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Teh supposed "breakdown of trade" in teh Dark Ages
For more than fifty years, the history of the Middle Ages has been dominated by the ‘Pirenne Thesis’, with which a great historian sought to explain the collapse of the ancient world and the establishment of the medieval economic order in Charlemagne’s Europe. Great historians, like all great men, cast long shadows. Henri Pirenne, the venerable Belgian medievalist behind the Pirenne Thesis, has had an enormous influence on the study of European medieval history and has provoked one of the most exciting debates in the field. Following his release from a German prison camp in the 1920s, Pirenne began work on a series of papers and lectures that culminated in 1935 in the publication of his revolutionary book, Mohammed and Charlemagne, in which his thesis was proposed.
Pirenne constructed his thesis against a background of intellectual stagnation in medieval history. Since the Renaissance, historians had stressed the ‘Gothic bleakness’ of the Dark Ages, and focused on the apparently cataclysmic impact of the Germanic ‘invasions’ on the rich civilization of Rome early in the fifth century. As a result, historians of the ancient world terminated their studies with the fifth century, while medievalists began theirs with the Germanic inundation of Western Europe from that time on, a schism that to some extent still remains. Pirenne was one of the first historians to stand back from these entrenched views of the past and to consider the interactions between the ancient and medieval worlds. The Pirenne thesis upset the traditional historical conceptions regarding the location of the boundary between these two worlds, and has formed the basis of subsequent discussion on the topic. According to Pirenne, it was not the Germanic invasions that led to the fall of the Roman way of life; the migrant tribes of the fourth to sixth centuries preserved what political, economic and social conditions they could and did not deliberately destroy classical civilization. The ancient world only ended after the extremely successful, and unexpected, Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries had swept around the perimeter of the Mediterranean, effectively overthrowing the ‘Roman’ mastery of the sea lanes. This, Pirenne argued, destroyed the essential and characteristic lifeblood of the Roman Empire – its unity and coherence. For centuries, the Mare Nostrum of the Romans had held firm the great imperial structure; over its waters had passed trade and commerce, the Roman military and naval might, and the vital exchange of ideas. As a result of the Arab gains, the remnants of the Western Empire were separated from the Eastern Empire of Byzantium. Political, cultural and economic exchange ended. Except for the most tenuous of ties between Constantinople and a few Italian ports, where the Byzantine fleet afforded some protection, Christian ports were cut off from one another, and could not maintain communication or maritime trade; the Muslims had rolled down an iron curtain between the East and West that remained down until the eleventh century. The central idea of the thesis is that these dramatic changes in the Mediterranean isolated the Merovingian Franks in north-west Europe and caused the gradual rise of the Carolingians, who were economically more remote. The isolation of Italy compelled the Pope to ally himself with the aspiring Carolingian dynasty in the late eight century, and ultimately led to the coronation of Charlemagne as emperor. Mohammed had made possible Charlemagne. The most famous passage from Mohammed and Charlemagne concludes:
It is therefore strictly correct to say that without Mohammed Charlemagne would have been inconceivable. In the seventh century the ancient Roman Empire had actually become and Empire of the East; the Empire of Charles was an Empire of the West … The Carolingian Empire, or rather, the Empire of Charlemagne, was the scaffolding of the Middle Ages.
The West, which had always drawn upon the superior economic resources of the East, reverted to an agrarian economy, “an economy of no outlets”. Urban life collapsed, the middle class disappeared and political power became focused on land holdings and in the hands of the Church. Finally, it was Charlemagne who decisively altered the situation, standing astride the gap between a static closed economy and an emergent, fluent one.
On the whole historians are wary, perhaps too wary, of broad generalizing themes, but Pirenne’s thesis demanded particular attention. His brilliant generalizations have attracted an enormous volume of critical comment by historians, numismatists and archaeologists.
Ferdinand Vercauteren (1930s), a member of the old school of historical thought and a student of Pirenne, published a paper on the role of merchants in Western Europe. He supports Pirenne’s view in that, by the ninth century, a pan-European economy had established itself in European civilization. The merchants, who had until the ninth century been known as negociators, began to be referred to as mercators, men of the mercatum or market. These merchants were itinerant, and in an age in which traffic was minimal and regional differences sharp, men from outside could have a sharp psychological resonance. That they traveled through such widely different regions, from Byzantium to England, Muslim Spain to the Slav border lands, makes it reasonable to attach some cultural significance to the merchant community. Conspicuous in Vercauteren’s work is that he acknowledges the existence of commercial links between East and West, and in this sense, it is the first noteworthy revision of the Pirenne thesis.
Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi, an anthropologist and an economist respectively, serve to demonstrate how closely history is related to other fields. Though perhaps unaware of the Pirenne thesis, their works put it, and economic history in general, into an entirely new perspective. In his particularly insightful work entitled The Gift, Mauss examined the nature of gift-giving in different societies across the world. The foundation of a particular form of circulation of goods and services is the social obligation to give, to receive, and to repay. Mauss termed such a condition “the formality of the potlatch”, after a custom in Melanesian societies in which social status, power and net worth are established not by the amount of wealth that one owns, but by the amount that is freely distributed. Such an economic structure requires counter-gift as well, lest it collapse. A gift not yet repaid debases the man who accepted it; failure to offer counter-gifts is equivalent to a declaration of war. This informal, yet highly structured, framework of circulation can be summed up by the following Maori philosophy:
You give me a gift; I give it to another. He gives me a return gift which I am obliged, by the spirit of the gift, to give to you.
While one might argue that a particular custom of certain Pacific islanders is irrelevant in the context of medieval European society, similar behavior can in fact be found. For instance, the Germanic custom of feasting can be understood in terms of “the formality of the potlatch”.
Polanyi’s argument is that in modern market economies the needs of the market determine social behavior, whereas in pre-industrial and primitive economies the needs of society determined economic behavior. Drawing heavily on Mauss and other anthropologists such as Malinowski and Thurnwald, he introduced the concepts of reciprocity and redistribution. According to Polanyi, economy is an instituted process – the ‘changing of hands’ of goods and services is enmeshed in institutions, both economic and non-economic. For a framework for the circulation of goods and services to arise, an economy needs to be integrated, or institutionalized. This can be brought about in three ways – reciprocity, redistribution and exchange. The subject of economics usually deals exclusively with exchange economies; this is the type of economy to which economists refer when they use the word ‘economy’. An exchange economy is instituted by barter and commerce, markets and money. In the period under study, however, the other two types of economies, namely, reciprocative and redistributive economies, have a previously unseen significance, and must be discussed in further detail.
A reciprocative economy is based on mutual interactions between socially and legally symmetric groups, such as clans, families or individuals. Circulation of goods and services is brought about primarily by gift, though pillage and tribute are also important. In a reciprocal economy, each individual produces what he or she is best suited to produce. The produce is shared with the community, and this is reciprocated by the other individuals of the community. The motivation to produce and share is not personal profit but rather, as Mauss theorized, fear of social contempt, ostracism and loss of prestige.
An economy in which goods and services flow towards a center, and then outwards to different spatial and social locations, is called a redistributive economy. Commodities change hands by redistribution. Taxation and subsequent public spending is an important example of such redistribution, as is royally administered material exchange between estates.
One of the weaknesses in the works of Pirenne and Vercauteren is that their economic interpretations were set in essentially traditional moulds; notions of reciprocity and redistribution never occurred to them This traditional approach remained intact until 1959 when Philip Grierson offered a new interpretation of the economic implications of Pirenne’s thesis. In his celebrated paper Commerce in the Dark Ages: A critique of the evidence, Grierson declared:
All that we know of the social conditions of the time suggests that the alternatives to trade were more important that trade itself: the onus probandi rests on those who believe the contrary to have been the case.
Grierson drew attention to the social importance of exchange, in particular to the concept of gift exchange derived from Mauss. The main thrust of Grierson’s essay was to emphasize that in the Dark Ages the social dimension of exchange was probably more important that the economic one. In other words, the economic matrix was entirely different from that of the Roman period, which was based on firm market principles.
