The early Byzantine economy incontext: aristocratic property andeconomic growth reconsideredemed_320 255..284
Peter Sarris
This article responds to recent primitivist claims with respect to the lateantique economy of the early Byzantine period. It examines the archaeologicaland documentary evidence for economic sophistication in early ByzantineEgypt, and addresses the issue of economic growth in late antiquity as a wholeby placing the evidence for early Byzantine economic expansion in a broadermedieval context. In particular, the epiphenomena of economic growth in lateantiquity are compared to the epiphenomena of statistically demonstrableeconomic growth in Anglo-Norman England.
Introduction
The first decade of the twenty-first century witnessed the publication ofa number of important works on the commercial economy of Europe andthe Mediterranean in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. The firstvolume of Horden and Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea, for example, alertedscholars to the crucial ecological and environmental contexts in whichexchange of all sorts took place. Likewise, McCormick’s Origins of theEuropean Economy presented a bold case for the intensity of early medi-eval trade and the shifting patterns of economic contacts that emerged inresponse to new political and military realities.1 More recently, a collec-tion of essays edited by Marlia Mango has made accessible the latest
* Elements of the argument presented here have been proposed at seminars at the University ofSouthampton, the University of Birmingham (Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and ModernGreek Studies), the University of Manchester and Liverpool University. I am grateful to thosewho attended these seminars for their suggestions and responses, and to Dr Stanley Reuben(who read the whole in draft). I am especially grateful to the anonymous reader who read thispiece for Early Medieval Europe, and whose comments led me to improve it considerably.
1 P. Horden and N. Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford, 2000);M. McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce AD 300–900(Cambridge, 2001).
archaeological research, which has revealed a complexity of commercialand trading arrangements of which many would have been sceptical onthe basis of the written sources alone.2
The recent historiography does, however, leave some important ques-tions hanging in the air. In particular, it is possible to read much of therecent literature on commerce and yet come away relatively uniformed asto the extent to which trade was ever truly embedded within broadersocial and economic relations and, in particular, relations of production.How did the commercial networks described in McCormick’s book, forinstance, impact on the lives of the labouring populations of the earlyMiddle Ages? This is one of the reasons why the publication of ChrisWickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages marked such a watershed.3 Inthis work, Wickham made an extraordinary contribution to scholarshipin writing the first truly comparative study of early medieval economicdevelopment, which focuses on the east as much as on the west andwrestles with issues of production as well as of exchange. The problemfrom a specifically Byzantine perspective, however, is that Wickham’struly monumental work begins about one hundred years too late toconvey to the reader a sense of what was going on within the economy ofthe late Roman and early Byzantine empire prior to the west’s militarycrisis of the fifth century and the military disasters that befell the east inthe seventh. Its chronological parameters to some extent occlude theliveliness of its contribution to the debate over the nature, character, andtrajectory of late antique economic development. The same can be saidwith even greater force of the enormous Economic History of Byzantiumedited by the late Angeliki Laiou, which – rather unhelpfully – openswith a synchronic account of the Byzantine economy in the sixthcentury.4
The point is that – as the work of Jairus Banaji has established – interms of the social and economic evolution of the early Byzantine world,it was the fourth century that constituted the key turning point.5 Thefourth century witnessed the consolidation of those centrally articulatedand centrally focused ‘tetrarchic’ governmental institutions that trans-formed relations between the imperial authorities and provincial elites; itwas this development that first catalysed the dynamic process of eliteformation across the Mediterranean world as a whole, that starts tobecome apparent in our legal and papyrological sources from the fourthcentury, and which has been characterized as representing the ascendancy
2 M. Mundell Mango (ed.), Byzantine Trade 4th–12th Centuries (Farnham, 2009).3 C. Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean 400–800 (Oxford,
2005).4 A. Laiou (ed.), The Economic History of Byzantium (Washington, DC, 2002).5 J. Banaji, Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2001; 2nd edn, 2007).
of a new, trans-regional imperial aristocracy of service. It was in thefourth century that the papyri and imperial legislation record members ofthis emergent aristocracy of service beginning to win mastery of landedsociety; and, crucially, it was in the fourth century that the economic andmonetary context in which this process was taking place was transformedby virtue of the ever more widespread circulation of the Constantiniangold solidus.6 That is to say, it is only from a fourth-century perspectivethat the early Byzantine world of the fifth and sixth centuries – and theempire’s course of social and economic development – actually makessense.
Conflicting models and contrasting perspectives
That the period from the fourth century to the sixth witnessed a dynamicprocess of elite formation and an associated concentration of landown-ership is now widely acknowledged.7 This marks a major corrective tomodels of early Byzantine social and economic development which pre-vailed in the period from the 1970s to the 1990s, which typically empha-sized the supposed emergence in late antiquity of a free and autonomouspeasantry in a social landscape largely devoid of great landowners, andwhere holy men and saints came to serve as the key interlocutors betweenpeasant communities, urban elites, and the imperial government.8 Whereopinions continue to differ, however (sometimes with a vehemence thatborders on the theological), is with respect to the economic effects of theapparent concentration of landownership in the early Byzantine world. Ithas been argued by Banaji, for example (and indeed by the presentauthor), that the concentration of landownership in aristocratic hands inlate antiquity contributed to a wave of economic expansion, sophistica-tion and growth that persisted in the early Byzantine empire until at leastthe mid-sixth century.9 That is not to say that great landowners were the
6 Banaji, Agrarian Change is fundamental here.7 Thus, as a phenomenon, it is broadly accepted by both Hickey and Kehoe: see T. Hickey,
‘Aristocratic Landholding and the Economy of Byzantine Egypt’, in R. Bagnall (ed.), Egypt inthe Byzantine World (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 288–308, at p. 289 – although for Hickey, ‘it wasin the second half of the fifth century that the ‘great estates’ emerged as a prominent feature onthe late antique landscape’; D. Kehoe. ‘Aristocratic Dominance in the Late Roman AgrarianEconomy and the Question of Economic Growth’, Journal of Roman Archaeology (2003),pp. 711–21.
8 This is the social context assumed, for example, in P. Brown’s essay ‘The Rise and Function of theHoly Man in Late Antiquity’, Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971), pp. 80–101. See alsoM. Kaplan, Les hommes et la terre à Byzance du VIe au XIe siècle, propriété et exploitation du sol(Paris, 1992), which posits an agrarian economy dominated by family-based peasant production.
9 Banaji, Agrarian Change and P. Sarris, ‘Rehabilitating the Great Estate: Aristocratic Propertyand Economic Growth in the Late Antique East’, in W. Bowden and L. Lavan (eds), RecentResearch on the Late Antique Countryside (Leiden, 2002), pp. 55–71.
only agents of economic expansion; peasant freeholders and farmersclearly made an important contribution too.10 However, members of theimperial aristocracy of service were in a unique position (by virtue of theirrelationship with the organs and agents of the state) to take advantage ofthe economic opportunities offered by the imperial government’s distri-bution and dissemination of the Constantinian gold solidus to gear pro-duction on their estates to the market. As a result, production on suchestates could increasingly concentrate on production for exchange ratherthan production for direct use, thereby facilitating the greater integrationof urban and rural economies.11
This ‘commercializing’ model has met resistance. First, it has beenclaimed (by the American papyrologist Todd Hickey) that rather thanbeing a highly commercialized, economically integrative enterprise, theestates of the Apion family around the Middle Egyptian city of Oxyrhyn-chus (which offers the richest and most detailed case study of an earlyByzantine great estate), were in fact largely autarkic, essentially self-sufficient units from which the Apion household derived only modestrental incomes.12 Second, significant scepticism has been expressed (byDennis Kehoe) as to the supposed economic benefits hypotheticallyassociated with the concentration of wealth in the hands of members ofthe early Byzantine aristocracy recorded in the sources.13 What bothHickey and Kehoe also query is whether there really was significant percapita economic growth in the early Byzantine era, and in so doing alignthemselves with persistent primitivist assumptions concerning the natureof the late antique economy.14
Debates over economic growth in the ancient or late ancient world aredogged by one very basic fact: that to a great extent late antique economichistory is constrained by the intellectual horizons of those who write it.The question of whether there was ‘significant’ economic growth in lateantiquity, for example, necessarily begs the question: ‘compared towhat?’. This is not a question that those whose intellectual formation lies
10 On which see the excellent book by M. Decker, Tilling the Hateful Earth: Agricultural Produc-tion and Trade in the Late Antique East (Oxford, 2009).
11 See P. Sarris, Economy and Society in the Age of Justinian (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 177–99.12 See Hickey, ‘Aristocratic Landholding’, p. 302 and the supporting study that he cites. Hickey’s
claims with respect to the modest nature of Apion income from the family’s estates is not themain concern here. Yet even on his minimalist figures, the rental income derived fromthe family’s properties around Oxyrhynchus in the mid-sixth century were roughly half of therental income derived in the eighth century by the papacy from the entirety of its clearly vastestates in Sicily and Calabria: see C. Zuckerman, ‘Learning From the Enemy: More Studies in“Dark Centuries” Byzantium’, Millennium 2 (2005), pp. 79–135, at p. 103.
