans-Mediterranean commerce in the Merovingian period.
Another indication of the, survival of Mediterranean trade is the prosperity of Marseilles and the towns of the Midi in the sixth century: the pendulum of economic prosperity had swung back from the north of Gaul to the south; commercially, Gaul was the hinterland of the port of Marseilles. While the political future lay with the kings of Paris and Metz, and even while Clovis I, Lothar I and Lothar II were overlords of all Gaul, spending power clearly predominated in the south. While the Frankish kings in the north fought their enemies on their eastern frontier, no great accession of treasure would have come from their conquest; the Visigoths and Burgundians, on the other hand, lived in a land of now prosperous towns, an old, cultivated countryside, and some surviving commerce. The acceptance of the economic pre-eminence of the south particularly in the early Merovingian period, however, does not imply the existence of a purely ’natural’ economy in north Gaul. M. Vercauteren, in his notable étude sur les civitates de la Belgica Secunda, traced by coin finds and written sources the trade route from Marseilles up the Rhone valley and along those of the Saône, Yonne and Seine to Paris, and between the tributaries of the Seine to Troyes, Soissons, Reims and north Gaul. At Reims coins were regularly struck from the beginning of the sixth century. The existence of ships bringing oil and wine from Bordeaux to north Gaul is also attested. But the scale of commerce was clearly greater in the towns of the south and was supported by at least a partial survival of eastern trade.
The question whether the Merovingian and other barbarian kings disposed of a large money revenue, comparable to that received by tax officials in the late Roman empire, is difficult to decide from the very sparse survival of papyrus records; though the evidence marshalled by Pirenne from other written sources, the History of the Franks, saints’ lives and the like, illuminated a field hitherto considered dark. Before referring to Marc Bloch’s direct examination of the gold supply, the points dealt with by Pirenne should be noted.
He contended that the Merovingian kings, besides being great landed proprietors, enjoying the resources of the lands of the fisc, and of mines, disposed of a formidable treasure in coined money. The kings paid their functionaries in coined money (the direct evidence for this is slight); they could assign very large sums from their treasury, as when the abbey of Saint-Denis obtained a yearly grant of 200 gold solidi, or when Desiderius, bishop of Verdun, obtained from king Theoderic 7,000 gold solidi for the relief of his distressed citizens (the king had been, however, in possession of the exiled bishop’s land and treasure and had done him many injuries). Other considerable offerings of treasure are recorded; as also is the frequent increase of the kings’ own treasures by the confiscation of their subjects’ ornaments, money and lands: ‘they killed to get wealth’. They did not simply hoard wealth in their treasury, but by using it kept it in circulation. Apart from purchasing eastern goods for their courts, making grants and offerings to churches, and presumably meeting the expenses of their frequent frontier and fratricidal wars, they used their gold on occasion to buy off frontier tribes (as the Avars in 596) and normally for the bribery of envoys and their principals. The Visigothic pretender Sisenand offered king Dagobert 200,000 gold solidi to have his alliance and Leovigild promised the emperor’s lieutenant 30,000 to have his help. These are large sums, if they were actually paid; the lesser ones for the routine bribery of envoys would seem to have been normally paid. All these gold solidi, however, appear to have been money of account.
The evidence for Pirenne’s contention that the Goths and Vandals, hospitati on the countryside, received their ‘third’ of the revenue of the estate in money is almost completely lacking as is that for the assertion that the great domanial estates in Gaul all produced a money revenue: the papyri that would have determined this have not survived. Gregory the Great in Italy paid his higher clergy a money stipend, but he also made them food allowances from the patrimony, and analogy suggests that already the estates of the landed proprietors were valuable mainly as feeding the family and servants of the proprietor, though some of the produce may probably also have been sold.