Georges Duby wrote in the 1960s on the nature of European economies. Clearly influenced by Polanyi and Grierson, he argued that the economies of the ancient Germanic societies were almost purely reciprocative and redistributive. The distribution of gifts, the hosting of feasts and the offering of brides served the purposes of circulation of goods and services as well as the maintenance of social structures. Pillage too played an important role. Armies and war-bands would raid enemy settlements and seize such items as ornaments, weapons, cattle and even people. Pillage and counter-pillage functioned much as gift and counter-gift did. Peace between two groups could be defined as the prospect of the exchange of gifts. Redistribution too was manifested by pillage, followed by the distribution of the spoils by the warlord to the members of the clan. Arts and crafts, especially gold-working, were supported by the ‘kings’, who required that their gifts and plunder be fashioned into coherent forms for public display of their wealth. Tribute was a form of gift, made by the weak to the strong in order to maintain peace. In pagan areas, the dead, who were buried with elaborate burial items and rituals, constituted an important class of consumers.
In the Roman world, by contrast, there existed an advanced exchange economy. Money, in the form of coins, was in wide circulation, and supported markets and commerce. Large volumes of commodities were traded internationally, and merchant classes, such as the Syrians and the Jews, assumed prominence as maritime traders and businessmen. Luxury items such as spices, ivory, silk, wine, papyrus and oil were imported from the East for the elites. Within the empire, cereals, wine, pottery, slaves, wool and textiles were traded among the various provinces.
Peter Spufford (1980s), a numismatist, explained in great depth, on the authority of archaeological and literary evidence, the system of coinage in and after the Roman Empire. Gold was plentiful in the empire. The solidus, a gold coin, was the unit of currency in terms of which prices were expressed. In addition to the solidus, coins of lower denominations were also used, such as the gold semissis and tremissis (triens), the copper nummus, and the silver miliarenses. Such coins were essential for day-to-day expenses of city dwellers and to commercial traders, and were used by the large urban population of the empire, and by merchants.
Following the collapse of the Roman Empire, the European economy witnessed a regression. Wave after wave of plague decimated the population of Southern Europe. Urban life dwindled, and towns remained as nothing more than forts and ecclesiastical centers. Political organization disintegrated, and the lack of a strong central authority resulted in the collapse of a system of coinage. Public expenditure ceased – there was no army or civil service requiring payment in gold, no state transportation system to maintain, nor were there bulk purchases of food for free distribution. Peasants subsisted upon land through the system of economic exploitation called seignorialism. Coinage declined rapidly; gold was steadily replaced by silver, and the silver declined in quality over time.
Spufford and Duby agree in that, contrary to the Pirenne Thesis, the dwindling of the Roman market economy is no longer considered to be as abrupt as was once thought, but rather, as gradual and prolonged a process as the disintegration of Roman power and the disappearance of the Roman senatorial aristocracy. Furthermore, the decline of the Roman economy and way of life began long before the Arab conquests, and the general consensus is that Pirenne exaggerated the impact of Islam on the collapse of the European economy.
In the 1980s, Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse published a critique of Pirenne’s thesis based on archaeological evidence. Building on the ideas of Grierson, they dismissed Pirenne’s notion of a totally closed economy, and instead supported the view that a modified economy did exist in Europe. They described the nature of the redistributive economy, in which the elites of the society fostered administered markets of small artisan classes and controlled the movement of valuable commodities. Trade partnerships with other chiefdoms enhanced political position, and therefore, administered bilateral trade expanded. To regulate such trade, it was confined to specific trading posts, such as Quentovic and Dorestad on the North Sea. Commercial trade did not completely disappear either. In the North Sea and Rhine valley, it expanded under the industrious Frisians. Peasant markets and fairs constituted a primitive rural market economy. On the whole, however, the exchange economy was insignificant. Commerce, credit, and regular exchange were no longer needed for the maintenance of the social fabric. The whole of society was in a state of dependence on the owners of the soil and the dispensers of justice. Economic independence had reached its lowest point, and in this regard, the Pirenne thesis remains unchallenged.
James Campbell, in his publication The Anglo-Saxons (1982), cautioned against being too optimistic regarding the extent of commerce in this period. He argued that the development of an international trading network in the Dark Ages does not necessarily suggest the existence of a true market economy, but rather a regulated, royally administered form of redistributive trade. This hypothesis is corroborated by archaeological, numismatic and literary evidence gathered at Hamwih, a mid-Saxon English port of the early eighth century. At Hamwih, merchants, who paid heavy tolls in exchange for royal protection, purchased goods such as livestock and other commodities which kings collected from their subjects and defeated enemies. Enormous quantities of animal remains and items of precious metals have been found, in addition to large volumes of locally minted coins. Campbell points out:
…the gathering of [such commodities] was more likely to have been achieved by the exercise of royal power and the collection of royal dues than via the mechanism of a formal market network which probably did not exist.
Traders would pay for these goods in kind, selling similar items like agricultural produce and booty from other kingdoms. Thus, we can see that international exchange of goods occurred within the framework of a modified redistributive economy in which merchants and traders played the role of intermediaries in the chain of redistribution.
Pirenne viewed the reign of Charlemagne as the point of inflexion of Europe’s economic graph. He asserted that it was under the reign of Charlemagne that Europe began its gradual ascent out of the economic abyss of the dark ages. The completely isolated manorial “economy of no outlets” gradually gave way to a commercial economic setup. Duby agreed:
…from this point of view, the rise of Carolingian power marked a decisive phase in the economic history of Europe.
Spufford, too, supported the view of a resurgent Europe. Political structures had reached the level of maturity necessary for the establishment of a framework for monetary circulation. The introduction of the silver denier injected a fresh vitality into the stagnant economy and facilitated the linkage of trade with markets. The denier gave North Sea trade a fresh impetus, and facilitated an increase in public spending. Spufford observed that money became more readily available. Furthermore, Carolingian military campaigns, particularly those in Slavic areas, resulted in the capture of thousands of slaves for export. Consequently, Europe’s trade deficit was erased, at least temporarily, by the inflow of Arab and Byzantine gold into the economy.
Pierre Riché (1980s) also cited the revival of coinage by the Carolingians as the most important factor in the economic revival of Europe. The Carolingians passed legislation aimed at bringing about universal acceptance of coinage. At the council of Frankfurt in 794, Charlemagne passed the following resolution:
As regards denarii, know that we have decreed that everywhere, in every town and every trading place, the new denarii are also to be legal tender and to be accepted by everybody. And if they bear the monogram of our name and are of pure silver, should anyone reject them… he is to pay fifteen solidi.
The proliferation of the denier sparked a revival of local and regional trade. Coinage began to be used for trade, wages, to redeem obligations in kind, to collect duty from merchants, and to levy the tribute demanded by the Scandinavians. Even when exchange was conducted without coins, prices were expressed in terms of the denier. Riché concludes:
Carolingian monetary reforms resulted in a vast monometallic ‘silver zone’ that prevailed across Europe until the reemergence of gold coinage in the thirteenth century.
Pirenne constructed his thesis against a background of intellectual stagnation in medieval history. Since the Renaissance, historians had stressed the ‘Gothic bleakness’ of the Dark Ages, and focused on the apparently cataclysmic impact of the Germanic ‘invasions’ on the rich civilization of Rome early in the fifth century. As a result, historians of the ancient world terminated their studies with the fifth century, while medievalists began theirs with the Germanic inundation of Western Europe from that time on, a schism that to some extent still remains. Pirenne was one of the first historians to stand back from these entrenched views of the past and to consider the interactions between the ancient and medieval worlds. The Pirenne thesis upset the traditional historical conceptions regarding the location of the boundary between these two worlds, and has formed the basis of subsequent discussion on the topic. According to Pirenne, it was not the Germanic invasions that led to the fall of the Roman way of life; the migrant tribes of the fourth to sixth centuries preserved what political, economic and social conditions they could and did not deliberately destroy classical civilization. The ancient world only ended after the extremely successful, and unexpected, Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries had swept around the perimeter of the Mediterranean, effectively overthrowing the ‘Roman’ mastery of the sea lanes. This, Pirenne argued, destroyed the essential and characteristic lifeblood of the Roman Empire – its unity and coherence. For centuries, the Mare Nostrum of the Romans had held firm the great imperial structure; over its waters had passed trade and commerce, the Roman military and naval might, and the vital exchange of ideas. As a result of the Arab gains, the remnants of the Western Empire were separated from the Eastern Empire of Byzantium. Political, cultural and economic exchange ended. Except for the most tenuous of ties between Constantinople and a few Italian ports, where the Byzantine fleet afforded some protection, Christian ports were cut off from one another, and could not maintain communication or maritime trade; the Muslims had rolled down an iron curtain between the East and West that remained down until the eleventh century. The central idea of the thesis is that these dramatic changes in the Mediterranean isolated the Merovingian Franks in north-west Europe and caused the gradual rise of the Carolingians, who were economically more remote. The isolation of Italy compelled the Pope to ally himself with the aspiring Carolingian dynasty in the late eight century, and ultimately led to the coronation of Charlemagne as emperor. Mohammed had made possible Charlemagne. The most famous passage from Mohammed and Charlemagne concludes:
It is therefore strictly correct to say that without Mohammed Charlemagne would have been inconceivable. In the seventh century the ancient Roman Empire had actually become and Empire of the East; the Empire of Charles was an Empire of the West … The Carolingian Empire, or rather, the Empire of Charlemagne, was the scaffolding of the Middle Ages.
The West, which had always drawn upon the superior economic resources of the East, reverted to an agrarian economy, “an economy of no outlets”. Urban life collapsed, the middle class disappeared and political power became focused on land holdings and in the hands of the Church. Finally, it was Charlemagne who decisively altered the situation, standing astride the gap between a static closed economy and an emergent, fluent one.
On the whole historians are wary, perhaps too wary, of broad generalizing themes, but Pirenne’s thesis demanded particular attention. His brilliant generalizations have attracted an enormous volume of critical comment by historians, numismatists and archaeologists.
Ferdinand Vercauteren (1930s), a member of the old school of historical thought and a student of Pirenne, published a paper on the role of merchants in Western Europe. He supports Pirenne’s view in that, by the ninth century, a pan-European economy had established itself in European civilization. The merchants, who had until the ninth century been known as negociators, began to be referred to as mercators, men of the mercatum or market. These merchants were itinerant, and in an age in which traffic was minimal and regional differences sharp, men from outside could have a sharp psychological resonance. That they traveled through such widely different regions, from Byzantium to England, Muslim Spain to the Slav border lands, makes it reasonable to attach some cultural significance to the merchant community. Conspicuous in Vercauteren’s work is that he acknowledges the existence of commercial links between East and West, and in this sense, it is the first noteworthy revision of the Pirenne thesis.
Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi, an anthropologist and an economist respectively, serve to demonstrate how closely history is related to other fields. Though perhaps unaware of the Pirenne thesis, their works put it, and economic history in general, into an entirely new perspective. In his particularly insightful work entitled The Gift, Mauss examined the nature of gift-giving in different societies across the world. The foundation of a particular form of circulation of goods and services is the social obligation to give, to receive, and to repay. Mauss termed such a condition “the formality of the potlatch”, after a custom in Melanesian societies in which social status, power and net worth are established not by the amount of wealth that one owns, but by the amount that is freely distributed. Such an economic structure requires counter-gift as well, lest it collapse. A gift not yet repaid debases the man who accepted it; failure to offer counter-gifts is equivalent to a declaration of war. This informal, yet highly structured, framework of circulation can be summed up by the following Maori philosophy:
You give me a gift; I give it to another. He gives me a return gift which I am obliged, by the spirit of the gift, to give to you.
While one might argue that a particular custom of certain Pacific islanders is irrelevant in the context of medieval European society, similar behavior can in fact be found. For instance, the Germanic custom of feasting can be understood in terms of “the formality of the potlatch”.
Polanyi’s argument is that in modern market economies the needs of the market determine social behavior, whereas in pre-industrial and primitive economies the needs of society determined economic behavior. Drawing heavily on Mauss and other anthropologists such as Malinowski and Thurnwald, he introduced the concepts of reciprocity and redistribution. According to Polanyi, economy is an instituted process – the ‘changing of hands’ of goods and services is enmeshed in institutions, both economic and non-economic. For a framework for the circulation of goods and services to arise, an economy needs to be integrated, or institutionalized. This can be brought about in three ways – reciprocity, redistribution and exchange. The subject of economics usually deals exclusively with exchange economies; this is the type of economy to which economists refer when they use the word ‘economy’. An exchange economy is instituted by barter and commerce, markets and money. In the period under study, however, the other two types of economies, namely, reciprocative and redistributive economies, have a previously unseen significance, and must be discussed in further detail.
A reciprocative economy is based on mutual interactions between socially and legally symmetric groups, such as clans, families or individuals. Circulation of goods and services is brought about primarily by gift, though pillage and tribute are also important. In a reciprocal economy, each individual produces what he or she is best suited to produce. The produce is shared with the community, and this is reciprocated by the other individuals of the community. The motivation to produce and share is not personal profit but rather, as Mauss theorized, fear of social contempt, ostracism and loss of prestige.
An economy in which goods and services flow towards a center, and then outwards to different spatial and social locations, is called a redistributive economy. Commodities change hands by redistribution. Taxation and subsequent public spending is an important example of such redistribution, as is royally administered material exchange between estates.
One of the weaknesses in the works of Pirenne and Vercauteren is that their economic interpretations were set in essentially traditional moulds; notions of reciprocity and redistribution never occurred to them This traditional approach remained intact until 1959 when Philip Grierson offered a new interpretation of the economic implications of Pirenne’s thesis. In his celebrated paper Commerce in the Dark Ages: A critique of the evidence, Grierson declared:
All that we know of the social conditions of the time suggests that the alternatives to trade were more important that trade itself: the onus probandi rests on those who believe the contrary to have been the case.
Grierson drew attention to the social importance of exchange, in particular to the concept of gift exchange derived from Mauss. The main thrust of Grierson’s essay was to emphasize that in the Dark Ages the social dimension of exchange was probably more important that the economic one. In other words, the economic matrix was entirely different from that of the Roman period, which was based on firm market principles.
Georges Duby wrote in the 1960s on the nature of European economies. Clearly influenced by Polanyi and Grierson, he argued that the economies of the ancient Germanic societies were almost purely reciprocative and redistributive. The distribution of gifts, the hosting of feasts and the offering of brides served the purposes of circulation of goods and services as well as the maintenance of social structures. Pillage too played an important role. Armies and war-bands would raid enemy settlements and seize such items as ornaments, weapons, cattle and even people. Pillage and counter-pillage functioned much as gift and counter-gift did. Peace between two groups could be defined as the prospect of the exchange of gifts. Redistribution too was manifested by pillage, followed by the distribution of the spoils by the warlord to the members of the clan. Arts and crafts, especially gold-working, were supported by the ‘kings’, who required that their gifts and plunder be fashioned into coherent forms for public display of their wealth. Tribute was a form of gift, made by the weak to the strong in order to maintain peace. In pagan areas, the dead, who were buried with elaborate burial items and rituals, constituted an important class of consumers.
In the Roman world, by contrast, there existed an advanced exchange economy. Money, in the form of coins, was in wide circulation, and supported markets and commerce. Large volumes of commodities were traded internationally, and merchant classes, such as the Syrians and the Jews, assumed prominence as maritime traders and businessmen. Luxury items such as spices, ivory, silk, wine, papyrus and oil were imported from the East for the elites. Within the empire, cereals, wine, pottery, slaves, wool and textiles were traded among the various provinces.
Peter Spufford (1980s), a numismatist, explained in great depth, on the authority of archaeological and literary evidence, the system of coinage in and after the Roman Empire. Gold was plentiful in the empire. The solidus, a gold coin, was the unit of currency in terms of which prices were expressed. In addition to the solidus, coins of lower denominations were also used, such as the gold semissis and tremissis (triens), the copper nummus, and the silver miliarenses. Such coins were essential for day-to-day expenses of city dwellers and to commercial traders, and were used by the large urban population of the empire, and by merchants.
Following the collapse of the Roman Empire, the European economy witnessed a regression. Wave after wave of plague decimated the population of Southern Europe. Urban life dwindled, and towns remained as nothing more than forts and ecclesiastical centers. Political organization disintegrated, and the lack of a strong central authority resulted in the collapse of a system of coinage. Public expenditure ceased – there was no army or civil service requiring payment in gold, no state transportation system to maintain, nor were there bulk purchases of food for free distribution. Peasants subsisted upon land through the system of economic exploitation called seignorialism. Coinage declined rapidly; gold was steadily replaced by silver, and the silver declined in quality over time.
Spufford and Duby agree in that, contrary to the Pirenne Thesis, the dwindling of the Roman market economy is no longer considered to be as abrupt as was once thought, but rather, as gradual and prolonged a process as the disintegration of Roman power and the disappearance of the Roman senatorial aristocracy. Furthermore, the decline of the Roman economy and way of life began long before the Arab conquests, and the general consensus is that Pirenne exaggerated the impact of Islam on the collapse of the European economy.