13 Kehoe, ‘Aristocratic Dominance’.14 Discussed in Banaji, Agrarian Change, pp. 213–21. See also Hickey, ‘Aristocratic Landholding’,
p. 294 n. 33; W. Scheidel, ‘In Search of Roman Economic Growth’, Journal of Roman Archae-ology 22 (2009), pp. 46–70.
primarily in the field of ancient history, with its notorious dearth of hardeconomic statistics, are necessarily in a strong position to answer.15
Attempts have been made to conjure up such statistics, through tabulat-ing epigraphic findings, shipwreck sites, industrial pollution deposits inancient ice cores, etc., but every attempt at precision is ultimately vitiatedeither by the problematic nature of the data sets assembled, or theassumptions that underlie their interpretation.16 Even more unsatisfac-tory have been attempts to impose wholesale on the ancient economy thelatest fashions in academic economics, such as the so-called ‘New Insti-tutional Economics’. This can have the effect of reducing all past eco-nomic history to the glibly comparative language of business studies,generating largely ahistorical discussion of ‘firms’, ‘rent-seeking activity’and such like.17 As the financial crises of the early twenty-first centuryhave revealed, liberal economists have problems getting to grips withmodern capitalist society: it seems unlikely that they should have muchto offer by way of insight into the ancient or medieval worlds.18 Nor doesthe recent vogue for comparing the ancient world with the distant andunconnected civilizations of China or India ultimately deliver much. Allone tends to discover from such studies is how much western historiansthink they have learned about cultures of which they hitherto knewlittle.19 Rather, questions concerning the extent and nature of economicgrowth in late antiquity require the ability, readiness and competence todraw comparisons not just between pre-industrial and industrial societies(or industrializing ones) but between pre-industrial societies themselves,and, crucially, to understand those societies from the inside. In short, itrequires a broader but also deeper comparitivist perspective.20
Understanding of the social and economic history of the late Romanand early Byzantine world is also vitiated by what might be termed the
15 A point once made to the author in a personal communication from the late Geoffrey de SteCroix, who argued how much better a training medieval history was compared to ancient, as itenabled one to witness pre-industrial social and economic relations in action with considerableevidence. Note, however, the thought-provoking essays contained in J.G. Manning andI. Morris (eds), The Ancient Economy: Evidence and Models (Stanford, 2005).
16 Note, for example, the critique by A. Wilson, ‘Indicators for Roman Economic Growth:A Response to Walter Scheidel’, Journal of Roman Archaeology 22 (2009), pp. 71–82.
17 P.F. Bang, ‘The Ancient Economy and the New Institutional Economics’, Journal of RomanStudies 99 (2009), pp. 194–206. For an example of how the use of this model can go wrong inuntrained hands, see R. Mazza, ‘Big Questions, Small Answers? The Apiones Archive andDebate on Aristocratic Landholding in Late Antique Egypt’, in G. Azzarello (ed.), Ricchezza epotere n’ell Egitto Bizantino (Berlin, 2011).
18 Historical materialism, by contrast at least offers a matrix through which to analyse andcompare societies that respects the particularity of each historical era or social formation: seeJ. Banaji, Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation (Leiden, 2010).
19 A point I owe to Richard Talbert.20 As exemplified by J. Banaji, ‘Modernizing the Historiography of Rural Labour: An Unwritten
Agenda’, in M. Bentley (ed.), Companion to Historiography (London, 1997), pp. 88–102.
‘problem of Egypt’. Egypt famously represents the one part of the ancientand early medieval world for which we have abundant documentaryevidence in the form of the extant papyri. So, for example (as we shallsee), debate over the economic nature of aristocratic households in lateantiquity tends to boil down to a debate over the nature of the Apionestates around Oxyrhynchus, as they provide our best-documentedexample.21 Yet there is still a certain reluctance on the part of somehistorians to incorporate evidence derived from the papyrological recordinto their analysis.22 This position becomes less and less tenable as evermore documentary papyri from provinces of the Roman and early Byz-antine world beyond Egypt are unearthed, the contents of many of whichgive the lie to the supposed ‘uniqueness’ of Egyptian social conditions.23
Of course, such reluctance on the part of some historians to make themost of the papyrological sources is only partly their own fault: too oftenit is exacerbated by the fact that certain of those who edit, study, and thuscommunicate the contents of the papyri to non-papyrologists, give everysign of knowing relatively little beyond the world of the papyri them-selves. As a result, they are sometimes unable to appreciate the fullsignificance of the evidence they have before them. To accuse a papyrolo-gist of not being able to see the wood for the trees would be to getdangerously close to mixing metaphors, but certainly, too much narrowspecialism can make for uninformed readings.24
Late antique sophistication: the case of Egypt
It is becoming increasingly evident that ‘primitivist’ approaches to theancient, late antique and early Byzantine economies ultimately rest upona misunderstanding or lack of appreciation of the evidence. It was alreadytrue in Finley’s day that minimalist models concerning the possibilities ofextensive patterns of commercialized exchange in the ancient world, orthe denial of the existence of levels of economic sophistication compa-rable to those later encountered in Europe in the late medieval or early
21 Sarris, Economy and Society, pp. 16–17.22 See the discussion of this in Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, pp. 23–4, who notably
makes highly productive use of the Egyptian materials.23 As noted by R. Bagnall, ‘Evidence and Models for the Economy of Roman Egypt’, in Manning
and Morris (eds), The Ancient Economy, pp. 187–206, at pp. 188–9.24 Thus Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, p. 25, notes ‘that abiding Egyptological
blind-spot, a lack of interest by most scholars in anywhere outside the Nile valley’. An exampleof the curious positions that emerge as a result would be the denial that the word chôrion(Modern Greek chorió) could be used in late antiquity to mean village: R. Bagnall, ‘The Dateof P. Kell. 1 G 62 and the Meaning of chôrion’, Chronique d’Égypte 74 (1999), pp. 329–33, at p.332. Note, however, Procopius, Anecdota XXII.40, J.Nov. (= Justiniani Novellae Constitutiones)139, 157 and 163, and, for a papyrological example, SPP (= Studien zur Palaeographie undPapyruskunde) X 154.
modern periods, primarily depended upon a readiness to largely ignorethe testimony of the documentary evidence from Egypt on the one hand,or, on the other, the archaeological evidence and the epigraphic record forthe Roman empire at large.25 In the years since the publication of Finley’sThe Ancient Economy this has become even more palpably the case.26
What might be termed the ‘industrial archaeology’ of the Roman empire,for example, is revealing a strikingly high degree of capitalization ofproduction associated with what appears to have been market-associatedpatterns of exchange across the Mediterranean world.27 As Hitchner hasconcluded, ‘the sheer volume of manufactured goods recovered on sitesall over the empire . . . attests to the scale of production in the Romanworld, a situation not seen again until the eighteenth century’.28
Likewise it should be noted that commonly repeated primitivistassumptions concerning the supposed difficulty and expense of overlandtransportation in the ancient world, and the inhibiting effect of this oninter-regional trade and commodified exchange, are increasingly beinggainsaid by both the documentary and archaeological evidence. AsBagnall has noted of Egypt, there is evidence for the commercializedcultivation of olives and olive oil in late antiquity as far inland as theKharga and Dakhleh oases in the Western Desert, commodities that wereconveyed vast distances by land, but which nevertheless remained com-petitive in Egyptian markets.29
As the case of the oasis olive trade suggests, Egypt in late antiquityprovides a striking example of late Roman economic sophistication:indeed, Egypt was almost certainly the economically most sophisticatedregion anywhere under Roman rule.30 Central to the economic cohesionand significance of Egypt was the region’s unique natural resources, andin particular, the Nile flood. The Nile inundation, combined with theirrigation systems, canals and technological innovations that furtherfacilitated agriculture beyond the Nile valley, blessed Egypt with a fecun-dity unrivalled in the Mediterranean world, and which, in the Near Eastas a whole, would only appear to have been surpassed in the early MiddleAges by the carefully irrigated blacklands or sawad of the early Abbasid
25 Bagnall, ‘Evidence and Models’, pp. 187–8.26 M.I. Finley, The Ancient Economy (London, 1973).27 See R. Bruce Hitchner, ‘ “The Advantages of Wealth and Luxury”: The Case for Economic
Growth in the Roman Empire’, in Manning and Morris (eds), The Ancient Economy, pp.207–22; and A. Wilson, ‘Machines, Power and the Ancient Economy’, Journal of Roman Studies92 (2002), pp. 1–32.
28 Hitchner, ‘The Advantages’, p. 217. This issue is also discussed in B. Ward-Perkins, The Fall ofRome and the End of Civilization (Oxford, 2005).
29 Bagnall, ‘Evidence and Models’, pp. 196–7.30 Sarris, Economy and Society, pp. 10–28.
Iraqi alluvium.31 This facilitated very high population levels, and inparticular very high population density in the Nile valley as well as inAlexandria and the Nile Delta. The extent to which Egypt was liberatedfrom the uncertainties of dry farming also meant that members of thepopulation were freer to engage in artisanal and other non-agriculturaleconomic activities. Moreover, the ease and cheapness of communicationby water along the River Nile rendered practicable and supported a veryhigh degree of inter-regional integration, and correspondingly highdegrees of specialization. Again, the parallels with early Abbasid Meso-potamia are noteworthy.