The question of the tax revenue of the Merovingians is of great interest: Pirenne contended that the tonlieu (toll, telonia) was paid exclusively in silver. It was the direct descendant of the various imperial customs and taxes (the portaticum or harbour dues, the rotaticum or transport tax, etc.) and was levied directly for the profit of the king. The collectors of the tax were frequently Jews, and the tax was let out to farm; injustice must sometimes have been done, for some royal efforts were made to curb it. In 614 Lothar II intervened to order that tolls should remain as they had ever been; Theoderic the Great also wrote to his agents in Spain, giving directions about the collection of the customary tolls. The Merovingian kings occasionally relaxed the toll for the benefit of an abbey, but never granted it away till the period of the collapse of their power. Pirenne held that the product of money taxes to the Merovingian kings was very great: partly as an inference from the fact that they could dispose of such large sums.
It is certainly true that all the barbarian kings minted money, and possible that some of them mined small quantities of precious metal: but whether the volume of currency they could maintain was as great as that handled by the officials of the later empire remained in considerable doubt. As to minting, the laws of Receswinth state penalties for those, of whatever status, who forge money or clip coins or adulterate the gold given them by another to make ornamenta, etc.; the detailed regulations suggest a good supply of the precious metals and the possibility that the Spanish mines were not yet exhausted. Gaul, however, had never produced the precious metals to anything like the same extent, and any wastage of the Merovingian currency due to payments for foreign goods must, as Pirenne emphasized, have been made good by payments for exports, or the direct buying of gold. He instanced the sale of wheat as bringing gold to Gaul, and also that of a very large number of slaves from the slave market at Marseilles, and elsewhere; a quite exceptionally large trade in war captives (many of them carried off from Britain) was done in the sixth century. Both trades would have helped to give Gaul a favourable balance of trade.
Some gold also entered Gaul by way of purchase and as subsidy or diplomatic present from the emperor or the barbarian kings. The buying of gold is evidenced by a form of the tariff of customary charges made by the canons of Tournai in the twelfth century. Their church had been rebuilt by king Chilperic († 584) who had also granted them an immunity, i.e. the right to collect the royal toll at Tournai: though the tariff as written belongs to the twelfth century, it contains very old material. ‘If a man slave or a woman slave or an ounce of gold is sold’, one item runs, ‘let the seller pay 4d. [a triens] and the buyer 4d.’ Gregory of Tours also speaks of king Chilperic’s envoys bringing back supplies of gold from Constantinople, some of which they saved from shipwreck at Agde. The emperor Maurice, says Gregory, sent Chilperic gold coins, or ingots, of a pound’s weight: from this Byzantine gold Chilperic had a very fine gold bowl made of 50 lb. weight ‘for the honour of his kingdom’. Whether this gold was directly bought, or was sent in return for some kind of invisible diplomatic export, is not clear from Gregory’s account.
Pirenne also emphasized, in support of his argument for large-scale trade in Merovingian Gaul, that usury was still lawful there, as by Roman law. When the above-mentioned bishop of Verdun tried to get a loan from king Theoderic, he offered to repay him ‘with legitimate usury’. This, however, it should be noted, was not for a mercantile venture but to relieve the starving population of his city. The collectors of the royal tolls sometimes, Pirenne showed, lent money to important personages: though at least on one occasion they got murdered when they asked for repayment. ‘Legitimate usury’, a triens in the solidus or 33 per cent, was, it seems, occasionally practised: though the evidence that credit transactions occurred in Mediterranean Gaul to anything like the scale of the later empire is lacking.
The evidence as to the origin of the ‘decentralized’ currency of Merovingian Gaul, which Pirenne himself accepted, points rather to a shortage of currency than anything else. In Merovingian Gaul, as in the other barbarian kingdoms, gold continued the official unit of exchange, though both gold and silver coins were minted, following their Roman prototypes so closely that Pirenne styled them ‘pseudo-imperial’. The coin designs followed the changes introduced into Byzantine money: e.g. the cross replaced the old symbol of the emperor’s victory, a draped female figure. It was clearly necessary for foreign trade to maintain the old Roman uniformity of coinage, and the emperor’s name appeared on the coins of the Germanic kings. But whereas late Roman Gaul had been supplied with a gold, silver and bronze currency from four state mints, Aries, Lyons, Marseilles and Trier, the Franks struck coins, not only in the palace and in various cities but (as Pirenne put it) ‘by an infinity of moneyers’. The kings’ names do not appear upon these coins, but instead the name of the vicus, castrum or villa where they were struck, and the name of some lay official or bishop. It used to be held that the lay official’s name was the name of the moneyer who struck the coin, and that these numerous local mints, in places of such small importance that they cannot always be identified, were merely the workshops of individual craftsmen, who had escaped from the imperial mints when Roman Gaul was overrun.
