An Economic History of Medieval Europe

Norman John Greville Pounds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317893561
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

A clear and readable account of the development of the European economy and its infrastructure from the second century to 1500. Professor Pounds provides a balanced view of the many controversies within the subject, and he has a particular gift for bringing a human dimension to its technicalities. He deals with continental Europe as a whole, including an unusually rich treatment of Eastern Europe. For this welcome new edition -- the first in twenty years -- text and bibliography have been reworked and updated throughout, and the book redesigned and reset.

CHAPTER ONE

The Later Roman Empire

In the middle years of the second century A.D. the Roman Empire stood at the height of its power and prosperity. Eulogised by contemporaries and praised by posterity, the Empire was peaceful, happy and affluent. From this high level under the Antonine emperors the fortunes of the Empire declined – so it is commonly held – to the nadir of its fortunes in the fifth century, when power fell from the hands of the last feeble emperor in the West, and imperial soil was occupied by barbarian invaders and ruled by their tribal leaders.

The reasons for this reversal of fortunes have been a subject of controversy and debate for fifteen centuries, and every possible argument, from racial degeneration to climatic change, has been advanced. The decline of Rome still arouses interest, even though no one today would dare to explain it in terms of a single decisive factor. The phenomenon of Rome's fall was complex, and no simple explanation can ever be admissible.

All was not well with the empire of Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. The legend of the golden age of the Antonines, which owed much to Gibbon's Decline and Fall, is unquestionably exaggerated, and by this time the seeds of Rome's decay had already been sown. Fighting was increasing in intensity on the frontiers of the Empire, and Marcus Aurelius was obliged to spend much of his later years campaigning along the Danube. The army was increased in size and heavier taxes were levied to support it. The soldiery, once recruited from among the peasants of Italy, was more and more drawn from provincials and even from those barbarian peoples whom it was its purpose to resist. Whole contingents of such Foederati were recruited for the legions. Heavy and all too often inequitable taxation depressed the peasant and increased the gulf between rich and poor. The well-to-do broadened their estates while the descendants of a once free peasantry become in the course of time coloni, bound to the soil of their masters.

The needs of defence explained and in some measure excused the strengthening of imperial control over the provinces and over the cities (civitates) of which they were composed. The imperial bureaucracy grew in size and power, and the social structure became increasingly rigid. Imperial edicts bound the craftsman to his trade and the farmer to his land. Such occupations, and even membership of the city councils, were made hereditary, restricting social mobility and destroying initiative.

The cities, the principal bearers of Roman civilisation and culture, had grown steadily in number, as well as in size and splendour during the later years of the Republic and under the Principate. But few were founded after the first century A.D. and almost none after the middle of the second. The erection of vast public buildings and the construction of public works such as aqueducts and baths, diminished in importance during the second century, except in Rome itself, and, during the third, the building of defensive walls against barbarian raids came to be of greater urgency and importance.

The age of the Antonines was a watershed between the period of territorial expansion and economic growth which had, in general, characterised the Principate, and that of invasion and economic recession which followed. The economic change which took place in these centuries is difficult to trace and impossible to express in any quantitative manner. The decline was not continuous or consistent; there were periods when the fortunes of the Empire appear to have taken an upward turn; when the military commanders met with success on the frontiers and the Emperors, through their edicts, tried courageously, if in the end vainly, to stem the spreading social evils of the times.

Nor was the decline common to the whole Empire. The Middle East and eastern Mediterranean did not in all respects share the fortunes of the western Mediterranean and of the European provinces. If the Roman Empire in the West ‘fell’ in the fifth century, one must always remember that the Eastern Empire, with its focus in Constantinople, continued for another thousand years.

