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TRADE AND EXCHANGE

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The changing European economy between A.D. 400 and 1000 lies at the nexus of several trajectories of cultural transformation. The major transition from the Roman world to the medieval world is echoed by the geographically ever diminishing economy, from a large-scale interregional trade network to smaller spheres of exchange. In addition, the context of trade within what once had been Roman provinces differed from areas that had been inside the Roman sphere of interaction but outside the Roman purview. Changing connections, changing trade routes, changes in the social, economic, and political context of the marketplace are important considerations. Although historical records give selectively (or arbitrarily) preserved glimpses into these problems, only archaeology can reveal the whole picture, from crafts workshops to marketplace organization, from trade routes to the patterns of interaction between the public, artisans, merchants, and elites of the successor states.

ORIGINS AND CONTEXT OF EARLY MEDIEVAL TRADE

Local trade in early medieval Europe is a continuation of a long tradition of exchange stretching back into prehistoric times, but one of the distinguishing attributes of trade in the Iron Age, Roman era, and Early Middle Ages was the increased mobility of people and goods. Exchange of some type over relatively long distances dates to the Paleolithic, and while recent isotopic analysis of Neolithic skeletons suggests that early farmers were more mobile than previously thought, their travel from upland to lowland and along river valleys was aimed at settling in new places. In the Bronze Age most trade was local, but rare substances, such as bronze and amber, clearly were moved over long distances. Outside the Mediterranean, where trade was organized professionally, goods probably were traded hand to hand by many intervening individuals.

The Iron Age saw a transition to trade as a regular, major part of the subsistence and political economies of European polities. This was due in part to heightened political interactions and improved transport technology, especially in shipping. As in earlier times, Iron Age elites probably controlled importation of luxuries that helped maintain their community status. Later, while still controlling production and trade of the most valuable items, they lost their monopoly over the creation and dissemination of other goods, and the continuing trend from generalist farmers toward economic specialization in various trades and occupations created an artisan class and a market for their output. In the Celtic Iron Age, populous proto-urban oppida settlements of continental Europe continued to be the destination for exotic goods. Attached craft specialists created indigenous prestige objects of outstanding beauty for their elite masters, even as others produced less spectacular goods for local exchange and consumption: ceramic vessels, metal tools, and items of clothing and adornment. Eventually, the urban societies of the Iron Age Mediterranean culminated in the market economy of the Roman Empire, where each year professional merchants transported hundreds of thousands of tons of goods in large cargo ships. A vast trading system with complex rules and regulations crisscrossed the empire before its decline.

Thus, a combination of earlier trade and exchange traditions combined with the legacy of the Romans influenced the development of early medieval markets. Post-Roman trade varied regionally, depending on whether an area had been part of the former Romanized core, a less Romanized province, such as England or Germania, or a region, such as Scandinavia or the Slavic lands, that was outside the empire but regularly interacted with Rome.

The Roman Empire stretched from Syria to Scotland, but daily governance was conducted at a local level. A Roman civitas and its hinterland made up a highly autonomous administrative unit, organized loosely under a provincial governor with a military contingent. When the greater Roman entity became unstable, provinces grew even more autonomous, eventually breaking into regions and then subregions. The post-Roman era is known for its migrations and incursions, as non-Roman outsiders, customarily called barbarians, invaded and seized these fragments of the empire. Many Europeans outside the Roman sphere were content to stay at home, but even so their local economies were affected deeply by the decline of the imperial system. Thus, the question of continuity between the late Roman and early medieval economies during this period of unimaginable change is an important issue.

THEORIES ON TRADE AND EXCHANGE

The debate has long simmered over urbanism, trade, and markets in post-Roman Europe. Early-twentieth-century historians, most notably Henri Pirenne, combined the documentary record with deductive impressions about the origins of feudalism to formulate several plausible hypotheses about urbanization, markets, and long-distance trade in the post-Roman world. Pirenne's influential thesis proposed that the Roman organization of Europe was never dismantled but persisted far into the medieval period. Only as European trade with the Mediterranean was cut off by Muslim expansion in the seventh century did Germanic rulers of the Dark Ages, such as Charlemagne and his contemporaries, slowly expand their regions' agricultural economies.