This theory was difficult to maintain, however, since about a hundred years’ gap intervened between the break-down of the imperial mints, and the appearance of those small local mints whose coins bear neither an emperor’s nor a French king’s name. (Clovis’s coins, with the emperor Anastasius’ name between two C’s, would doubtless have been struck by Roman trained moneyers: Reims had actually been an official imperial mint for a short time in the fourth century, and Roman goldsmiths would have been available to him.) M. Ferdinand Lot, however, and Pirenne following him, accepted an origin for the ‘decentralized’ Merovingian mints connected with the imposition of the tonlieu: they regarded the personal name on the coins as that of the collector of the tax, of some royal steward, or of the steward of some abbey which was authorized by its ‘immunity’ to collect the tonlieu for its own benefit. It was convenient, that is, for the royal collector, or the steward of a demesne, to receive ‘payments in kind, foreign money or ancient money or metals by weight’, and to render his account to the fisc, or to his own abbey, in the coins he had caused to be minted on the spot. The coins bore his signature as guarantee of their origin and value, and the place of minting as a sign to recall where the tax was collected.
Bishops, similarly, minted their own coins less as the usurpation of a regalian right than in the effort to mobilize their resources; if minting was a process of account on the demesnes of the fisc, it is likely that it would also be used for the collection of revenue from episcopal lands, and particularly for payments of one kind or another to the king, or for incense and oil. Episcopal lands within the civitas were from the beginning the subject of a grant of immunity, and for those outside in the territorium immunity was gradually sought and acquired: favours granted by the king were often preceded by gifts to him, and coined money was useful. Nevertheless, it is very difficult to believe that the adoption of this system of local minting, even as part of an accounting system, meant anything but that currency was in short supply. The Theodosian code had provided for the coining into ingots of money paid in taxation: a precaution against pilfering in transport and a method of assessing by weight the worth of local currencies. The Merovingian system, however, could only have been adopted when a uniform royal currency, even within the separate Frankish kingdoms, was lacking; it also suggests a fairly frequent payment in plate.
Payment for the Merovingian descriptiones would appear to have been in kind, or to have involved ’mobilization of resources’ and minting. From Gregory of Tours’ references, these descriptiones appear to have been occasional and heavy, though in one or two passages he implies the normal levy of something like a land or property tax, at less high rates. King Chilperic, he says, commanded that new and heavy descriptiones should be made in all his kingdom, by means of which many left their cities and their private possessions, thinking it better to be refugees than to put themselves in such peril. For it was appointed that the owner of a private estate should pay one amphora of wine for each arpent of vineyard; arid many other charges were laid on other land and on that worked by serfs, which could not be paid. For taxation as heavy as this, the normal supply of currency could scarcely have sufficed.
This shortage of Merovingian currency is supported also by the conclusions of Marc Bloch. First, he showed that the Constan-tinian gold solidus, weighing 4 gr. 48 of fine metal, was no longer coined in the west; the Byzantine empire maintained it under the new name of nomisma and huperperon (hyperpère), and though the value of this coin fluctuated, it diminished only in a slow downward movement; perhaps in consequence of the need to equalize the value of the new coins with old, worn gold coins. As late as 1200, however, the hyperpère equalled in weight of fine metal about three-quarters that of its Roman ancestor; the gold solidus had practically been maintained. The currencies of the barbarian kings, on the other hand, were poor in gold, and in bad reputation. Among the Franks, the gold solidus dropped out, and fractions of it the half solidus and the triens were minted: the triens became the normal gold coin of the barbarian kingdoms. Among the Anglo-Saxons an even weaker, silver gilt coinage, that of the sceattas, was all that could be struck till the reign of Offa.
