The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, 395-700 AD

THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITY

system can be located in the later sixth to early seventh centuries, i.e., after the
Justinianic attempt at reconquest and before the Arab invasions?
All these issues are the subject of ongoing debate and considerable disa-
greement, not least because they raise ideological issues about trade and the
nature of the ancient economy. Carandini, Panella and their colleagues see
the evidence as refl ecting trading patterns in a market economy. Among
the questions still to be settled is that of the overall economic impact of the
Vandal conquest, including that of the effect on North Africa (and the other
conquered areas) of the cessation of Roman taxation. Wickham rightly un-
derlines the importance for North Africa of the grain requisitions for Rome,
which would have had the effect of requiring a highly developed navigation
and export system from which other products could also benefi t, and whose
cessation was therefore likely to have serious effects. According to this argu-
ment, the enforced grain exactions for Rome and Constantinople called forth
a considerable level of production that was itself non-commercial, but which
served to underpin commercial networks.^61 According to Wickham, the east-
ern Mediterranean saw an agrarian boom in the fi fth-sixth centuries and an
‘active commercial exchange network which linked Egypt, the Levant, and
the Aegean in overlapping ways’; this system collapsed in three generations
after 600, in the face of political change, but was ‘pretty stable’ until then.^62

The fall of the Roman empire

There is no simple way to characterize the late Roman economy, or the actual
effect on society of the government’s attempts to control it. Certain trends are
evident, not simply the profound impact of barbarian invasion and settlement
during this period, but also more general developments such as the tendency
towards the amassing of vast amounts of land by individuals, the return to
taxation in coin (gold) instead of in kind, the growing gulf between east and
west and the diffi culty experienced by the government in ensuring the collec-
tion of revenues and staffi ng its own administration. The establishment of the
post-Roman kingdoms in the west and the effects of the wars of reconquest
had major economic repercussions; these will be discussed in Chapter 5. In
the east, by contrast, there is evidence of population increase and of intensi-
fi ed agriculture and cultivation in areas such as the limestone massif of north-
ern Syria and even in such unpromising areas as the Hauran and the Negev;
this evidence will be discussed further in Chapter 7. On the other hand, by the
late sixth century, following the effects of war and perhaps also plague, the
Roman military presence in the east was clearly becoming harder and harder
to maintain. Clearly it is misleading if not impossible to generalize over so
wide an area and so eventful a chronological span. As we saw, older historiog-
raphy connected a highly negative view of the supposed rigidity, corruption,
and over-taxation of the later Roman empire with the reasons for the fall of
the Roman empire, and modern historiography also abounds in confi dent val-
ue-judgements about decline and the end of antiquity, many of which rest on