In the late Roman period, the fecundity of Egypt was primarily drawnupon by the state to oblige landowners to grow wheat on a vast scale,turning the region into the breadbasket of empire.32 The self-sustainingprosperity of Egypt was such, however, that in marked contrast to otherparts of the Roman world (as argued by Wickham), the fiscal demands ofthe Roman state appear to have played only a comparatively minor rolein the economic integrity and prosperity of the region. This is suggestedby the fact that the fundamental realignments of Egypt’s fiscal spine overthe course of the seventh century (associated first with the cutting off ofthe grain supply to Constantinople and the Roman world to the northduring the Roman–Persian wars of 603–30, then the diversion of Egyp-tian grain and taxes to Mecca, Medina and the Arab-ruled territories tothe east under the Umayyads, and ultimately the emergence of a muchmore fiscally free-standing early Islamic Egypt in the eighth century)seem to have had no discernible impact on levels of prosperity.33
Indeed, in Egypt, the fading away of the fiscal demands of the Romanstate may simply have served to open up new opportunities to landown-ers, as land that had hitherto been set aside to grow fiscally demandedcereals could instead be turned to still more lucrative cash crops such asflax.34 In Egypt, in short, the demands of the East Roman state may haveserved to curtail economic development: there may have been a measureof ‘opportunity cost’ to the production of so much grain for Constanti-nople, which the later development of the medieval Egyptian textile tradeperhaps reveals. The medieval transition from cereal production to thecultivation of crops associated with the textile industry seems to have led
31 H. Kennedy, When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World (London, 2004), pp. 130–60.32 Sarris, Economy and Society, pp. 10–28.33 C. Foss, ‘Egypt under Mu’awiyaa: Part I’ and ‘Egypt under Mu’awiya: Part II’, Bulletin of SOAS
72 (2009), pp. 1–24 and pp. 259–78. A similar claim could be made for Roman North Africa,which initially thrived under Vandal rule: see A. Merrills and R. Miles, The Vandals (Oxford,2010).
34 P. Mayerson, ‘The Role of Flax in Roman and Fatmid Egypt’, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 56(1997), pp. 241–58.
to a renewed phase of economic expansion similar to that revealed byEpstein with respect to late medieval Sicily.35
Critically, the extraordinary wealth and high population density of lateantique Egypt meant that very substantial profits could be derived frominternal, localized patterns of production and exchange: a phenomenonvisible in both the archaeological and papyrological record.36 The profitsderivable from local production and exchange are likely to have acted inEgypt as a disincentive to any long-distance export trade save in the caseof a small number of exceptionally high-value goods, or items in whichEgypt possessed an effective monopoly (such as papyrus). The author ofthe fourth-century Expositio Totius Mundi Et Gentium, for example,noted the abundance of viticulture within the region, an assertion amplyattested by the documentary papyri. Yet the ceramic evidence reveals thatEgypt exported very little by way of wine: the main Egyptian amphoratype (in which wine was transported) is found in only relatively smallquantities along the sea-lanes leading to Constantinople and the Pales-tinian littoral. Egyptian wine, in any case, was not regarded as being ofterribly good quality. Rather, middling-quality Egyptian wine was pro-duced, but produced en masse, for a middling but mass Egyptian market.Likewise, it is striking how little penetration of Egyptian markets isdiscernible on the part of finewares made outside of the region. Rather,locally produced finewares, produced in huge quantities in factory-likeconditions for the local market of the Nile valley, appear to have success-fully squeezed out African red slip ware (the main late Roman finewaretype) over the course of the fifth century.37
A high degree of specialization of production and, importantly, ofcommercialization of production, is evident not only in urban but also inrural contexts. Indeed, the high population density of Egypt in lateantiquity arguably renders such a distinction unhelpful: the economicdevelopment of both the urban and rural sectors of the Egyptianeconomy was such that settlement hierarchies between poleis (cities) andkômai (villages) began to break down in the fifth and sixth centuries, afeature that some archaeologists and papyrologists have misread as sig-nalling urban decline.38 Certainly, a high degree of occupational special-ization and diversity is evident with respect to the village of Aphrodito inthe sixth century: on the ‘productive’ side of the economy, for example,we find skilled artisans and textile workers alongside shepherds, tenant
35 S.R. Epstein, An Island For Itself: Economic Development and Social Change in Late MedievalSicily (Cambridge, 2003).
36 Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, pp. 259–69.37 Sarris, Economy and Society, pp. 11–13; Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, p. 760.38 P. van Minnen, ‘The Other Cities in Later Roman Egypt’, in Bagnall (ed.), Egypt in the
farmers and, importantly, agricultural wage labourers.39 A high degree ofoccupational specialization and economic complexity is also discerniblewith respect to the village of Jeme in the seventh and eighth centuries, forwhich the evidence of the ostraka in particular reveals a lively market inmoneylending and credit.40
Primitivist autarky or commercialized integration? The case of theApion archive and the early Byzantine great estate
Crucially, ‘market orientated’ specialized production and an engagementwith specialized networks of presumably primarily local exchange are alsoevident with respect to the estates of the magnate households or oikoi,which are now widely accepted to have been an increasingly pronouncedfeature of the period from the fourth to early seventh centuries. This isimportant, in that, as we have seen, there are still those who are mindedto treat such estates – or at least the best recorded of them – as if they werebackward-leaning, self-sufficient, autarkic entities, cut off from urbanand rural markets. The owners of these estates, on such a model, weresimply rentiers.41
The model of the economically isolationist large estate, such as ToddHickey posits on the basis of the Apion archive from Oxyrhynchus, forinstance, makes no sense, however, either of the Egyptian evidence or thatfor the eastern empire at large. There would, for example, have been littlelogic in adopting such isolationist strategies against the broader back-ground of economic sophistication now evident for late antiquity as awhole, and it would have been even more illogical to adopt such strategiesin Egypt, where, as we have seen, sophistication and commercializationare likely to have been at their most pronounced. For the empire at large,considerable commercial drive on the part of landowners is suggested byimperial legislation on the collatio lustralis, or tax on mercantile profits,contained in the fifth-century Theodosian Code. These laws sought interalia to regulate the activities of merchants attached to aristocratic house-holds, seemingly with a view to merchandizing the produce of theirestates. Such arrangements would have enabled landowners to profitfrom trade whilst off-loading the risk of commercial transactions onto theshoulders of the merchant.42 This legislation takes it entirely for granted
39 Sarris, Economy and Society, pp. 96–114.40 T.G. Wilfong, Women of Jeme: Life in a Coptic Town in Late Antique Egypt (Michigan, 2002).41 Hickey, ‘Aristocratic Landholding’; J. Durliat, ‘Les conditions du commerce’, in R. Hodges and
W. Bowden (eds), The Sixth Century: Production, Distribution and Exchange (Leiden, 1998), pp.89–117.
42 Codex Theodosianus XIII.i.6 – I am grateful to my pupil Alyssa Bandow of King’s College,Cambridge, for discussion of this law.
that landowners should wish to sell the produce of their estates for profitat market, and expressly exempts from the tax those selling the produceof their own estates (perhaps in response to pressure from landowninginterests in Constantinople). As a constitution of 364 declares: ‘A specialplea shall defend only those persons who are recognized as engaged inbusiness (negotiantes) on their own estates and through themselves orthrough their men, and such persons should not be considered so muchin the category of merchants as of skilled and zealous masters.’43 Com-modification of estate production, we should note, was what made for askilful dominus in the fourth century: there is no sign here of aristocraticautarky.
What of the Apion estates themselves? To Todd Hickey for instance, aswe have seen, the Apiones were a family of rentiers, who rented out theirlandholdings so as to secure a steady and stable cash income. Much ofHickey’s work has focused on study of estate accounts from the Apionarchive detailing the rents collected in cash and crop from various estateproperties, so his assumption that rental income was important to theprivate economy of the Apion household is entirely reasonable. However,by not extending his horizons to take into account the available contentsof the archive as a whole, Hickey has simply failed to spot the manifestevidence for the Apiones also having kept up a regime of direct manage-ment. Indeed, direct management was arguably the hallmark of theApion estates. Around Oxyrhynchus, the Apion household (oikos) main-tained families of estate labourers (geôrgoi – literally ‘land-labourers’ inGreek), who were settled in tied estate villages or labour settlementscalled epoikia. These epoikia were associated with allotments of landstyled ktêmata and other amenities (such as dovecotes and oil-presses).The estate geôrgoi paid rents on such allotments and amenities (as well asthe fiscal charges to which they were liable) which were handled by thefigure of the village-level estate steward (pronoêtês).
At the same time, alongside these rented ktêmata we find a structurally,managerially and economically distinct category of land, often describedas the autourgia (‘self-working’ land), on which estate bondsmen (both‘free’ and ‘unfree’) worked, some of them in return for wages. This landwas directly managed: the costs of its cultivation were at least in part metby the rents collected from the tied villages or epoikia; and its produceseems to have been dealt with by separate administrative personnel. Thusalthough arrears in payments owed to or associated with the autourgiawere handled by the village overseers or pronoêtai, no document to date(as of 2010) reveals the pronoêtai to have handled productive arrears on
the autourgia.44 Given that the fiscal and other expenditure-related obli-gations of the Apion household are recorded as being met by the revenuescollected from the epoikia by the pronoêtai, this would have left theproduce of the autourgia free to have been marketed. The administrativedistinction between rent-producing and surplus-producing portions ofthe estate is an instructive one, and it should also be noted that wineproduction in particular was administratively ‘hived off’ from the pro-duction of cereals and garden farming.45 This highly regimented andfunctionally distinctive economic structuring of the estates is indicativeof a high degree of specialization (itself suggestive of commercialization).