This weakness of the gold currency of the barbarians, and the comparative scarcity of silver, must have been increased by the disuse of the Roman copper coinage. The latter was, in the fourth century, only a money of account: bronze coins were still minted in the fourth century, but their nominal worth bore no relation to the value of the metal contained. But neither the barbarian kings, nor the decentralized mints of the Merovingians, had the authority to maintain a money of account, valuable as it must have been in local trading; its function had to be taken over by a weak silver currency, increasing the general shortage.
The continuity, however, of a culture, a society, in the Mediterranean basin from late Roman times to the Arab conquests is not evidenced solely by economic continuity: continuity of royal and local administration by notaries has long been accepted (see pp. 299, 399), as has the influence of a survival of Roman law (see p. 105). ‘By the continuity of the form of her administration, as by her cultural prestige,’ wrote Pirenne, ‘Rome survived her fall.’ It is, however, his distinctive contribution to have recognized the survival of the trans-Mediterranean trade with the east, of a partial money economy among the Franks, and the arrival of papyrus from Egypt with all its social implications. If his assertion of a scarcely disturbed or diminished money economy in the west has not met with acceptance, his vision of a mainly Roman Mediterranean society, ruled by Germanic dynasties, but speaking a popular Latin, using Roman legal forms, obeying officers with the old Latin titles and wearing east Roman ornamenta, maintaining the villas of the fisc and of private owners, obeying in the countryside the count of the old civitas and in the towns the successors of the old senatorial ordo: this vision has illuminated the history of the sixth and seventh centuries, and will live.
The Arab conquests of the seventh century brought a further economic recession to western Europe. Syria fell under-Arab dominion in 634–636; Egypt between 640 and 642, Africa between 643 and 708, and Spain in 711. All these countries were drawn into the orbit of Islam and Mediterranean unity was broken. The sea became ‘an uncrossable ditch’ between the western and eastern parts of the Roman world. Arab mastery of the Tyrrhenian Sea was so complete that no Christian vessel dared to cross it. If any vessels made their way safely between Marseilles and the Levant, they were very few.
The Byzantine empire, thanks to its war fleet, succeeded in sheltering its own coasts from the Muslim pirates: her merchant ships could pass safely to the Black Sea, the Aegean, Greece, south Italy and the Adriatic: Constantinople had communications with Venice, Taranto, Amalfi and Naples: but not with Marseilles or Narbonne. The Spanish ports were in Muslim hands, and the Tyrrhenian Sea was dead to large-scale commerce. Pilgrims for the east from Gaul or Britain for the most part took the land route to Naples and sailed from there.
There are two striking pieces of evidence for the economic results of the Arab conquests on the west, and on the Carolingian empire when it arose: the disappearance of a gold currency, and of an east-west Mediterranean commerce.
In the matter of currency, a monetary schism in the Carolingian period divided Europe: the Arabs and the Byzantines used a gold standard, and the Carolingian empire and England a silver standard and this of necessity. The Byzantine empire after the Arab conquests of its provinces was no longer synonymous with ‘the east’: the gold-using area included its shrunken territories, and those of the Arabs; the Levant, Egypt, Maghreb (Morocco), south Italy as partly Greek and partly Arab, Sicily as first Greek and then Arab, and the greater part of Spain. The Arabs had inherited a double tradition of a gold currency, that of the Byzantines and that of Sassanid Persia, and they continued to issue gold coins of the same weight, though eventually with Arabic inscriptions, as those of the countries they conquered. They had the eastern trade, and it gave them supplies of gold. The map of Europe was divided between the gold monetary area of the Greeks and Arabs, and the silver monetary area of the Carolingian empire and England. To the gold area in this map was added for a short period at the end of the tenth century Varangian Russia; otherwise it held good till the middle of the twelfth century.
