Gone Medieval - How the Mediterranean Created Wealth

Episode Date: May 23, 2023

What does archaeology tell us about how regions in the Mediterranean built their wealth between the 10th and 12th centuries? How did economies grow in Egypt, Tunisia, Sicily, the Byzantine empire, Islamic Spain and Portugal, and north-central Italy? And what were their trading relationships with each other? In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis talks to Professor Chris Wickham, author of The Donkey and the Boat: Reinterpreting the Mediterranean Economy, 950-1180. Based on a completely new look at the sources, his research is forcing a rethink about how economies worked in the medieval Mediterranean. This episode was produced by Rob Weinberg. If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. The commercial revolution is a term that crops up sometimes when talking about the medieval period. It's been viewed as setting the field for global trade networks and revolutionizing medieval economies. A new book that's fabulously entitled The Donkey and the Boat seeks to reassess this long-held understanding. The author is Chris Wickham, who is Professor.

Emeritus of medieval history at Oxford and Birmingham universities. And I'm delighted Chris is joining us to explore medieval trade and trading routes a bit further. Welcome to gone medieval Chris. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you very much for joining us. I guess to start off with what was the commercial revolution? Whereabouts in the medieval period are we and what are we talking about? Essentially it's a period in which trade and exchange production, urbanism all develop really quite substantially. And You can identify it in the Mediterranean, you can identify it in much of Western Europe, starting in the middle of the 10th century, but at different speeds in different places. In Italy, it really takes off around about 1,200, in Flanders, what's now Belgium, a century earlier, perhaps,

and then it gradually extends across the whole of Europe and the Mediterranean in the next three or four centuries. And why has history traditionally suggested that it happened when and where it did? History has focused on Italy, above all, because the documents are so much better for evidence about merchants, particularly in Venice and in Genoa. So it's all linked to the idea of the sea groaning with arguses coming into the Venetian and the Genoese ports. And it's been seen as very much generated by the bounce of those two cities, Pisa as well. and this is very largely because historians of the West tend to above all read Latin and so these are Latin documents and they can identify with them. Flanders is less well documented from that respect,

but it's perfectly obvious in too many sources that it started very early, so Flanders is as important. But it's Italian documents that really have underpinned what people are thinking about when they think about the commercial revolution. And really this book seeks to explore that idea and sort of explode that myth that this all originated in Italian cities. So what led you to question that explanation for the commercial revolution? Essentially, because it leaves out half the material, as early as the 1960s, it became clear that there is material from Egypt, the Ganesa collections, which include a large

number of letters between merchants from the 11th century, which show that in the 11th century, if there's any country that dominates trade routes in the Mediterranean, it's actually Egypt and not Italy at all. So that's one reason why I doubt it. A second reason is because the whole historiography of the commercial revolution focuses on long-distance maritime trade, but that's only a very small part of economic history, because buying and selling is actually mostly inside countries. Even now, far more then. Just a few statistics. The UK economy now has imports and exports less than 20% of the total economy.

In 1800, European countries imported and exported perhaps less than 5% of a total economy. In the Middle Ages, it's much less than that. And 2% for an active economy, I would think, sometimes occasionally a little bit more, Sicily in the late Middle Ages, a bit more, but most places a lot less. And so it's got to be marginal to the way you actually understand how economic change works. I think one of the interesting things about reading the book is just that simple logic. of for there to be export, there has to be a local surplus, which requires a booming local economy before you can even think about any kind of export. You mentioned there that the Ginica materials,

so underused document collections are always exciting, they're always great to learn about and to understand. Exactly what is the Ginitsa collection of materials? Where does it come from and what does it relate to? The reason why the Genisa exists, the Cairoganesa, I should say, because there were others and one or two of them, small ones have survived. They were collections of texts that Jews did not need anymore. It's a very Jewish thing, and it's because Jews in the medieval period, and sometimes before and after, characteristically did not want to destroy any writing that had the name of God on it. And even letters tend to have the name of God in the first line. So it became normal in this particular case in the 11th century for Jews to simply keep all writing.

and then when they had no use for it to just throw it away in batches. And they posted it in a kind of letterbox in the attic of the synagogue of Cairo's Twin City for Statt, which is now south of the main drag in Cairo, but is still part of Greater Cairo. That's why it's called the Cairo-Ganeda. And it sat there until the end of the 19th century, when they redid the synagogue, and they thought that they would just get rid of this attic collection. and they started to sell it off in little bits, but in the end, Cambridge University got hold of about four-fifths of it. And this is hundreds of thousands of texts.