The refutation of this theory and a new understanding of markets, money, and manufacturing during the barbarian age have come about largely as the result of the revelations of modern archaeology. The twentieth century saw dramatic changes in urban and marketplace excavation methods. Early civic projects in European towns were conducted by workmen clearing arbitrary layers, keeping sketchy records of the curiosities they unearthed. After World War II, archaeologists working in bomb-damaged cities primarily used trenches for investigation. As they looked at small bits of deep strata, they could detect a long and complex history at a particular site, and could even date the strata, but they were unable to observe the "big picture." Only in the last decades of the twentieth century, when horizontal excavation became dominant, could large-scale exposure of former surface areas uncover many contemporary structures, features, artifact scatters, and boundaries as well as their patterning and context. By the 1980s archaeologists began to challenge earlier ideas about the complex economics of the early Middle Ages.

ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE FOR TRADE AND EXCHANGE IN FORMER IMPERIAL EUROPE

The provinces of Rome had a busy market economy based on import, export, and manufacturing. Trade between provinces was facilitated by shared traditions, rules, and regulations within a single political economy. As the empire's troubles deepened through the course of the fifth century, could producers and consumers maintain the convenience of customary trade, or were they forced or encouraged by changing conditions to find new economic solutions? Archaeological investigations around the Mediterranean and Europe have shown that in contrast to Pirenne's idea of post-Roman continuity, by the late fifth century the Roman world was in decline, leaving a vacuum in which the provinces became disconnected and transformed into regional and subregional systems and in which markets largely lost their character as interregional and long-distance trade centers.

While post-Roman primary documents exist, perhaps the socioeconomic crises are best seen through archaeological evidence. During the imperial era, Rome's Campus Martius was a beautifully planned and maintained monumental landscape. In addition to parade grounds, it held temples, porticoes, baths, the stadium, circus, and several theaters for public enjoyment. By the late fifth century it was despoiled: squatters and craftspeople were camped out in shantytowns within the ruins. One excavation found a glassmaker's stall of the fifth or sixth century supplanted in the seventh or eighth century by a workshop manufacturing religious objects for the clergy and local markets. The extremely local and limited nature of trade, compared with earlier times, is illustrated by the fact that imported items came from no farther than Sicily. Another indicator of economic decline is coinage. Between the seventh and eighth centuries alone, gold coins dropped from 90 percent to 10 percent content and silver from 70 percent to less than 30 percent, and bronze coins were as thin as paper.

At sites elsewhere in Italy dating to the fifth to seventh centuries, commercial harbors were abandoned, and there is a strong decline in import-trade amphora from Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, indicating that interregional trade had collapsed. On the Adriatic at fifth-century Butrint, fortifications were built against barbarian invaders, palaces were left unfinished, and squatters moved in. Merchants occupied the ruined forums of other towns across Roman Europe, creating makeshift workshops in the rubble of former citadels. While Rome and a few other southern cities maintained a modicum of urban character, western European towns and markets were largely abandoned. Long-distance commercial exchange and the interregional market system had ceased operation.

TRADE, EXCHANGE AND MARKETS OUTSIDE THE FORMER EMPIRE

Archaeological evidence shows regular, active trade between Romans and non-Romans before A.D. 400. In return for elite goods—swords, adornments, wine and serving vessels—non-Roman peoples exported utilitarian wares, such as leather, hide, foodstuffs, and slaves. Modern excavations at elite-controlled ports, such as Gudme-Lundeborg in Denmark, usually show a chieftain's compound with a complement of craftspeople and a harbor during the Roman era.

Rulers in barbarian regions thus became highly dependent on Roman goods for maintaining their social status. After Rome's troubles began and the imperial system began to totter, Roman goods disappeared from these sites, as long-distance trade was curtailed. Despite the cutoff of Roman items, local rulers still needed to impress their peers and overawe their subjects, so the trade in elite goods could not be allowed to end. Instead, smaller, less ambitious trade networks were formed between the upper classes in Britain, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, and Germanic and Slavic regions. Trade continued at some Roman-era places; more important, however, between A.D. 700 and 1000 a series of new, specialized sites combining crafts production with a trading center appeared. Among them were Ipswich and Hamwic in Britain; Birka, Ribe, Kaupang, and Hedeby in Scandinavia; Quentovic in northern France; Dorestad on the Dutch Rhine; Staraya Ladoga in Russia; and Wolin in Poland. Similar sequences are found in the Czech Republic and northern Germany.