In the west, an exclusively silver coinage was used by the Carolingian Franks; Professor Grierson has shown that there was more gold in Spain and England than used to be believed,1 though in England it was used for ornaments that could be melted down at need rather than in the normal minting of gold coins. Charlemagne and Louis the Pious issued certain gold coins once more, but only rarely and for quite exceptional needs. Among the Anglo-Saxons the amount of gold used in the coinage was unimportant compared to that needed for such ornaments as those found in the seventh-century cenotaph at Sutton Hoo. Even the gold coinage of Offa was soon discontinued. When, on the continent, new mints were opened for countries that had never earlier had their own currency (Germany east of the Rhine, Bohemia, Poland and the Scandinavian states), they minted only silver. The silver denier (denarius) of Carolingian Gaul spread all over western Europe: the scarcity of metal is shown by its lightness, and it became successively lighter and lighter till the thirteenth century.
Money, in the Carolingian empire, meant silver, and the only coin was the silver penny. The solidus survived as a money of account only, and it was now reckoned as a silver solidus: twelve deniers, for the most part, went to the solidus (the sous). Though for accounting purposes, payment might normally be reckoned in silver solidi (shillings), for the purpose of a natural economy a payment could be used of solidi ‘in grain’. Though this silver coinage of the Carolingian empire was scanty and poor, the resources of the Franks enabled them to support it: the silver mines of the central plateau were used throughout the middle ages.
The history of the later imperial and early medieval gold currency hinged on the fact that Europe was poor in gold: new gold could only be obtained by conquest or in commercial exchange with countries that produced it, and from the eighth to the twelfth century little of the latter was possible. The eastern trade came to Byzantines and Arabs, or passed up the Russian rivers to the Scandinavians. Nevertheless, some gold circulated in western Europe, though to a limited extent and without an official currency. Gold ornaments were a resource at need, and were apparently often melted down; gold circulated in the form of ingots, dust and rings. Payments reckoned in gold appear later in Domesday Book, and the payment of an ounce of gold (by weight) occurs in various records and chronicles.
In the eighth and ninth centuries two gold coins circulated in the central and western Mediterranean, and were at least known to the Franks: the Byzantine and Arabic forms of the old solidus aureus. The Greek hyperpère is met with in the Chanson de Roland as the besanz, and elsewhere in Carolingian sources; the dinar struck by the Arab caliphs and then by the Syrian amirs and the Umayyad caliphs of Cordoba was also widely known in western Europe. Dinars have been found among the silver coins of the Carolingian Franks, and one of between 724 and 743 occurred in a find at Eastbourne.
The assessment of the relative volume of Arabic or Byzantine gold coins in western Europe depends upon the meaning of the term ‘mancus‘. It used to be believed that the mancus was the Arab dinar, or a western or English imitation of the dinar, or the weight in gold of the dinar used as a unit of account, as in England. Professor Grierson and other numismatists have now shown that the mancus was not an Arabic coin or the term derived from an Arabic word: the mancus, in the second half of the eighth century, was an Italian-minted Byzantine coin, a lighter or less fine version of the solidus aureus, in fact, a solidus mancus. It circulated in Rome, south Italy and Catalonia and the term occurs in the records of the famous Lombard abbey of Farfa. In Bavaria it was accounted worth 30 silver deniers and, with variations, this valuation held good throughout the west. Istria paid its contribution to the Carolingian fisc in mancuses. Towards the end of the ninth century the term mancus disappears from Latin texts of the Mediterranean regions and was replaced by marabotius, used especially of Almoravid coins: but this coin was still actually the old solidus, though now in an Arabic rather than Italian-Byzantine form.
The mancus figures regularly in Anglo-Saxon wills, charters, etc, of the period, but as a money of account. Professor Grierson has shown that there is no reason to believe that the mancuses minted by Offa for an annual offering to the pope were dinars, but in all probability copies of the south Italian mancus then circulating in Rome, of which returning pilgrims would have knowledge. Numismatists reject as quite insufficient the evidence that the single dinar found in Italy with some English associations was actually one of Offa’s mancuses. Moreover, the trading connexions between England and Spain were apparently almost non-existent: and the word used of Offa’s coin was actually mancus and not dinar.