The ‘fall’ of the Roman Empire, politically considered, meant the termination of a succession of emperors who had ruled it from Rome or Milan or Ravenna. At the same time the provinces of the Empire were transformed into kingdoms ruled by barbarian leaders and dominated by a non-Roman élite. This transition, however, was not matched by any comparable event in the economic field. The urbanised society of the second century passed slowly and gradually into the non-urbanised society of the early Middle Ages. Trade, which had characterised the former, dried up, and the interdependence of town and country and of one province with another by and large gave way to local self-sufficiency and isolation. This was not a sudden and revolutionary change. It took centuries to accomplish, just as, during the Middle Ages, it took centuries to restore towns, manufacturing and trade to the European economy.

This economic change was not an even and continuous process. It was strongly marked in the third century, but in the fourth there was a recovery in the West, followed by a golden autumn of the ancient world, before the winter of the Dark Ages. The fortunes of the Western Empire were not reflected in those of the Eastern. The latter did not fall until 1453. Its territory grew smaller, but its capital city of Constantinople remained inviolate and its ships continued to ply the seas, bearing its trade and maintaining the food supply of its cities.

There were many reasons for this contrast. The eastern provinces were wealthier and more populous than the western, and in this way could more easily support both the burden of defence expenditure and the bureaucratic superstructure of the Empire. They had an exportable surplus of grain and of manufactured goods. The West had very little with which to requite its imports from the East, and, except when these represented the proceeds of imperial taxation, they were presumably paid for by an outflow of gold from West to East.¹

The Western Empire, despite its lower level of wealth and the very much sparser population, was exposed to greater dangers than the Eastern. The Persians, it is true, represented a threat, especially after the accession of the Sassanids (A.D. 224). One emperor – Valerian (A.D. 253–260) – was even captured by the Persians, but the latter showed no desire to occupy more than the territories to which they could show some historic claim and to maintain a defensible boundary against the Roman Empire.

The West, however, was exposed to the pressure of the Germanic peoples and, in the fifth century, of the Mongol Huns. Invasion routes impinged most readily on the Rhine and Danube frontiers, and, at least from the mid-second century A.D., there was almost continuous war. Most of the legions were stationed along the line of the two rivers, and the supply both of recruits and of supplies taxed the resources of the Western Empire to the uttermost. The eastern provinces, from Egypt to Asia Minor, were in no great danger, at least until the seventh century, of invasion and destruction. In the West such fears were ever present. In the later years of the third century Germanic tribes raided deep into Gaul, and the hastily contrived defences of the towns show how the provincials attempted to meet the danger.

The social problems facing the Western Empire were more serious and more deeply rooted than those in the East. In part they were the consequence of the military danger and of the need to maintain a large army; in part, they date from the Principate and even from the Republic. In short, there was a widening gap between rich and poor, with the rich increasingly successful in evading their social responsibilities. The burden of taxation was borne by an increasingly impoverished tax-base, while the technological backwardness of the Empire – itself in some degree a consequence of the institution of slavery – prevented any significant increase in production.

THE FRONTIERS

The Empire had reached its greatest territorial extent under Trajan, with the subjugation of the province of Dacia. Antoninus Pius advanced the frontier in northern Britain to the Scottish Lowlands, but this was shortlived. For the rest, the boundary between the Empire and the Germanic and Celtic tribes, between civilisation and barbarism, followed the course of the lower Rhine (Fig. 1.1); then from near Coblenz (Confluentes) it cut across to the Danube, which it met near its great bend at Regensburg (Regnum) and followed, except for the inclusion of Dacia, to its mouth in the Black Sea. The river boundary was clearly defined and readily defensible. It, furthermore, made the movement of soldiers and supplies relatively easy between one frontier fort and another.

The boundary of the Empire in the East was based on no such geographical feature. It extended from the easternmost shore of the Black Sea across the mountains of Armenia to the valley of the Euphrates. From here it stretched southwards, very roughly along the boundary of the steppe and the desert, to the borders of Egypt. It was a fluctuating line, and only where it followed the upper course of the Euphrates did it have any degree of permanence. Here the Empire was under pressure first from the Parthians, then from the Persian Sassanids. At intervals the Romans penetrated beyond the Euphrates but for most of the period covered by this chapter they were on the defensive.