How did direct management on the Apion estates actually work? InEconomy and Society in the Age of Justinian (published in 2006, butresearched during the period 1994–8), this topic was not discussed in anydetail, as the main point of interest to the author was the bi-partite orbilateral relationship between autourgia and ktêmata on the Apion estates.Broadly speaking, direct management and direct cultivation took twoforms. First, land could be assigned to named individuals or bands ofworkers, who, certainly in the case of vineland, were seemingly expectedto reach a production target set by the estate in return for a wage in cash,credit or kind.46 This system was most suited to forms of agriculturewhich required steady labour inputs: so, for example, this would appearto have been how much viticultural activity was organized. Thus, inOxyrhynchus papyrus (= P.Oxy) XVI 1859 (probably dating from theearly seventh century), an estate secretary (chartoularios) writes to theestate manager (antigeouchos):
I exhort my good master, if it is possible, to spare Pambechios and hiscompanions from Seruphis today and tomorrow, until they completethe portion of the landowner’s vintage assigned to them (eôs ou plêrô-sousin tên gouchikên rhysin autôn), since they began today to pick thefruits of their vines; for they are producing a great yield of wine.47
In P.Oxy XVI 1896 (dating from 577), a group of estate workers promisedto pay the Apion household ‘on account of the landowner’s vintage
44 This point is important as it serves to highlight a fundamental misconception at the heart of aclaim made by Hickey (which, he notes, he owes to Roberta Mazza): T. Hickey, ‘An Inconve-nient Truth? P. Oxy 18.2196 verso, the Apion Estate, and fiscalité in the Late Antique Oxyrhyn-chite’, Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 45 (2008), pp. 87–100, at p. 97 n.45. Thedocument he cites (P.Oxy. XVI 2032) implies the opposite of what he thinks it does.
45 Sarris, Economy and Society, pp. 29–70.46 This model is entirely compatible with the evidence of the document concerning wine pre-
sented by A. Benaissa, ‘The Economic Arrangements Between the Apion Household and itsEnapographoi Georgoi’, in Azzarello, Ricchezza.
47 P.Oxy (= The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, Published by the Egypt Exploration Society) XVI 1859, ll. 1–4.
(geouchikês rhyseôs) from the landowner’s vines of our holding (tôn geouch-ikôn ampelôn tou hêmôn ktêmatos) . . . 3,000 eight-sextarii landowner’sjars (geouchika sêkômata) of wine’.48 Sums of wine collected from the‘landowner’s portions of land’ (geouchikai merides) are recorded on P.OxyXVI 1916 (verso). Hickey regards these merides as shares of a crop or rentsin kind from what he terms ‘share tenancy’ arrangements, but in most lateantique papyrological attestations, the word meris is used to mean ageographical entity.49 These geouchikai merides, in short, seem to havebeen directly cultivated (as opposed to leased out) vineland.
Mechanically irrigated plots are also recorded to have been assigned tonamed workers to cultivate, with the Apion household providing thecapital requirements for the labour process. So, for example, in P.OxyXXXVI 2779 (dating from 530), an estate labourer (geôrgos) acknowl-edged that he had received a new axle ‘for the landowner’s water-wheelunder my charge (tên hyp’eme gouchikên mêchanên) which . . . supplieswater to vineland and arable land’.50 In a similar document (P.Oxy. XVI1982, dating from 497) a worker agreed to perform all tasks expected ofhim by the landowner, effectively combining the receipt with a contractof employment.51 Throughout these papyri (as in other documents fromlate antique Egypt), the adjective geouchikos (‘belonging to the land-owner’) is used to signify property or services pertaining to the domain ordemesne.52
Second, more seasonal tasks, such as sowing, could be performed byway of labour service or corvée. In the document published as P. Wash.Univ. II 102, for example (dating from the fifth or sixth centuries), wefind an account of workers (gnôsis ergatôn) obliged to sow the landowner’sautourgia (eis katasporan tês geouchikês autourgias).53 The use of the inhab-itants of estate epoikia as field labourers on directly managed portions ofthe Apion estate is also strongly suggested by a number of documents inwhich bread rations and wine are recorded to have been issued to hun-dreds of estate employees from geographically disparate settlements.54
These rations, as the editor of the most recently published texts concern-ing them has noted, look like they were ‘intended for the provision of
48 P.Oxy XVI 1896, ll. 14–19.49 R. Ast (ed.), Late Antique Greek Papyri in the Collection of the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
(P.Jena II) (Bonn, 2010), ‘Appendix I. Merides in 4th–8th c. Documents’, pp. 157–66.50 P.Oxy. XXXVI 2779, ll. 1–3.51 P.Oxy. XVI 1982, ll. 20–2: he agreed to acknowledge and accept ‘everything belonging to the
landowner’s account’ (hapanta ta anêkonta tô geouchikô logô).52 See, for example, T. Reekmans, A Sixth-Century Account of Hay (P.Iand. inv. 653) (Brussels,
1962), p. 14: ‘our document does not concern the entire village, but merely a domain situatedwithin it. This may be deduced from I 1, 9 and II 2, 10, where the adjective geouchikos occurs.’
53 P. Wash. Univ. (= Washington University Papyri) II 102.54 P.Oxy. XVI 1952 and LXII 4926-9 (bread rations to over 450 individuals from various Apion
epoikia); P.Oxy XVI 2012 (wine rations for 164 inhabitants).
estate labourers involved in the harvest’.55 Such labour tasks seem to havepossessed a strongly customary character, and could be demanded fromagricultural workers to whom sections of the estate had been assigned orwho were also renting property from the household. So, for example,P.Oxy. XXVII 2478 (dating from 595–6), records that an estate gardenfarmer (pômaritês) working an estate orchard (geouchikon pômarion) – butwho was also paying rent – was obliged to provide ‘all the landowner’slabour services customarily given by him’ (tas didomenas par’autou exethous geouchikas hyperhêsias pasas).56 Given the clear testimony of thesources, it is difficult to see how a rentier model can be justified.
Indeed, more recently, in the Bulletin of the American Society of Papy-rologists, Hickey has grudgingly acknowledged the existence of theautourgia, and has accepted that part of the Apion estate probably wasindeed directly managed, but has proposed that almost all that the Apionestate managers seem to have grown on the directly managed portion ofthe estate was fodder crops such as hay, beans and pulses, perhaps for thepurposes of an internal estate transport system, to feed mounts, camelsand donkeys.57 Accordingly, Hickey persists in asserting, there is noevidence of commercialized or potentially commercial agriculture on theApion estates: wheat, he contends, was only grown to meet the internalrequirements of the household and its fiscal obligations, whilst in wine,according to his study, the estate was barely self-sufficient. The otherpossible ‘market sector’ he mentions is flax (for the textile trade), whichhe does not see as important to the estate.58
There are many problems with this. Hickey’s assertions with respect toboth wheat and wine are easily dismissed: his claims (as noted earlier) areprimarily based on accounts detailing contributions paid to the Apionhousehold by way of rents in kind from estate ktêmata. That is to say, hedoes not take into account the possible scale of production on the directlymanaged portion of the estate. Perhaps more perplexing is the dismissiveattitude he adopts with respect to hay (‘hardly the archetypal cash crop’,he opines).59 In seigneurial economies, hay-producing land and meadow-land were often highly prized and landowners were accordingly keen tokeep them under their own control. In Byzantine tax regulations, forexample, as recorded in the Geometric treatises (of late antique origin),meadowland was subject to a fiscal surcharge.60 It should not surprise us,therefore, to find a concentration of hay-producing land on the centrally
55 P.Oxy. LXXII, p. 173, comment by A. Benaissa.56 P.Oxy. XXVII 2478, ll. 20–1.57 Hickey, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, p. 97.58 Hickey, ‘Aristocratic Landholding’, pp. 301–2 and the supporting study cited.59 Hickey, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, p. 98 n. 45.60 J. Lefort (ed.), Géométries du fisc byzantin (Paris, 1991), cc. 150–2, p. 112.
administered portion of the Apion estates. Exactly the same phenomenonis recorded in a sixth-century account of hay from the EgyptianArsinoïte.61 A Byzantine tax collector reading the Apion estate accountswould have read them very differently to Hickey. In any pre-industrialeconomy, hay and fodder crops are an important commodity, as theyprovide the fuel for the beasts of burden and draught animals on whichincreased productivity often depends.62 Indeed, it is worth noting that forthe later Middle Ages, economic historians tend to regard the specializedproduction of fodder crops on demesne land as evidence for a growingcommercialization of agriculture, as it avoids the need to engage inperiodic crop rotation between cereal and fodder (such as Jane Rowland-son has identified for the Oxyrhynchite in earlier phases of its Romanhistory).63 In sixth-century Egypt, hay even served as a medium ofexchange in trade.64
Moreover, it simply is not the case that hay or fodder crops are the onlyor even main crop type for which we have evidence with respect to theApion autourgia (although they do feature).65 Again, this is a topic thatwas not discussed in any detail in the author’s Economy and Society in theAge of Justinian, so the evidence merits brief exposition here. On theautourgia Exô tês Pylês, the evidence points to viticulture and gardenfarming;66 on the autourgia dikaiou tou ktêmatos Tarousebt, the sourcesrefer to ‘farmed holdings’ (edaphê geôrgoumena) assigned to workers fromApion epoikia and viticultural activity;67 with respect to the autourgia touktêmatos Loukiou we find mechanically irrigated plots and references tovinedressers, again indicating viticultural activity.68
So we have evidence not only for the cultivation of fodder crops on thecentrally managed portion of the estate, but also viticulture and gardenfarming. Wine was a major commodity in late antiquity, from whichthe Apion household might well have hoped to profit.69 Moreover,demesne cultivation of wheat cannot be ruled out: as well as vinedressers
61 Reekmans, A Sixth-Century Account of Hay.62 C. Dyer, Making A Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain 850–1520 (London, 2002), pp.