As to the other sign of economic recession in the Carolingian period, the diminution of an east-west Mediterranean trade, the most striking phenomenon was the sudden disuse of papyrus in the west between c. 670 and 680, most clearly shown in the documents issued from the Merovingian writing office in those years. It is usually held that papyrus had become unobtainable and parchment was therefore used to replace it: though it has been recently suggested that the change was due to desire for a less friable material for use with a seal. But authentification by seal alone was not immediately adopted by the Merovingians on the change-over to parchment, though the more solid material, once adopted, certainly hastened the use of the seal. It has also been asserted that vellum was now cheaper than papyrus, which may well have been if papyrus was almost unobtainable: though in the days of the unhindered supply of papyrus, as under the Roman empire, papyrus would have been a much cheaper writing material than vellum. The place of papyrus was, in any case, soon after 670 taken in legal and administrative business, correspondence and for books, by parchment. Cheap writing material for the merchants was unobtainable; but as bulky eastern goods could no longer come by sea from Egypt or the Levant, and large-scale commerce dwindled, there was the less occasion for business letters and accounts. Italy could still obtain papyrus, after the tenth century from Sicily, where the Arabs introduced it, or from the merchants of Amalfi, Naples or Venice, who continued to traffic with the Muslims of Egypt, contrary to all the prohibitions of the church.
It is of interest that the notaries of the papal scrinium continued to use papyrus, and the old cursive hand appropriate to it, long after the chanceries of western Europe, and particularly those of the Carolingian emperors, had adopted parchment. Parchment was a much more lasting material, with a smooth surface, and the new script evolved for it became universally recognized and understood in Europe, while ability to read the cursive hand died out. Yet the Roman curia went on issuing papyrus documents (sometimes accompanying them with a readable parchment copy in the new script) till the eleventh century. The Roman curia was always a notably conservative body: the old Roman prudentia seems usually to have prevented the adoption of administrative or liturgical practices originating in western Europe for about 200 years: but its use of papyrus seems to have been due to something more than notarial conservatism. The curia desired to follow Byzantine practice. The manufacture of papyrus in fifth- and sixth-century Egypt was an imperial monopoly, and for the prevention of forgery notaries were compelled to use only the basilike charte. Imperial Byzantine documents of the greatest importance were written on such papyrus with purple ink and sealed with golden seals bearing the emperor’s effigy; documents of lesser importance, or those issued by the imperial family, were written with silver ink and sealed with a leaden seal. The pope at Rome and his curia, following Byzantine law, seem to have conformed their practice with that of Constantinople, using the leaden bulla of documents of the second class. When the Arabs conquered Egypt and possessed themselves of the papyrus industry, they did not at once prohibit the export of papyrus; they did so during the course of their quarrel with Justinian II, but some supplies seem always to have reached Italy, though not western Europe.
Spices also, and the embroidered silken ceremonial cloths of the east, became rare luxury imports in the west in the eighth century. Importers were generally Jews, who brought a few sacks of pepper or spices from Muslim Spain or the Byzantine ports of Italy: kings or the church might get occasional supplies of spices or incense, but the regular commerce in spices from Marseilles dropped suddenly. The question whether Syrian traders completely ceased to visit the Carolingian empire after the Arab conquest of the Mediterranean has been much disputed by savants; there was undoubtedly a rush of refugee Syrian Christians to Europe in the seventh century, when the eastern provinces were overrun, and the manuscripts, textiles and ornaments they brought had a notable effect on art. Byzantine and even Syrian and Armenian influence was strong in western Europe at the end of the seventh century through their refugee Syrians; but, as Pirenne argued, a few refugee Syrian bishops and their icons might well influence art-forms without affording any evidence for east-west Mediterranean trade. Some Syrians became popes, like Sergius I (687–701) and Constantine I (708–719), and the Greek monk Theodore became archbishop of Canterbury (668–693): but while East Roman forms influenced religion and art, east Roman trade with the west dwindled.
