A note on trade and trade centers in the eastern and northern Adriatic region between the eighth and the ninth Century

Abstract

Ever since Henri Pirenne has introduced trade to the discipline as a means of understanding the economic take-off of Western Europe, the tendency has been to see commercial relations and centers as key components of the political and cultural landscape of early medieval Europe. Some have claimed that the sudden burst of “exotic” artifacts—swords, winged lance heads, censers, reliquaries—in burial assemblages in Croatia represent the “spillover” of a much more extensive Venetian export of goods. The distribution of eighth- and ninth- century Byzantine coins on the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea has also been used as evidence for commercial relations between cities on that coast and the regions in southern Italy, which, like Dalmatia were at that time under Byzantine control. However, very little is known about the Dalmatian cities (Zadar, Trogir, Split, Dubrovnik, Kotor, and Ulcini) during that period, besides what is revealed by the analysis of still-standing monuments, such as the Church of St. Tryphon in Kotor. To date no pottery assemblages have been published from any excavation on urban sites in Croatia or Montenegro. On the basis of the existing evidence, the interpretation of artifacts of clearly foreign—especially Frankish—origin in burial assemblages in the region of Croatia between Cetina and Zrmanja needs to be re-assessed in the light of what little is known about the Frankish encroachment into the western Balkans and the war with Byzantium in the early ninth century.