Only a small number of them relate to trade or to social history or to cultural history. The rest are religious, as you probably expect. But there's a huge amount of data. And some of it's now really quite well studied, but there's so much more that you can do. So that's fascinating in itself. So what kind of information do these collections of documents, whole, what's actually in there for you to read through? Well, the thing about the letters in the Ganesa is that they are not just between merchants,

that they're between anybody, and they talk about almost anything. They talk about marriage negotiations, they talk about divorce negotiations, they talk about pleas to judges, they talk about pleas to donors if they think they're dying of starvation, and they say really kind of human things, like sell everything that you possibly can because ships are coming from Sicily and prices are going to go down. Or, I sold for you the shipload of linen, but I forgot to send on the wooden trays. My servant will bring them later. Or, why haven't you paid me the one and a half ten hours you only?

I've asked you three times. Or don't trust the peasants who are selling you flax in these villages, they'll cheat you. Or sometimes much more direct and hostile things, a wife to an errant husband that says, when I married you, I thought you were an honourable man. Now I know the truth. It's wonderful just reading these things, that they're fascinating in themselves. But then you can pick up plenty of economic history from them too. It sounds like aside from the economic history, there's a wonderful insight there into just 12th, 13th century lives, people who probably weren't all that different to us. Yeah, that's exactly right. And there are some really good people who are working on the

Genesea from that standpoint. And it's exciting to read their books too. Yeah, that's something else to look forward to. Like I said at the start, I think some of these unexplored caches of documents are sometimes so exciting to get around and to see what might be buried in there, even just from that human perspective. Yeah, that's exactly right. Because one of the things about the Middle Ages is it's a lot more human than people think. It's not just clerics sounding off and kings having battles. It's ordinary people battling through their lives and sometimes quite graphically. That's probably what's interesting about it, isn't it? So many times what we hear of medieval history, particularly in an Anglo-century, Northern Europe Outlook is written by monks and it's written in their cloisters about kings

and about famous events and we don't get a flavour of so much of the everyday life that it sounds like this gives us a real window into. That's exactly my view and that's what interests me about the medieval period. And you also mentioned using lots of other sources in the book. So how useful were things like other documentary materials? You mentioned that the Italian cities are well recorded later on and that this gives you access to information about particularly Jews in Egypt early on. Are there other sets of documents that were helpful in re-exploring this? Yes. I have to say that the Italian documents are very good and very systematic from about 1150 onwards, particularly in Venice and Genoa, but they're mostly in contract.

The great thing about the Ganesa is that it's letters between people or sometimes petitions, complaints. But you can also find similar things elsewhere in Egypt, not from Jews. this time but from Muslims and Christians, which are also sometimes just caches of letters and accounts that were thrown away or else deposited. Egypt's very dry. And if they're deposited underground, they quite often sit there until they're picked up in the 19th and 20th century of the dead. And then sometimes just sold in the Cairo markets with, after a while, enthusiastic collectors from places like Vienna coming and picking them up and making their own collections. And they're quite similar to the Geneseo. There's not so much stuff, but they're similar in their kind of

human interest, and they're similar in terms of the range of really quite detailed things that they can tell us about economic history. In other countries, you don't get quite so much, but you can build on the structures that you can hypothesise for Italy and for Egypt, but in other countries, archaeology is very good, and you can link the documents to the archaeology, as you also can in Italy. Yeah, one of the other things I was going to talk about is in the book, you do a great deal of work with linking the archaeological evidence of things like Amphora, you know, collections of vessels and pots and things that must have been used in mass import and export alongside documents.