130, 331.63 M.-J. Tits-Dieuaide, La formation des prix céréalières en Brabant et en Flandre au XVe siècle
(Brussels, 1975); C. Dyer, An Age of Transition? Economy and Society in England in the LaterMiddle Ages (Oxford, 2005), pp. 13–15; J. Rowlandson, Landowners and Tenants in Roman Egypt:The Social Relations of Agriculture in the Oxyrhrynhite Nome (Oxford, 1996) p. 20.
64 Reekmans, A Sixth-Century Account of Hay, p. 10.65 The autourgiai of Notinês Paroriou and Path Tampemou may have specialized in hay production:
P.Oxy. LV 3804 and P.Oxy. XVI 1911, 1913 and LV 3804.66 P.Oxy. XVI 1913: ll. 1–25 refer to mechanically irrigated plots and the production of fruit and
vegetables, and ll. 30–5 to vinedressers and the vintage.67 P.Oxy. XVI 1911, ll. 107–15: the section appears to detail wage payments. See also P.Oxy. XVI
1911, ll. 175–91 (viticulture) and P.Oxy. LV 3804 ll. 196–204.68 P.Oxy. XVI 1911, ll. 116–24; P.Oxy. LV 3804, ll. 205–12.69 Decker, Tilling the Hateful Earth, pp. 121–48.
(ampelourgoi) and garden farmers (pômaritai) we also find land labourers(geôrgoi) on the autourgia, via whom, in one instance, a payment of wheatwas made to a local smith in return for his having repaired the estate’sirrigation machines.70 The ‘farmed holdings’ referred to on the autourgiamay well have been geared towards cereal production. Moreover, Hickeydismisses far too readily the potential commercial significance of foodproduction.71 The provisioning of cities in medieval and early modernEngland, for example, was a source of enormous profit to landowners,farmers and merchants.72 In the much more highly urbanized world ofearly Byzantine Egypt, the opportunities to profit from food productionmust have been even greater. It is worth noting in this context the way inwhich late antique landowners sought to undercut or subvert state inter-ventions in civic food supplies at times of crisis, with landowners delib-erately distorting the market, for example, through hoarding grain, so asto send the price rocketing.73 The local role of landowners in managingcivic food supplies (by virtue of their status as curiales or honorati)effectively allowed them to rig local arrangements to line their ownpockets.74
As for flax, the evidence as it stands is indeed rather thin on theground. It should be noted, however, that in earlier periods of its history,Oxyrhynchus was primarily associated not with the production of linen(into which flax was worked), but rather, woollen textiles.75 It is thusperhaps significant that the Apion estate is recorded to have leased flocksof sheep to its tenants and employees.76 Moreover, in spite of claims to thecontrary, Apion involvement in the cultivation and perhaps working offlax is not entirely absent from the documentary record. In P.Oxy. XIX2243 (a), for example, a group of Apion estate workers is recorded to havepurchased flax from the household, whilst in P.Oxy. XVI 2033 the inhab-itants of an Apion-owned settlement made a payment in the form of flaxto their estate overseer or dioikêtês. Village-based production or workingof flax in the early Byzantine Oxyrhynchite is strongly suggested by thesixth- or seventh-century (non-Apion) P.Oxy. VI 893, which alludes to alegal dispute between a dealer in flax (stippopragmateutês) by the name ofMarinos and an inhabitant of the village (kômê) of Apollo.
70 P.Oxy. XVI 1913, ll. 19–20.71 Hickey, ‘Aristocratic Landholding’, p. 301: ‘careful consideration of the extant documentation
reveals that only flax and wine were potential market sectors’.72 J. Masschaele, Peasants, Merchants, and Markets: Inland Trade in Medieval England (London,
1997). Dyer, Making a Living, p. 126: ‘The managers also had an eye on market opportunitiesand would grow wheat for the urban market.’
73 D. Stathakopoulos, Famine and Food Supply in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Empire: ASystematic Survey of Subsistence Crises and Epidemics (Birmingham, 2004), pp. 187–210.
74 R. Alston, The City in Roman and Byzantine Egypt (London, 2002), p. 277.75 R. Bagnall, Egypt in Late Antiquity (Princeton, 1992), pp. 82–3.76 See P.Oxy XVI 1911.
A considerable amount of flax was clearly still being worked in the cityof Oxyrhynchus in the late fifth and sixth centuries. The references toApion estate workers purchasing flax from the household and furnishingit to household officials would suggest that it would be rash to rule outaristocratic involvement in the early Byzantine textile industry. The evi-dence is entirely consistent with a model whereby flax was grown both onthe autourgia and also within the estate village properties: both it andwool may then have been traded with dealers, merchants and guildmembers from Oxyrhynchus, in either a raw or factored state (the house-hold perhaps drawing upon pools of peasant family labour from withinthe epoikia or resident on the autourgia to work the raw product). As withwine production on the Apion estates, trade in such textiles or textile-related commodities would probably have been primarily overseen by aspecialist employee of the household, who would have kept a separate setof accounts detailing major transactions. At the same time, merchantsand dealers clearly traversed the villages of the Oxyrhynchite, buying uptextiles or raw materials from smaller-scale peasant producers andfarmers.
This is all highly speculative, but none of it stretches the evidence tobreaking point, and similar arrangements can be seen to have operatedwith respect to the textile trade in other comparatively developed pre-industrial seigneurial societies.77 Moreover, given the large number ofOxyrhynchus papyri that remain to be edited, it would be rash to rule outthe emergence of further details: until the publication of P.Oxy LXVII4615 in 2001, for example, we had no irrefutable proof that the Apionestate actually leased land to the inhabitants of the epoikia (although sucha relationship had been inferred). Lastly, we should note evidence of theApion household having engaged in profit-producing credit arrange-ments with members of local Oxyrhynchite village society, using thedevice of the so-called ‘antechretic’ loan to circumvent imperial regula-tions on rates of interest in such transactions.78 The world of the Apionestates was emphatically not an economically isolationist one. Indeed, itis remarkable that anybody could ever have believed that it was.
Early Byzantine economic development in a comparativemedieval perspective
It was noted earlier that there is growing acceptance of the claim that thelate Roman and early Byzantine period witnessed processes of aristocratic
77 See M.M. Postan, ‘The Medieval Wool Trade’, in his Medieval Trade and Finance (Cambridge,1973), pp. 342–52.
enrichment and an apparent concentration of landownership, even if alarge and prosperous peasantry continued to exist beyond the embrace ofthe early Byzantine great estate.79 What continues to be challenged,however, is the extent to which this process contributed to economicgrowth in late antiquity, whether on an aggregate or per capita basis.Indeed, for some, the very notion of a late antique wave of economicgrowth remains open to question.
To some extent such scepticism is rooted in the same sort of primitivistassumptions concerning the nature of ancient, medieval and, indeed,pre-industrial economic organization and activity in general that weencountered earlier. It also bears close affinity to what medievalists wouldregard as ‘Postanian’ assumptions concerning the significance of commer-cialization, specialization and technical change in pre-industrial contexts,according to which, as Britnell has put it,
before the age of modern economic growth – usually considered tohave begun somewhere in the mid-eighteenth century – both popu-lation levels and standards of living were held within some ‘traditional’bounds by constraints upon productivity growth. Only in the modernperiod (it is argued) could rising population and rising productivity besustained. Accordingly, the economic historian’s principal interest in‘pre-industrial’ economies lay in understanding the constraints thatprevented their becoming modern.80
Such ‘stagnationist’ assumptions, as Britnell describes them, are clearlydiscernible in the modern historiography of the Byzantine economy.Kehoe, for example, has questioned the possibility of economic growth inlate antiquity.81 Similarly, Kaplan has argued that the Byzantine economywas constrained by what he terms a ‘blocage technico-économique’.82 Yetwe should note that, in a medieval context, such assumptions have beenincreasingly challenged to ever great effect, obliging historians to postu-late ‘a more creative and more adaptive medieval economy’.83 Likewise, aswe have seen, the high degree of capitalization of production discernablearchaeologically in the Roman world renders the application of suchconcepts to ancient or late antique economic development even more
79 Decker, Tilling the Hateful Earth.80 R.H. Britnell, ‘Commercialisation and Economic Development in England, 1000–1300’, in
R.H. Britnell and B.M.S. Campbell (eds), A Commercialising Economy: England 1086 to c.1300(Manchester, 1995), pp. 7–26, at p. 8: discussing M.M. Postan, Essays on Medieval Agricultureand General Problems of the Medieval Economy (Cambridge, 1973).
81 Kehoe, ‘Aristocratic Dominance’, p. 718.82 Kaplan, Les homes, p. 573.83 Britnell, ‘Commercialisation and Economic Development’, p. 9.
questionable. Advances on the part of medieval historians on the onehand and Roman and late antique archaeologists on the other may indeedoffer a means of moving beyond this otherwise seemingly intractabledebate.