With the dwindling of large-scale commerce, the Carolingian empire reached the last stage of ‘recession’: a domanial economy focussed on the large estate, a natural economy tempered by the use of a small currency, replaced the Merovingian régime, where at least more money and merchants had been in circulation. The Carolingian empire was shut in on the east by the Avars, on the north by the Scandinavians, who traded with the Arabs down the Russian rivers, and by Arab dominance of the west Mediterranean: it has been called a closed economy, without outlets, with an insufficient supply of the precious metals to maintain a good currency. The gold coinage had disappeared and land became the only source of wealth. The Carolingian emperors and kings were forced to pay their servants, especially the counts, in land, and hence arose the extension of the system of the grants of beneficia, to laymen as well as to churchmen; the cellararium fisci ceased to be provisioned with eastern goods, and abbeys which had had privileges exempting them from paying customs on goods bought in the markets of Marseilles and Fos ceased to claim them, for the goods desired were not there. A Carolingian trattoria assigned quantities of home-grown food to envoys, but no longer spices and rolls of papyrus.
The question whether, in this domanial economy, any produce of the estate was grown for sale in the Carolingian period, has been answered in the affirmative by M. Ganshof; and the question, whether any Syrian merchants at all reached Gaul was answered by the instancing of the Syrian Cappi mentioned in the capitulary of Quierzy, by the American historian, J. W. Thomson; Professor Dopsch also and his pupils have claimed that the Arab influence on the cutting off of trade has been over-emphasized. Other scholars too have denied the complete cutting of Frankish intercourse with Sicily in the ninth and tenth centuries. But if eastern commodities reached the west, it must have been in small quantity, and trade done in corn, wine or external goods in the towns between the Seine and the Rhine was done by means of a relatively small, silver currency. No peasant paid a money rent for his land; he paid by services on his lord’s demesne, he held his small farm freely, or he commended it and himself to the patronage of some lord; the king’s officials held their land by reason of service, not, till the ninth century, military. There was no longer a royal land tax, collected in money, and though the customary tolls were paid partly in coin, they went, by this time, largely to the immunists, not to the king or emperor. All this recession towards a natural economy, the parent of ninth-century feudalism, hinged upon shortage of currency and absence of sufficient large-scale commerce. It was a purely economic phenomenon: and not, till the latter half of the ninth century, connected with the need of military defence.
The change which the barbarian invasions brought to European agriculture was less marked than that caused to town life and commerce; but it had its part in the gradual extension of arable at the expense of brushwood and forest, which is the main historical feature of European agriculture in the middle ages. Agriculture round the Mediterranean basin was already old and the cultivable land had long been laid out for vineyards or in the small rectangular (or irregular) fields by the aratrum. But in the hinterland of the Mediterranean, in north Spain, north Gaul, the Rhine lands, central Europe and the Balkans there was still much uncleared forest and heath land, and here the making of assarts (clearings, défrichements) went on gradually in the early middle ages, and was rapidly extended in the thirteenth century. In the Merovingian and Carolingian period, when wars and disturbances threw land out of cultivation only too often, clearing often meant only the removal of brushwood and copses which had grown up on land once cultivated. The clearing of the great forests was very heavy work not at first attempted in the days of the Germanic settlements; moreover, where Germanic influence was strong, there may have been reluctance to meddle with the territory of the gods who dwelt in the deep woods.
Only two points can be here briefly mentioned: the effect of the Germanic settlements on the lands the Germans conquered: and the connexion between the layout of the countryside and the kind of plough used.1
Three zones of agrarian settlement can be distinguished in Europe after the barbarian settlements. The first was that where, by the system of hospitalitas, the conquerors drew a share of the Roman landlord’s revenue or produce from his estates, or even replaced him altogether. To the coloni or servi who worked the villa or the demesne, this could have made little difference, for only enough to support life, and that meagrely, was allowed him already. Nor was there any reason to introduce new methods of cultivation or new instruments: the villas were worked as before, nor is there reason to think that in this first zone the conquerors settled in the vici and tilled the land themselves. This zone comprised the Mediterranean lands: Spain and south Gaul, under the Visigoths and later the Franks; the Rhone country of the Burgun-dians, and Ostrogothic and Lombard Italy. Here no traditions of Germanic agriculture or village life appear to have affected the countryside.