Does that help to tie down kind of trade networks and perhaps give explanations for why things were going where they were going? Why questions are always quite difficult in economic history, but they can be got at. The great thing about archaeology is, for a start, you can say, this town is expanding, this town is contracting, the houses are built better, the houses are built less well, and that tells you straight forward economic things. But also, you get pottery ceramics in almost every excavation. And the great thing about pottery is that you can tell, in many cases, where it's come from. It's got particular fabrics which can only come from this place or that. It's got particular styles which are associated with particular places. And so you can have an archaeological site in Greece, which has a substantial amount of pottery from Turkey or from Egypt, maybe, not so much in this period. You can certainly have a substantial site in Sicily, where you can find pottery from Spain, North Africa, southern Italy, Egypt, and you can say, there are connections here. And then you ask yourself, how much pottery,

how dense of these distributions, how large-scale are the connections that you can work out on the bases of it. And then suddenly you've got a trade route. So with the ceramics, you can say, I've got this network of trade routes. Now let's have a look at the documents to see what they tell us about other types of goods. Clough above all. Clough is always the most important major product. And to an extent, they're both more important than actual pottery in terms of trading. But you can't say so much about the archaeology. But sometimes the documents tell us a lot more. Certainly the Ganesa tells us a lot more about cloth. And then you can try and match it up. And that's one of the major ways in which I approach this too.

It must be quite rewarding when the documents kind of bear out the archaeological evidence and they sort of knit together and start to make sense of each other. Yeah, it is. Often enough, it's guesswork and you say, I've got this archaeological distribution, it probably reflects cloth. I'm sure it must reflect cloth. But in Egypt in particular, and to an extent in the Byzantine Empire, Greece and Turkey, the patterns that you can see in the archaeology

and the patterns that you can get from the documents do match up. So you can say things like really important, I can identify really important cloth-producing centres in Greece, which are corinth and thieves in the 12th century. But that's actually where all the ceramics are coming from as well. Now, these are major productive centres. And you can say similar things for Tandini do. And then you've got a network of things that you can be much more sure about. And being sure about it never really hurts when writing this truth. Absolutely. It's a good position to be in.

And before we move on to a bit more detail about some of the specific regions that you talked about, one of the things I also wanted to mention was the types of goods that we should be thinking about when we think about huge export networks during this period. Because I think we tend to have an impression that we're talking about luxury goods for the elites. But you make the point in your book that we should actually be looking in terms of mass trade at much more kind of day-to-day, bulk goods rather than anything luxurious. Yeah, that's absolutely right. So it's cloth for clothing for orderly people, iron goods, ceramics, wood, but it's not golden jewels.

These are economically crucial, but they're also discussed less. Chronicles, for example, will go on about golden jewels, because chronicles are written for upper class people, written for kings, written for bishops. But it's true now. If you look at what people write about clothing in the press, you'll find an awful lot more about Chanel than you will about Premark. But actually, Premark's what matters. How many people buy Chanel?

But on the other hand, millions of people go to Primark. It's 500,000 times more clothes bought in Primark than bought off the catwalks. I'm making the figure out. But it's that kind of scale. It's like that in every historical period. The things that ordinary people are buying and selling don't really get into most types of documents. But it is they that makes an economy important or else not important. Yeah, it's a really good way of looking at it.

I'm a spy doing whatever spies do. But what am I going to whip out of my pocket next? Careful. In this special month of patented, we're celebrating the 70th anniversary of James Bond by having a look at some of the inventions that have changed espionage. From gadgets and their creators

to the cars and cocktails that make Bond look oh so effortlessly cool. Join me, Campbell, Dallas Campbell, on Patented, a History of Inventions, where I will have my can on a string up against the walls of some of the best historians in this field. Look forward to your company. So in the book, you kind of take six regions as sort of case studies for dealing with their economies through this period and how they changed and how they grow. Could you just focus through where you chose and why you chose those areas in particular, please?

I chose Egypt because of the Ganesa and because of the other documents from the country. It's archaeology is not so good. I chose Sicily because it's absolutely in the centre of the Mediterranean and an awful lot of trade in every period goes through it and past it, and it's got an extremely good archaeology. I linked that to North Africa, above all to Tunisia, because those two were very closely linked in the medieval period, although the evidence for North Africa isn't so good.