The reason why the debate is otherwise incapable of resolution isbecause, as Snooks has put it, ‘estimation of economic growth ratesrequires reasonably reliable information on national income per capita attwo points in time’.84 This in turn, of course, requires some sense at leastof both national income and population. We can safely assume that nosuch statistics will ever become available for any part of the early Byzan-tine (or, indeed, Roman) world. There can, therefore, never be a statisticalresolution to the dispute. Rather, the best historians can do is to look tocomparative data from other medieval or early modern societies, forwhich it may be possible to obtain something approximating to suchstatistics. For if, through study of the archaeological, numismatic and(where it exists) documentary evidence, the historian of early Byzantiumcan identify similarities in terms of patterns of economic developmentbetween the Byzantine empire and a pre-industrial society or societieswhere per capita economic growth can be demonstrated to have takenplace, then the concept of the early Byzantine world having followed asimilar path of economic development is strengthened immeasurably. Itis on the epiphenomena of growth that one needs to focus.
Here Anglo-Norman England is proposed as a point of comparison:partly because it is an example of a well-documented pre-industrialsociety with which the author is reasonably familiar, and partly because ofthe quality of English medieval economic historical scholarship. Study ofthe economic history of Anglo-Norman England has been characterizedboth by the high quality of the sources available to the historian, and thestill higher quality of the resultant secondary literature. On the basis ofstatistical analysis of such rich sources as Domesday Book, the Englishmanorial accounts, and the poll tax returns of the late fourteenth century,and in spite of earlier claims to the contrary on the part of Postan and hisfollowers, it is now becoming increasingly apparent to those workingwithin the field that per capita economic growth of a substantial sortcharacterized the Anglo-Norman experience. This has been most force-fully argued by Snooks, whose statistical study of Domesday Book andlater evidence has led him to declare that
by the late eleventh century the English economy had achieved a highdegree of market orientation . . . More importantly the commercial-ised sector was coincident with the economic interests of the main
economic decision-makers: the crown, the feudal lords, and free peas-ants, who acted in an economically rational way. This created aneconomic system capable of achieving relatively high rates of economicgrowth by the standards of pre-industrial economies. The twelfth andearly thirteenth centuries thus emerge as a period of real economicgrowth during which the living standards of some, if not all, of thepopulation actually rose . . .85
As Snooks has concluded, his statistical analysis reveals
the years 1086–1170 as experiencing a particularly vigorous spate ofgrowth: population grew at an estimated compound rate of 0.7 percent per annum and GDP per capita grew at 0.6 percent perannum . . . At their peak these rates were undoubtedly even higher.Such high rates of growth compare favourably with those attainedduring the industrial revolution, but fall some way short of the impres-sive 1.6 per cent per annum attained during the phase of vigorouseconomic recovery in the first half of the sixteenth century.86
Mayhew has argued for a considerably lower rate of per capita eco-nomic growth: although even on his figures growth there still was (andfrom our perspective, it is the fact of growth that matters).87 As onewould imagine, associated with the expansion of the Anglo-Normaneconomy, there is clear evidence that the economy and society of medi-eval England was becoming increasingly commercialized as ever moresophisticated relations of production and exchange developed. As Brit-nell and Campbell put it: ‘commerce increased in relative as well asabsolute importance between 1086, when Domesday Book provides aunique window onto English economy and society, and c.1300, whendemographic and economic expansion appear to have reached theirlimit’.88 Campbell continues:
If by 1300 the market was not yet the single determining principle ofproduction, it was at least an increasingly powerful influence uponsocial and economic activity. Simple commodity production, wherebysmall-scale producers sold produce for money in order to buy othercommodities for consumption, was firmly established as a feature of
85 Snooks, ‘The Dynamic Role’, p. 53.86 Snooks, ‘The Dynamic Role’, p. 51.87 N. Mayhew, ‘Modelling Medieval Monetisation’, in Britnell and Campbell (eds), A Commer-
cialising Economy, pp. 55–78. Note also in the same work Appendices 1–3 on the calculation ofGDP for 1086 to c.1300.
88 Britnell and Campbell (eds), A Commercialising Economy, ‘Introduction’, p. 1.
rural life, as, increasingly, were market factors in labour and land. Suchwas the apparent scale and vigour of the exchange thereby generatedthat . . . lords and the state, by chartering markets, fairs, and bor-oughs, were not so much creating trade as attempting to control andprofit from it.89
The outward signs of this commercialization were manifold. Clearly,part of the driving force behind it was population growth and ‘the greateroccupational specialisation and economic differentiation that it induced,and . . . the economic expediency and opportunism that induced mount-ing numbers of rural producers to exchange produce and services’.90 Thisin turn ‘was reinforced by a doubling in the per capita supply of coin, byrising rents and increasing taxation, and by a mounting demand fromlords and the state that these rents and taxes be paid in cash rather thankind’.91 Urban expansion also played a major role: ‘great cities were one ofthe forcing grounds of commercial agriculture. The more they grew, thewider was the area upon which they drew for their food and raw materialsand the more complex and sophisticated were the commercial networksby which rural producers were linked to urban consumers.’92 Crucially,the growing commercialization of agriculture is also demonstrated by thegrowing frequency with which manorial accounts are encountered in thehistorical record, and by the evidence for an expansion of bi-partiteseigneurial estates: ‘the demesne farms of the thirteenth century, withtheir carefully compiled accounts’.93 Campbell has explained this latterphenomenon thus:
the seigneurial sector undoubtedly had the potential to be the morecommercialised of the two sectors (i.e. it and the peasant producersector). In the first place, its share of agricultural land was significantlygreater than the share of total population (represented by the lord, hishousehold, and his workforce) immediately dependent upon it.Demesne agriculture is therefore likely to have produced a substantialsurplus over the immediate needs of consumption. Secondly, manyestates were scattered in distribution, either obliging their lords to lead
89 B.M.S. Campbell, ‘Measuring the Commercialisation of Seigneurial Agriculture c.1300’, inBritnell and Campbell (eds), A Commercialising Economy, pp. 132–93, at p. 134.
90 Campbell, ‘Measuring the Commercialisation of Seigneurial Agriculture’, p.134. Note, however,recent suggestions that in medieval England population growth occurred in response to eco-nomic growth, as men and women responded to new economic opportunities by increasing thesize of their familes. See J. Langdon and J. Masschaele, ‘Commercial Activity and PopulationGrowth in Medieval England’, Past and Present 190 (2006), pp. 35–81.
91 Campbell, ‘Measuring Commercialisation’, p. 134.92 Campbell, ‘Measuring Commercialisation’, p. 136.93 Britnell, ‘Commercialisation and Economic Development’, p. 23.
a peripatetic lifestyle and, with their households, eat their way roundtheir estates . . . or inducing the adoption of management strategieswhereby outlying manors sold their produce and transmitted cash tothe household. Thirdly, as medieval material culture grew in sophisti-cation, the range of luxury goods obtained through international tradeincreased, and the rate and incidence of royal taxation rose, so land-lords increasingly demanded cash rather than produce from theirestates.94
Likewise, in his masterly survey of English medieval economic devel-opment, Dyer has written of how the thirteenth-century shift to demesnefarming (reflected in a growing interest in agricultural handbooks of thekind that were also popular in late antiquity) witnessed growing special-ization on estates ‘under their energetic lords’ which were ‘administeredin more effective ways’.95 Landowners and managers ‘reacted to thestimulus of the market, as demand for produce of all kinds increased andpushed up prices’. ‘The lords’, he continues,
were part of a society undergoing economic growth. They participatedin that expansion, gaining from such trends as the specialisation incrafts, and interacting with others involved in production and man-agement. Their great contribution lay in the resources that they couldmobilise, and their ability to pay for major projects.96
To what extent, then, were such signs of economic development andmounting commercialization, indicative as they are of per capita eco-nomic growth, also evident in the early Byzantine world? Naturally, onewould not expect them all to have been replicated (or at least, given thenature of the evidence, for such to be demonstrably so) but very closesimilarities are nevertheless apparent. The archaeological evidence, forexample, strongly indicates both rising population levels and urbanexpansion in the early Byzantine Near East from the fourth to themid-sixth centuries, in the aftermath of the ‘Aurelian plague’.97 Indeed,on the basis of his survey of the archaeology, Ward-Pekins has concludedof the late antique east that ‘it seems certain that the fifth and sixthcenturies were the period of both the greatest spread of settlement inRoman times and of the highest population density and overall numbers.