Figure 1.1 Towns and provinces of the Roman Empire.

The Empire had no boundary on the south. Its authority terminated at the edge of the Sahara, where there were no people to dominate or resources to control. Legionary forts were established up to a hundred miles from the coast of Tripolitania, and they formed a chain along the southern margin of the Atlas Mountains of Numidia and Mauritania. Only in Egypt did the Empire extend farther to the south, and here its authority ended somewhere to the south of the First Cataract of the Nile.

THE POPULATION

It is commonly held that the population of the Empire stood at its highest level in the second century A.D., and that it declined from that time until the extinction of the Western Empire. For this, however, there is no direct evidence. Nevertheless, progressive depopulation, implicit in the shortage of recruits for the army and the growing extent of abandoned land, was a factor in Rome's decline. It was, Bury claimed, ‘the most obvious element of weakness in the Roman Empire’.²

The many estimates which have been made of the population of the Empire in the age of the Antonines and at other periods in its history are nothing more than intelligent guesswork. They range from 50 to 70 million for the second century, though some have put the total as high as 100 million. Even for Italy, despite the censuses conducted under the early Principate, there is great uncertainty because children and slaves were omitted. The most recent, and also the most scholarly examination of the data, that of Brunt, puts the Italian total in the early years of the first century A.D. at about 7.5 million.³ That of the Empire as a whole may have been about 60 million.

The population of Italy, in all probability the most densely settled of the European provinces, did not exceed 8 million. In Spain and Gaul, the overall density was very much less, though the ‘cities’ of the Mediterranean coastland appear to have been fairly populous. Britain, the Germanies and the Danubian and Balkan provinces can have had between them no more than a few million. That of Britain is unlikely to have been more than 3 million. The present trend, it should be added, is to raise these estimates somewhat, as more and more evidence for inhabited sites of the Roman period is discovered by the spade.

The death rate was high and the expectation of life short. The evidence is scanty and derived in the main from funeral inscriptions and stelae. The sample of the Roman population for which we have information is very far from random, and is, by and large, composed of those who were wealthy enough to record their lifespan. The average age at death for adults appears to have been between thirty and thirty-five years. One assumes that there was a high rate of infant mortality, and the average expectation of life at birth was probably not a great deal more than twenty years.

By far the greater part of the population of the Empire lived in rural areas and worked on the land. All their lives they were at a subsistence level, and after paying taxes and rent they had no reserves. The depredations of invaders from beyond the Rhine and Danube or the scarcely less damaging actions of Roman legionaries could reduce them to starvation. Disease was rife among this undernourished population. In the time of Marcus Aurelius, the bubonic plague swept through the Empire, and, as was usual with the plague, sporadic outbreaks occurred through the following century. Again in the sixth century (542–3) the plague spread westwards, and again claimed an immense toll of life. If the Black Death of 1348–51 provides any analogy, the death role must have been enormous and the recovery of the population very slow. Perhaps it never fully recovered from these outbreaks. In addition, malnutrition must always have exposed the population to other, if less lethal, diseases.

The evidence for a chronic shortage of labour in the later Empire is overwhelming. Agricultural workers were tied to the soil – adscripti glebae, and, if they should escape, were savagely pursued. To the landlord they were a precious commodity that could not easily be replaced. Much land lay uncultivated (se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of abbreviations
• Foreword to the First Edition
• Foreword to the Second Edition
• 1. The Later Roman Empire
• 2. The Early Middle Ages
• 3. The Expansion of the Medieval Economy
• 4. The Population of Medieval Europe
• 5. Agriculture and Rural Life
• 6. The Development of the Medieval Town
• 7. Medieval Manufacturing
• 8. Trade in the Middle Ages
• 9. The Commercial Revolution
• 10. The Late Middle Ages
• Bibliography
• Index