And Byzantium, because it's got good archaeology and because it's got a very dense collection of written sources of all kinds of different kinds, which can be linked quite well to the archaeology. Then I did Al-Andalus, in other words, Islamic Spain and Portugal, which again has very good archaeology, which is almost unknown outside Spain and Portugal, and I thought that it would be very interesting to put that into a Mediterranean framework. And finally Italy, which has so much data from written sources and very good archaeology as well. And also, I've studied Italy for decades. I know Italy best, so I obviously had to include it. All of these are different in that Egypt is very complicated, doesn't develop quite as fast as the others.

Sicily is developing pretty fast in the 11th and 12th centuries. Byzantium begins to do so in the 12th. Islamic Spain and Portugal dramatically in the 11th and 12th, faster than anywhere else. Italy, surprisingly, given the emphasis of historians on the commercial revolution, Italy is actually quite late to the game. It only really picks up around about 1,200, although it moves very fast after that. So there are considerable contrasts here, which it's very interesting to play with, to see how they fit together, to see how they match up,

and to see how they end up telling a story that's quite different from me. the story that you'll get in most books. And did these regions, I guess, change over the period? Or is it simply a case of keeping doing what they're doing but on a bigger scale? Or do they adapt and change to the way that international trade is changing? They do change. In fact, it's mostly not related to international trade. In the case of Sicily, to an extent it is because it's always so well connected.

But even Egypt, everyone wants to trade with Egypt because it produces so much, it's so rich it's got such a complicated economy everybody wants to go there but then it's a question of which other regions of the mediterranean are organized enough to send a lot of boats to egypt and that's not italy initially italy only really begins to get involved in that trade in the second quarter of the 12th century two centuries after the sicilians and the tunisians are involved in it. Different regions connect into this network in different ways and with different rhythms. It's also quite interesting that the Byzantine Empire, which is focused on the Aegean Sea, is actually much less involved in the rest of the Mediterranean. And Islamic Spain, even though

it's doing so well economically, is hardly connected to the rest of the Mediterranean at all. So links to the Mediterranean and economic change are two different issues, and they have to be kept apart. And you mentioned as well in the book that there are obviously lots of regions that you could have covered as well that you sort of had to leave out to be able to detail these particular six. But do these six in particular help to illustrate how medieval economies more broadly operated? And does that explain why the commercial revolution came about in a different way to what history is generally perceived? I could have chosen other regions. I could have chosen Catalonia, which has got an enormous amount of documents, although not many often really relate to trade. I could certainly

have included what is now Syria, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, what became the Crusader states in the 12th century. There's certainly enough data about that, but I just had to choose. But broadly, I chose regions that are a bit better documented than the regions that I didn't choose. Work on these regions showed me, or showed me more clearly, because I had my view of it. before. Economic growth and its roots aren't particularly related to international trade. So what were they? And I think you've got to look for demographic growth, urban expansion, the buying power of people inside the reasons you're looking at, not just people outside them. You've got to look at the buying power of the poor as well as the rich, the 90%, the people who go

to Premark rather than the people who go to the catwalks. and if you look at each region in itself, as well as each region in its relationship to everybody else, to everywhere else, you can get a sense of what are the underpinnings of economic growth when you can find economic growth, as you can in all of these regions one way or another. And in a sense, that's all the commercial revolution is. The commercial revolution is, as region and the economies expand, for their own reasons, they can trade more with each other. And it's that trading more with each other that other historians have noticed. But what they didn't notice when they were looking for that was what was happening inside the regions themselves, what was happening inside Spain, inside Italy, inside Egypt.

So did you find that some regions were more predisposed or better prepared for the region? growth and movement into international trade or did they adapt as those opportunities came along? I mean, I know we're saying international trade wasn't the main driver of some of these things, but were some places simply better set up to engage with that kind of thing? Yes, I think so. It's interesting that the first signs of maritime trade are between Egypt and Sicily and Tunisia. And it's clear that there are links between them, which go back earlier, which can then be exploited as the economies of all three become more complicated, whereas links with Spain are much weaker.