94 Campbell, ‘Measuring Commercialisation’, p. 135.95 Dyer, Making a Living, pp. 125–8. For agricultural handbooks in late antiquity, see Decker,
Tilling the Hateful Earth, pp. 263–71.96 Dyer, Making a Living, p. 132.97 Kehoe’s scepticism with respect to increasing population levels is eccentric: Kehoe, ‘Aristocratic
Furthermore, in these regions population levels were almost certainlyunmatched until very recent times.’98 Similarly, in his study of the latestarchaeological data, Decker has found evidence for ‘a late antique settle-ment peak’.99 The cultivation of highland and marginal zones in theSyrian ‘Limestone Massif ’ to the north of Aleppo, or in southern Pales-tine on the edge of the Negev desert, and the evident prosperity ofsettlements even in these marginal territories where agriculture was hard,is particularly striking.100 As in Anglo-Norman England, such populationgrowth would appear to have contributed to greater economic special-ization and differentiation, with evidence existing for the specializedcultivation (and processing) of the olive in northern Syria and in thecoastal hill country of western Cilicia.101 Evidence for specialized wineproduction is also discernible from the region to the east of Chalcis, andis certainly evident in Palestine to the west of the River Jordan.102
Just as the archaeology reveals rising population levels and the devel-opment of greater economic complexity, so too does the testimony of theearly Byzantine coinage provide evidence for a major wave of monetiza-tion of the economy of the eastern provinces of the Roman world fromthe fourth century onwards. As Safrai has commented of Palestine, forexample,
the number of coins increases dramatically, sharply, and clearly in thefourth century . . . the increase in the number of coins in the fourthcentury is consistent throughout the country and is indicated inalmost all the sites, with the exception of a few isolated cities thatdeclined in the third century.103
Palestine is likely to provide a reasonable barometer of monetization,by virtue of the quality and extent of archaeological surveys and
98 B. Ward-Perkins, ‘Land, Labour and Settlement’, in A. Cameron, B. Ward-Perkins and M.Whitby (eds), The Cambridge Ancient History – Volume XIV – Late Antiquity: Empires andSuccessors, AD 425–600 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 315–45, at p. 321. For urban prosperity see idem,‘The Cities’, in Averil Cameron and P. Garnsey (eds), The Cambridge Ancient History: VolumeXIII – The Late Empire, A.D. 337–425 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 371–410, at p. 406.
99 Decker, Tilling the Hateful Earth, pp. 21–7, where an extensive bibliography is provided.100 For northern Syria, see G. Tchalenko, Villages antiques de la Syrie du Nord: le massif du Bélus à
l’époque romaine, 3 vols (Paris, 1953); G. Tate, Les campagnes de la Syrie du Nord du IIe au VIIesiècle (Paris, 1992); J.-P. Sodini et al., ‘Déhès (Syrie du Nord) Campagnes I–III (1976–1978)’,Syria 57 (1980), pp. 1–300; C. Foss, ‘Syria in Transition, AD 550–750: An ArchaeologicalApproach’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 51 (1997), pp. 189–269. For the Negev, see D. Bar, ‘Popu-lation, Settlement and Economy in Late Roman and Byzantine Palestine’, Bulletin of SOAS 67(2004), pp. 307–20, and ‘Frontier and Periphery in Late Antique Palestine’, Greek, Roman, andByzantine Studies 44 (2004), pp. 69–92.
101 Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, pp. 449–52.102 Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, pp. 449–52.103 Z. Safrai, The Economy of Roman Palestine (London, 1994), pp. 404–5.
excavations conducted in the region. Indeed, as Safrai goes on to note, asimilar trend was charted in relation to the numismatic evidence fromEgypt by Johnson and West as long ago as 1949, and is also evident fromByzantine sites in Asia Minor and Syria such as Sardis, Tarsus andEphesus.104
What was true of the gold coinage in the late fourth century was trueof the copper coinage in the late fifth, when there occurred the mintingand extensive distribution of new issues of the small denominationbronze currency, which facilitated monetized exchange at the grass rootsof east Roman society.105 The early Byzantine authorities increasingly tookadvantage of the new monetary conditions created by the minting of firstsolidi and then the copper folleis to bring about the commutation of fiscalpayments from payment in kind to payment in coin, thereby furtherbolstering the monetization of the imperial economy.106 As in Anglo-Norman England, growing monetization of the fiscal system was alsoassociated with an absolute increase in the tax burden, as evidenced overthe course of the sixth century, for example, by the fiscal records we havefrom the village of Aphrodito.107
As remarked earlier, this monetary phenomenon coincided with aconcentration of landownership in the hands of members of the emer-gent imperial aristocracy of service. In the papyri from Egypt, the typesof documentation most commonly associated with directly managedlarge estates, such as estate accounts, become proportionately more sig-nificant as we enter the fifth century, whilst leases can be seen to declinein incidence.108 This conforms very closely to the pattern of the Englishevidence. The world of estates described by Dyer, for example, is highlyreminiscent of the world that was created by the Apiones around Oxy-rhynchus: ‘throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries’, Dyer notes,‘lords relied on a group of farm servants (famuli) as the core of theirlabour force. Some of these were tenants, usually of smallholdings, whowere obliged to work full time.’109 In the early Byzantine Near East, asagain in Anglo-Norman England, the growing monetization of theeconomy in general offered the owners of large estates – or those who hadthe opportunity to construct such estates – enormous opportunities for
104 See also C. Morrisson, ‘Byzantine Money: Its Production and Circulation’, in Laiou, EconomicHistory, pp. 910–66, Tables 6.1–6.15, p. 912.
105 See F.K. Haarer, Anastasius I: Politics and Empire in the Late Roman World (Cambridge, 2006),pp. 202–6.
106 Haarer, Anastasius I, p. 199: see also Banaji, Agrarian Change.107 See discussion in C. Zuckerman, Du village à l’empire: autour du register fiscal d’Aphrodito (Paris,
2004).108 Sarris, Economy and Society, p. 181.109 Dyer, Making a Living, p. 133.
self-enrichment.110 Importantly, as noted earlier, the greater ubiquity inthe post-Constantinian era of a high-quality and stable gold coinagefacilitated a far more profound degree of estate monetization and com-modification than had been practicable on the part of curial landownersin the troubled years of the mid-third century.111
Above all, as we have seen, in both the English and early Byzantineexamples economic growth was associated with the rise of regimes ofdirect management. In each case, the renting out of land and resourcesremained important. Dyer, for example, has written of how ‘even at thepeak of “high farming” at the end of the thirteenth century, Englishestates striving to maintain and increase their demesne profits werederiving 50 or 60 per cent of their incomes from rents of various kinds’.112
Likewise, writing in the early fifth century (so when developments stillhad some way to go), the Greek historian Olympiodorus of Thebesdescribed a world in which senatorial households derived two-thirds oftheir incomes from rents, and one third from receipts in kind (suggestiveof direct management of a part of their estates).113 It is entirely possible thata similar ratio pertained on the estates of the Apion family aroundOxyrhynchus in the sixth century, although given the heightened level ofeconomic development in Egypt at the time this seems unlikely. Cru-cially, however, in both the English and Byzantine examples, it was thegrowing emphasis on direct management that was new.114
Conclusion: aristocratic property and economicgrowth reconsidered
The archaeological, documentary and numismatic evidence for the earlyByzantine world thus records each and every one of the key phenomenathat, in an Anglo-Norman context, can be seen to have been associatedwith statistically demonstrable per capita economic growth. This wouldindicate that the early Byzantine empire probably followed a similarpattern of economic development. In each context, per capita economicgrowth was associated with an expansion of directly managed greatestates. Many of the reasons why this should have been so have been ablyset out by Campbell and Dyer in the extensive quotations cited earlier, to
110 See Banaji, Agrarian Change and Sarris, Economy and Society.111 Sarris, ‘Rehabilitating the Great Estate’, p. 63.112 Dyer, Making a Living, p. 137.113 R.C. Blockley, The Fragmentary Classicising Historians of Late Antiquity (Liverpool, 1983), 41.2,
pp. 204–5: Olympiodorus is talking about western senatorial incomes, but he was himself aneasterner, and was describing members of a relatively unified late Roman elite, in whichsenatorial households often owned land to both east and west: see Ammianus Marcellinus, ResGestae XVI.6.x.
which one should add the greater ability of large-scale landowners asopposed to smaller-scale peasant producers to engage in risk spreading(thus permitting greater specialization of agriculture).115 Aristocratic land-owners were also well placed to stimulate economic growth by investingin agricultural machinery (such as the water-lifting devices that helped toexpand the cultivable area in Egypt) and, significantly, by offering creditarrangements and patronage to members of village society beyond theworld of the great estate. As Kehoe, for example, has acknowledged,through the phenomenon of the antechretic loan encountered in thepapyri, landowners can be seen to have provided ‘small-scale producerswith the credit needed to get them through the agricultural year’.116 Thegeneral case for the association between aristocratic property and eco-nomic development in late antiquity and the early medieval world hasbeen ably summarized by Wickham thus:
In any society which does not rely on mass buying-power the peoplewho determined the basic scale and parameters of demand were elites:the privately wealthy and the people who took the benefits from thetax systems where they existed, that is to say, landowners and politicalleaders. If elites were rich, then they were more likely to buy artisanalproducts on a large enough scale to encourage productive complexity,or from further away (and thus more expensively) if products wereseen as better there, thus making long-distance transport morenormal, perhaps cheaper. If furthermore, the state was committed tothe movement of goods, then economies of scale were still easier, andtransport might be substantially underwritten, as in the later Romanempire. Under these circumstances, peasantries and the urban poor,too, would be able to find good quality products, sometimes importedfrom other regions, but still at accessible prices, because the economiesof scale had been created already. Often, indeed, goods for the lowerend of the market outweighed those for aristocrats and their entou-rages. But elite consumption structured these large-scale systems, allthe same. Peasantries and the poor were not yet a sufficiently consis-tent, prosperous market for these economies of scale to exist just forthem.117
One reason why the late antique peasantry was not able to generatesuch a market may have been bound up with the urban focus of the earlyByzantine elite and of the imperial government itself. By subsidizing the
115 See discussion in Sarris, Economy and Society, pp. 177–99.116 Kehoe, ‘Aristocratic Dominance’, p. 716.117 Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, p. 706.
