Sometime between the 5th and 9th centuries, the epicenter of the world shifted: the hegemony of the Mediterranean under the Roman Empire disappeared and that power, wealth and commercial networks moved to northern Europe and the Middle East. But no one is clear when, why, or how it happened, although there is a enormous record of letters that helps understand its decline.
There is no consensus on whether what collapsed first was politics or the economy, but of course: there were no records of production, consumption or trade data, but instead we had to rely on archaeological finds and fragments of literature. A team of economists has responded of the pull to all these issues through ancient coins, reconstructing the economic activity of the Mediterranean immediately afterwards. In short, and reminiscent of Watergate, they have followed the money trail.
More specifically, almost half a million of them distributed in thousands of treasures buried between the year 325 and 950 AD. In short, and remembering Watergate, they have followed the money trail.
What ancient coins say. More specifically, they have assembled a database of 494,229 ancient coins from 5,625 treasures buried between 325 and 950 AD in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Each coin records the place of minting, the issuing dynasty, date of minting and place of discovery. The authors reach four conclusions that qualify more or less known information:
- The Mediterranean economic decline begins in the 5th century.
- The arrival of Islam collapses trade between the north and south of the Mediterranean, but trade between Islamic regions prospers strongly.
- Actual consumption peaks in the Middle East during the 8th century, under the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates.
- In the 9th century, the Atlantic fringe is the richest area of the ancient Western world. That is, six centuries before the great voyages of exploration.
Why is it important. The last of his conclusions is especially interesting because what it says is that the Atlantic economic rise occurs 700 years before European colonial expansion. Seven centuries before Columbus and the exploration that allowed them to establish trade routes and extract resources, the Atlantic was already the richest area.
Furthermore, it pokes into the wound of one of the most heated and extensive debates in medieval history: what destroyed Mediterranean trade and pushed Europe northward. The Belgian historian Henri Pirenne summarizes it in one sentence: “without Muhammad, Charlemagne would have been inconceivable” pointing to Arab expansion as the cause. And broadly speaking, this work agrees with him, but with a nuance: the timing was different, since the Roman decline began earlier. This changes causality: Islam does not cause Mediterranean decline, it ends it.
Context. The period studied begins in the year 325 AD, when the Mediterranean is still Roman territory, and continues until 950 AD, when Carolingian Europe and the Islamic world have been consolidated for centuries. In that interval, milestones occur such as the division of the Roman Empire (395), the fall of Rome to Odoacer (476), wars Byzantine-Sassanids (602 – 628) and the dazzling Arab expansion.
In between, a couple of natural disasters to take into account: the Plague of Justinian (the first big explosion was in 541 – 549) and the little ice age of late antiquity(536 – 660), caused by volcanic eruptions and which caused temperatures in the northern hemisphere to drop almost one degree Celsius. All these events leave their mark on the circulation of people, objects and communications.
How have they done it. Coins are one of the materials most studied by archaeology, but almost always in a descriptive way. What this work does is use them as economic data: each coin records where it was minted and when, the treasure in which it appears indicates where and when it was buried. This trajectory works as a trade route proxy.
The authors formalize this method with a mathematical model applied in blocks of twenty years, using tools such as ORBIS (the Stanford project on Roman mobility) and the records of the Arab geographer Al-Muqaddasī (985 AD) to reconstruct the routes. The data reveal three patterns: the further away from the minting point, the less exchange; older coins have traveled further and flows across the Mediterranean change sharply in the 7th century with the Arab conquests. That all this coincides with independent studies on Roman ceramics confirms that the method is sound.
Yes, but. The great limitation of this work is its own source: the coin hoards are not a random sample of ancient trade, but are found where they are by accident (for example, the sinking of a ship) or buried in the middle. Then, archeology finds them by chance centuries later. Each step introduced is a bias that researchers have tried to mitigate with proportions of coins within each hoard and not absolute volumes, which eliminates part of the problem. Even so, the less excavated areas are probably underrepresented.
On the other hand, there is a misconception: coins record monetary circulation, not the entire economy. Trade in spices, self-consumption or redistribution leave no trace in this framework. That consumption collapses in a region may simply mean that the economy was demonetized (something that in fact It happened in post-Roman Europe.), more than impoverishment.
In Xataka | Someone has collected 7,049 letters from the Roman Empire: the file that explains the fall of an empire
Cover | PxHere and Massimo Virgilio
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