It's a lot further. And as a result of that, the Spanish economy is less evolved in Mediterranean traffic in general and is less dependent on it. Part of it is, what do you actually want to buy from someone else? And you can tell the answers in some cases, like Egypt wants to buy wood, timber, from other. other places doesn't have much. It wants to buy iron from other places, doesn't have much. And so it sells flax, it sells grain to other places. It sells a number of made goods, which it makes on a

larger scale and thus presumably more cheaply than anywhere else. So you can say Egypt needs these things and it's prepared to sell in order to get them. Whereas Spain has got pretty much everything. There's almost nothing that it needs that it doesn't produce. It's got metals. It produces its own grain, it's got thriving cloth industry, it doesn't really need other places. So it's a question of need as much as anything else. Of course, all of them have got enough to carry on with on a low level, because otherwise they wouldn't be able to exist in times in which it isn't much trade. But it's a question of as you expand, you need more, and then it's that need as you expand that makes you more interested in other places. So is it sort of a combination of having something

that you've got plenty of that's good enough quality that someone else wants it, and them having something that you would want to bring in in return. So you're sort of playing off each other's surpluses but also deficiencies and balancing those out. And that's how trade grows. That's exactly right. Italy, for example, in 900, isn't really producing anything much that anybody else wants. And so it's not going to be able to participate in these kind of networks until it starts to produce them.

It begins to, because Venice in particular, sells slaves to the southern Mediterranean, to Egypt, to Tunisia, to the Byzantine Empire as well. Italy's got quite a lot of timber and so Egypt's interested in that. But it's going to take some time before Italy also has other things that people want to buy. It's not until the 13th century that it becomes a big cloth export region, a big iron export region. Milan makes arms for the whole of the Mediterranean at the end of the 13th century. century. But that takes some time to take off. And until then, it is going to be a fairly margin. It's that kind of issue that you've got to explore of what people are producing that anyone else might want. And did each of the six regions tell you something different,

or is it the case of them all fitting into a similar pattern that begins to sort of mesh together as those cogs get turning? The evidence for each of them is slightly different because they're different places. As I said, Spain's got a lot of metal. Egypt doesn't. So it tells you different things in that respect. But in the end, they fit into a pattern because it's the job of historians to make the patterns. And so the pattern they fit in to is the pattern that I or another historian will see as a result of having looked at everything. So yes, I can say, yeah, they do fit into a pattern. And here it is in the book.

But another historian might have seen different one. The central premise of the book in the idea of the donkey and the book, boat is to do with sort of local trade on land within small areas by donkey and international trade by boat and I guess to question which one of those is the most important. So which did you find the most important the donkey or the boat and why? Oh the donkey. Absolutely no contest. I have to say to anyone who's wondering about this, donkeys get used for transport more than any other animal in the Middle Ages. Ox carts are fine as long as your roads are good enough. But if your roads aren't good enough, then you're stuck with donkeys.

Or mules, mules are half donkey. Horses are more expensive, so you don't find them use for transport so much, which is why I insisted on the donkey. But yeah, it's the donkey rather than the boat, because most buying and selling, most movements of goods, are inside regions and are by land. Now, boats are not cheaper, and as soon as you've got a river, you're going to use a boat, and certainly if you want to transport and cost and see, you've got no choice. But mostly, you've got to use the donkey.

Otherwise, you won't even get to the coast. From reading the book, it almost felt like some of this stuff was so obvious. I don't know why I hadn't understood it before, that you have to have that local surplus that is more than is needed in a community and at market level for it to be available to go to export. So you kind of need that thriving economy based on the donkey before you can even think about having an economy that's based on a boat. And the idea that it's bulk goods rather than luxury goods, when you read it, it's so utterly

logical that I don't know why I didn't realize that or I thought the opposite was true. Yeah, it's funny, isn't it? Most economic historians work on the 19th and 20th century as they don't work on this period. And so it's a question of introducing the kind of things that most economic historians are going to regard as totally obvious to a period in which there aren't many people working on. Yeah, which is why I think this book is so bad. valuable and would definitely recommend anyone who's interested in trade around this kind of period. It's an absolutely fascinating reader I would thoroughly recommend.

Thank you very much for joining us, Chris. I've really enjoyed chatting a bit more about The Donkey and the Boat. It's a great pleasure talking to you, Matt. Thank you very much. Chris's book, The Donkey and the Boat, is available now in all good bookstores. There'll be another fascinating episode for your listening delight on Tuesday. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcast from and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval.

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