urban economy and drawing resources into it, late Roman aristocrats andadministrators may well have limited the peasant sector’s ability toexpand and compete (although, as suggested earlier, this was probably lessof an issue in Egypt).118 Nevertheless, the factors detailed by Wickham areimportant in that they gainsay the claims of Kehoe and Hickey thatpatterns of aristocratic accumulation of wealth were essentially economi-cally regressive, with aristocratic households either investing their wealthin what are assumed to have been economically unproductive purposes(such as civic euergetism) or simply stockpiling it, rendering it inert.119
What such a position fails to appreciate is that, irrespective of whataristocrats spent their wealth on, the very act of generating that wealth (orextracting that surplus) fostered economic development and sophistica-tion. In particular, Kehoe’s model, whereby aristocratic accumulation ofwealth necessarily impoverished small-scale farmers and thereby mayhave contributed to an aggregate shrinkage of the early Byzantineeconomy, only works if one assumes (as he does) that this process wastaking place against a background of zero net economic growth.120 As wehave seen, however, this would not appear to have been the case. In asociety where there is per capita growth, one man’s living standards neednot necessarily be preserved or furthered only at the expense of another.Rather, as we see in Egypt and elsewhere in the late antique east, ‘the highlevel of exchange in the Levant allowed both rich landowners and inde-pendent peasantries to co-exist’.121
Hickey has expressed doubt as to whether the investments in agricul-tural machinery attested on the part of landowners in late antiquity werereally sufficient to have generated much by way of profit.122 Likewise,Saller has argued of the Roman economy in general that: ‘sustainedgrowth requires sustained technological improvement . . . the importantquestions are how much did productive technology improve over whattime frame, and for what proportion of the workforce’.123 Here onceagain, however, it is possible to identify theoretical misconceptions thatbecome apparent if the claims are placed in a comparative light. Cer-tainly, ‘sustained technological improvement’ can be a key factor in percapita economic growth, but there are other (more brutal) ways ofincreasing labour productivity: as many an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British capitalist realized, for example, sweat-shopping often
118 Alston, The City, p. 360.119 Kehoe, ‘Aristocratic Dominance’, p. 721 and Hickey, ‘Aristocratic Landholding’, p. 302.120 Kehoe, ‘Aristocratic Dominance’, p. 721.121 Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, p. 456.122 Hickey, ‘Aristocratic Landholding’, p. 302.123 R. Saller, ‘Framing the Debate over Growth in the Ancient Economy’, in Manning and Morris
(eds), The Ancient Economy, pp. 223–38, at p. 235.
offered a surer means of increasing output than the uncertainties ofinvestment in ‘green technology’.124 In this context, it is instructive tobear in mind that with the emergence of the adscript colonate and theextension of directed (and often wage-) labour on the late antique greatestate, the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries witnessed a fundamentalevolution and alteration in the condition of agricultural labour.125 Theintensification of exploitation associated with the development of theadscript colonate is itself likely to have contributed to per capita eco-nomic growth. Similarly, as Dyer has noted of thirteenth-centuryEngland, ‘the demesnes’ main contribution to technology lay in themanagement of resources rather than new inventions or mechanicaldevices’.126
Nor, it should be noted, was aristocratic stimulus and support of theearly Byzantine economy limited to investment in the agrarian sector onthe one hand, and, on the other, acts of competitive consumption andcivic and religious euergetism. Rather, there are indications that, inaddition to the ‘seigneurial’ credit arrangements whereby aristocratichouseholds helped to bolster the rural economy, aristocrats may also havehelped to foster sophisticated networks of production and exchangethrough furnishing mercantile credit. The sources reveal, for example,that the use of credit notes or pittakia was not limited to the confines ofthe great estate (where we find them issued to estate workers by way ofwages): rather, the use of pittakia as private financial instruments akin tobankers’ cheques would appear to have been widespread in the lateantique and early Byzantine world.127 The De Cerimoniis of ConstantineVII Porphyrogenitus, for example, describes how, in 457, as part of theceremonial associated with his accession to the throne, Emperor Leo I(457–74) was presented with a pittakion for three thousand pounds ofsilver by the Senate and the Urban Prefect of Constantinople.128 As atoken of his philanthropia and self-restraint, the new emperor instantlyreturned the gift. The episode is highly illuminating: it alludes to theexistence of extensive networks of credit and banking facilities on whichmerchants and others could draw. It is instructive to note that bothJustinian (527–65) and his Middle Byzantine successors to the imperialthrone were eager to seek to control the rates of interest that could becharged on loans. Thus the Justinianic rates of twelve per cent per annum
124 See M. Berg and P. Hudson, ‘Rehabilitating the Industrial Revolution’, Economic History Review45.1 (1992), pp. 24–50.
125 See Banaji, Agrarian Change and Sarris, ‘Rehabilitating the Great Estate’.126 Dyer, Making A Living, p. 130.127 For the use of pittakia on estates, see Sarris, Economy and Society, pp. 92–3.128 Constantine VII, De Ceremoniis Aulae Byzantinae I.91–415, ed. J.J. Reiske, 2 vols (Bonn,
on maritime loans, eight per cent per annum on loans by moneychangers(argyropratai), and six per cent on standard loan transactions, remainedin force in the eighth century. Basil I (867–86), in his Procheiros Nomos,forbade any interest to be levied on loans whatsoever, but this measurewas soon repealed by his son and successor Leo VI (886–912), whoimposed a cap of four per cent per annum on all transactions.129
Both the Justinianic and later legislation, it should be noted, refer to‘ordinary lenders’ (loipoi paganoi). Foremost amongst these are likely,once again, to have been our great landowners. Moneylending on the partof aristocrats and their households is frequently referred to in the extantdocumentary record as also in the testimony of our contemporary nar-rative sources: the papyri reveal, for example, that in the late sixth centurythe Oxyrhynchite aristocrat Flavia Christodote was owed 61 lb. of gold byan Alexandrian banker against whom she threatened legal proceedings.130
John the Lydian records that Emperor Anastasius intervened to write offthe debts owed by one Constantinopolitan senator to another – ‘a non-cancellable contract in gold specie amounting to a thousand pounds ofgold’.131 Procopius records how Empress Theodora and her entouragemocked an unnamed aristocrat of patrician ranks whose debtors werecausing him financial embarrassment by failing to repay what they owedhim.132 Just as we know from the Life of John the Almsgiver that thepatriarchate of Alexandria invested in maritime commerce, so too shouldwe also imagine the great aristocratic households of the early Byzantineworld to have supported and profited from both the agrarian and com-mercial sectors, through providing ‘seigneurial’ and ‘mercantile’ credit, aswell as engaging in straightforward moneylending to those in need,fostering economic development and growth in the same way as bankinghouseholds and institutions can be seen to have done in later periods.133
This is important, in that mercantile credit arrangements in particularwould have enabled aristocratic households to profit from the proceeds ofcommerce without the aristocrat being perceived as having ‘got his handsdirty’ through involvement in what could still be regarded as a sociallysuspect activity: if expressed in terms of patronage or good lordship,commercially driven credit relationships could be made to appear sociallyrespectable for even the grandest of aristocrats. Through credit, the
129 For discussion and references, see E.H. Freshfield, Roman Law in the Later Roman Empire:Byzantine Guilds Professional and Commercial (Cambridge, 1938), p. 13.
130 J.G. Keenan, ‘From the Archive of Flavia Christodote: Observations on PSI I 76’, Zeitschrift fürPapyrologie und Epigraphik 29 (1978), pp. 191–209.
131 John the Lydian, De Magistratibus III.48.132 Procopius, Anecdota XV.133 For discussion of the episode in the Life of John the Almsgiver, see G.R. Monks, ‘The Church of
Alexandria and the City’s Economic Life in the Sixth Century’, Speculum 28 (1953), pp. 349–62.
language of ‘customary social relationships’ (to use Polany’s formulation)was thus reconcilable with the profit motive.134
This article has mostly considered the east, but it is worth noting thatthe more fragmentary evidence for the late Roman west of the fourthcentury points to similar patterns of partly aristocratically sustainedcomplexity and expansion in most, although not all, regions. We mightreasonably ask how much of this complexity survived into the world ofthe Romano-Germanic successor states of the fifth and sixth centuries.Some clearly inherited more of this economic infrastructure than others,or were better placed to seek to profit from feeding off the ongoingeconomic expansion still evident in the east through to the middle of thesixth century. Credit notes or pittakia, for example, are referred to in boththe Ravenna papyri and the Variae of Cassiodorus.135 Moreover, if we wishto understand why so many post-Roman rulers around the shores of thewestern and central Mediterranean minted gold coins bearing the impe-rial image and conforming to imperial weight-standards in the fifth andsixth centuries, then the key is likely to be found in the demands andexpectations of merchants engaged in trade with the east or looking for astable unit of exchange and account, rather than any supposed deferenceto concepts of ongoing Constantinopolitan political suzerainty.136
Trinity College, Cambridge
134 K. Polanyi, Origins of Our Time: The Great Transformation (London, 1945).135 For the Ravenna papyri see J.O. Tjäder (ed.), Die nichtliterarischen Papyri Italiens, 2 vols (Lund,
1955), II, pp. 47–8; for pittakia in Cassiodorus see Variae III.35.136 See M. Blackburn and P. Grierson, Medieval European Coinage: The Early Middle Ages (5th–10th
Centuries) (Cambridge, 1986). This point was developed by my pupil Rebecca Day (née Darley)of Caius College in her excellent dissertation for Part II of the Historical Tripos, 2006.
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