In the 1980s, Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse published a critique of Pirenne’s thesis based on archaeological evidence. Building on the ideas of Grierson, they dismissed Pirenne’s notion of a totally closed economy, and instead supported the view that a modified economy did exist in Europe. They described the nature of the redistributive economy, in which the elites of the society fostered administered markets of small artisan classes and controlled the movement of valuable commodities. Trade partnerships with other chiefdoms enhanced political position, and therefore, administered bilateral trade expanded. To regulate such trade, it was confined to specific trading posts, such as Quentovic and Dorestad on the North Sea. Commercial trade did not completely disappear either. In the North Sea and Rhine valley, it expanded under the industrious Frisians. Peasant markets and fairs constituted a primitive rural market economy. On the whole, however, the exchange economy was insignificant. Commerce, credit, and regular exchange were no longer needed for the maintenance of the social fabric. The whole of society was in a state of dependence on the owners of the soil and the dispensers of justice. Economic independence had reached its lowest point, and in this regard, the Pirenne thesis remains unchallenged.
James Campbell, in his publication The Anglo-Saxons (1982), cautioned against being too optimistic regarding the extent of commerce in this period. He argued that the development of an international trading network in the Dark Ages does not necessarily suggest the existence of a true market economy, but rather a regulated, royally administered form of redistributive trade. This hypothesis is corroborated by archaeological, numismatic and literary evidence gathered at Hamwih, a mid-Saxon English port of the early eighth century. At Hamwih, merchants, who paid heavy tolls in exchange for royal protection, purchased goods such as livestock and other commodities which kings collected from their subjects and defeated enemies. Enormous quantities of animal remains and items of precious metals have been found, in addition to large volumes of locally minted coins. Campbell points out:
…the gathering of [such commodities] was more likely to have been achieved by the exercise of royal power and the collection of royal dues than via the mechanism of a formal market network which probably did not exist.
Traders would pay for these goods in kind, selling similar items like agricultural produce and booty from other kingdoms. Thus, we can see that international exchange of goods occurred within the framework of a modified redistributive economy in which merchants and traders played the role of intermediaries in the chain of redistribution.
Pirenne viewed the reign of Charlemagne as the point of inflexion of Europe’s economic graph. He asserted that it was under the reign of Charlemagne that Europe began its gradual ascent out of the economic abyss of the dark ages. The completely isolated manorial “economy of no outlets” gradually gave way to a commercial economic setup. Duby agreed:
…from this point of view, the rise of Carolingian power marked a decisive phase in the economic history of Europe.
Spufford, too, supported the view of a resurgent Europe. Political structures had reached the level of maturity necessary for the establishment of a framework for monetary circulation. The introduction of the silver denier injected a fresh vitality into the stagnant economy and facilitated the linkage of trade with markets. The denier gave North Sea trade a fresh impetus, and facilitated an increase in public spending. Spufford observed that money became more readily available. Furthermore, Carolingian military campaigns, particularly those in Slavic areas, resulted in the capture of thousands of slaves for export. Consequently, Europe’s trade deficit was erased, at least temporarily, by the inflow of Arab and Byzantine gold into the economy.
Pierre Riché (1980s) also cited the revival of coinage by the Carolingians as the most important factor in the economic revival of Europe. The Carolingians passed legislation aimed at bringing about universal acceptance of coinage. At the council of Frankfurt in 794, Charlemagne passed the following resolution:
As regards denarii, know that we have decreed that everywhere, in every town and every trading place, the new denarii are also to be legal tender and to be accepted by everybody. And if they bear the monogram of our name and are of pure silver, should anyone reject them… he is to pay fifteen solidi.
The proliferation of the denier sparked a revival of local and regional trade. Coinage began to be used for trade, wages, to redeem obligations in kind, to collect duty from merchants, and to levy the tribute demanded by the Scandinavians. Even when exchange was conducted without coins, prices were expressed in terms of the denier. Riché concludes:
Carolingian monetary reforms resulted in a vast monometallic ‘silver zone’ that prevailed across Europe until the reemergence of gold coinage in the thirteenth century.
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