The Mediterranean around 800: On the Brink of the Second Trade Cycle

Abstract

not moving from East to West, from West to East. There was never a moment in which the connectivity between microregions, for example small-scale cabotage from port to port, was not present, as Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell have recently stressed. And Michael McCormick, also very recently, has put a powerful case for the maintenance of a network of communication of all kinds in the Mediterranean throughout the early Middle Ages, including across the low point for interregional movement, which he would date to ca. 650-780.1 So, on one level, there is not a problem with the realities of interregional relationships, as the symposium title puts it. It does not require so very dense a communications network for one region to influence another in its material culture-a single princess can do it (as with Theophan6 and the court culture of late 10th-century Germany), or a single artisan or group of artisans moving to a different region (as with the twopronged spread of glazed pottery from the eastern Mediterranean to the West, from Constantinople to Rome in the late eighth century and from Iraq to Syria and Egypt, and then to Tunisia, Sicily, and Spain, in the ninth).2 It certainly does not require commercial exchange for regions to interconnect at the level of their material culture. All the same, the realities in the title of the symposium give space for an analysis of communications of a more specifically economic type, and on a larger scale than the movements of individuals. Those latter movements, indeed, themselves have different sorts of meaning in environments where there is a high level of interregional exchange with respect to those where communications are rather more reduced. Jerome could go from the West to Bethlehem in 386 without thinking twice about it, and write letters from there