These markets, commonly referred to as emporia, were not the spontaneous efforts of merchants and manufacturers. Local rulers' involvement is apparent in elite-built and maintained fortifications, indicating royal administration and protection, at emporia such as Hedeby, Ipswich, and Hamwic. Ribe and Löddeköpinge in Denmark and Sweden, respectively, had nondefensive boundary markers that probably delimited the area of regulated trade. At Mikulčice in the Czech Republic and at Hamburg, Lübeck, and Brandenburg, Germany, excavations show that local chieftains established fortress-like residences with attached craftspeople in the eighth century, after which non-elite settlements developed around them, leading to urban marketplaces.

Eventually, less luxurious local items were made and traded at these sites, probably because the taxes that kings could collect in a regulated royal market became as important as acquiring their own sumptuary goods. Anglo-Saxon texts confirm that between A.D. 700 and 1000 there was a steady rise in tolls and tariffs on trade. While such documentation is found only in England, scholars believe this was paralleled throughout the emerging successor states, providing a substantial royal income. As these states became important trading powers, new trade routes sprang up, including the Roman-era Rhine-Rhône river route between north and south, which served new trading places, such as Frisian Dorestad on the Rhine, and Roman-Baltic connections via the Oder (Viadna), Dnieper, Dniester, and Prut, the Elbe, Weser (Visurgis), and Eider grew active, serving Hedeby, Hamburg-Bremen, Lübeck, and Wolin. Sea routes continued to connect Atlantic Europe with Britain, and new sea-lanes linked Dorestad, Ribe, and Hedeby with emporia in Sweden and Norway.

NEEDFUL THINGS AND OBJECTS OF DESIRE

Despite the importance of trade to people in the Middle Ages, textual references to early medieval trade remain fairly sparse. Thus, the archaeological examination of ships, wharves, workshops, warehouses, and market organization sometimes is the best option for studying the manufacturers, merchants, and middlemen whose activities were transforming Europe. Through many extensive excavations, archaeologists have discovered what goods were coveted by both rulers and commoners. Precious metals and gems were reserved primarily for the royal and upper classes, as were fine imports of ceramic and glass, wine, textiles, and weapons. Locally produced adornments were skillfully made and available to a larger group of well-off citizens. Production of non-luxury items used by the broader populace is evident, and each trade had its unique artifact assemblage. Weaving tools and loom parts are common, as is the debris from workshops manufacturing combs and pins, in the form of sawed-off bone and horn fragments and partially finished products. Metal casting leaves fragments of crucibles and molds, brooches, and fasteners. Iron yields large amounts of slag, iron bars and rods, tool preforms (blank, pre-formed and unfinished tools), and, in some cases, the tongs and hammers of smiths. Advanced glass industries are evidenced by molten glass wasters and deposits of malformed glass beads; in one case, at the Danish trading site of Dankirke, archaeologists discovered a warehouse of glass drinking horns that had been destroyed by fire. Some sites yield butchered animal and fish bones from purveyors of foodstuffs, and thick dung layers indicate trade in live cattle. Coins, scales, weights, and moneybox keys sometimes are present.

Marketplaces often are ephemeral, with structures resembling fairground stalls and booths. Collections of sunken floored huts often are evident, and at Löddeköpinge, Sweden, the seasonal nature of the marketplace is seen in alternating occupational layers and sterile sand in the floors of these pit houses. On the other hand, many markets were permanent, with continuous occupations by specific workshops and industries. At Ribe and Hedeby, workshop boundaries and property divisions were maintained without change for many generations, reflecting long-term regulation, while the channeling of streams and the gridlike layout of streets and blocks show central planning at Hedeby.

By the end of the first millennium, long-distance and local trade in luxury and non-luxury goods was vital to the economies of medieval states. Taxes and regulations remained, but the specially constructed and maintained royal trading emporia disappeared. They were either supplanted by or transformed into urban markets within the cities of later medieval Europe.

See also Emporia (vol. 2, part 7); Ipswich (vol. 2, part 7); Staraya Ladoga (vol. 2, part 7).

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TINA L. THURSTON