The second zone was that settled in some numbers by the Franks, Alemans and Bavarians: in Gaul, that is to say, to the Loire, the Rhine mouth, Lorraine, Switzerland and Bavaria. Here the Germans were more numerous from the beginning, and here they received gradual reinforcements. The Salic Law and the laws of the Alemans and Bavarians provide for a land settled in small villages; in Salian Gaul three or four conquering Franks seem to have possessed themselves of some villa and worked it themselves with their followers, or with the coloni and serfs of the dispossessed landowner. Germanic place-names with a personal name and -ingen or heim point to ownership by a Frankish noble and his people: these place-names occur in the Rhineland. The place-name element thun (= Anglo-Saxon tun) in Normandy may point to an original Frankish population; but south of the Loire Frankish ownership did not imply Frankish settlers.
The third zone of German settlement was that of land outside the Rhine and Danube frontiers, where Roman traditions and Roman agriculture had never existed. It includes the Frankish territory on the right bank of the Rhine, and the lands of the Frisians, Saxons, Danes and Scandinavians. Here villages of freemen might be found and a sharing out of strips in the common fields by decision in the folk-moot; but here too were villages where some noble, or freeman of higher status than other freemen, had great, compact estates. There were grades of freemen among the Franks, athelings or edelingen (nobles) among the Saxons, and everywhere laeti, or the half-free conquered villagers, and slaves: and social status was accompanied by difference of holding, or absence of holding. Probably, as in Anglo-Saxon England, the lordless village of free ceorls (Charlton, Carlton) was the exception.
The countryside in western Europe has been laid out by two types of plough, the aratrum and the carruca, and, speaking broadly, the aratrum was the plough used in the Roman empire in the fifth century and long before, and the carruca was the plough used by the Germanic invaders. The aratrum was a light plough, ox-drawn, the handles supported only by the hands of the ploughman, and the share driving a light furrow on the surface of the field; to let sufficient air into the soil, it was necessary to cross the furrows with others running in the other direction. For such a field a small, rectangular plot was best, for it would not be possible to cross-plough a long, narrow one. The small fields of hilly country could be dealt with by the aratrum, if indeed they were not so sloping that they must be cultivated by hoe, mattock or caschrom. The coulter, or knife fastened before the share, to cut the skin of grass or weeds and make the passage of the share easier, was actually invented by the Romans for use with the aratrum, but most of these light, primitive ploughs would have been without it.
The word plough is itself Germanic, and was used of the wheeled plough, the carruca (connected with currus and charrue). It was a heavy plough and drawn by anything up to eight oxen; the weight of the plough now rested on the wheels: it is first mentioned by Pliny († A.D. 79) as used in Rhaetia, and appears to have been used by the Germanic tribes who practised extensive agriculture. A heavy wheeled plough would be much more effective in bringing new land into tillage than the lighter aratrum, and this apparently explains its extensive use by tribes on the borders of the empire, or in its less cultivated regions, for the Celts also used the wheeled plough. The furrow driven by the carruca was deeper than that drawn by the aratrum and it was hence unnecessary to cross plough; a day’s work by the carruca with its team of oxen would result in a long, narrow strip, an ager, or acre strip. These would be disposed, according to the lie of the land, in parallel strips, or in bunches of strips lying in different directions, and the whole would form a great open field (champagne, campania, champion farming): the open field itself would be fenced, but there would be no division between the strips. A peasant’s holding would consist of strips in different parts of the field, and the lord’s demesne in this arable field would similarly consist of these unfenced strips.
To preserve the fertility of the soil, both in the small, hedged fields of the light plough, and the large open fields laid out by the carruca, the land was left fallow in either a two-year or a three-year course. In the Mediterranean basin the older, two-year course long prevailed, for the soils were light and better crops were thus obtained; but among the Franks the three-course system, where introduced, was capable of yielding a larger produce. The next important development in the technique of ploughing, the use of a mould-board to turn the sod, did not occur till later than the Carolingian period.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE