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Monthly Archives: July 2015
A prophetless coinage
I stubbed this post quite soon after starting at the Barber Institute with no intent more serious than to post a picture of a marvellous coin and enthuse about it. And I hope you can see why!
Gold solidus of Emperor Heraclius and his two sons, struck in Constantinople between 638 and 641, Barber Institute of Fine Arts B2912
This is, as the caption says, a solidus of Heraclius with his two sons, whom we usually know as Heraclius Constantine and Heraclonas but whose given names were both Constantine, and the former of whom subsequently reigned briefly as Constantine III (641). There is lots to say about this coin type, which was novel in many ways: there is for example no legend identifying the emperors, only a monogram of Heraclius’s name on the reverse to the left of the cross, which will be important in a moment; it is making a strong point because the Church opposed the legitimacy of Heraclonas, who was Heraclius’s son by Empress Martina who was also Heraclius’s niece; and one could go on. But I mainly wanted to post it because they look so much like a poster for a superhero movie; one can almost see the cloaks billowing in the studio wind. (My original title for the post was Emperors Assemble…) I am not the only person who’s put these online, but who cares? But then very recently, while looking up stuff for a different project, I found a web-page discussing an Arabic imitation of this coin type which had a couple of things badly wrong with it, and a bigger point emerged.
Gold dinar struck by an unknown authority in Syria between, well, who knows? 639 and 705 would be probably-safe outside guesses. Barber Institute of Fine Arts A-B30.
You can immediately see both the similarities and differences. The Latin legend is replaced by Arabic, and the Arabic reads, for those who can, ‘bism Allah la ilaha illa Allah wahdahu Muhammad rasul Allah’ [Edit: corrected, it turns out I cannot], ‘In the name of God, there is no god but God, Muhammad is the prophet of God’. The monogram goes, being replaced perhaps by the beginning of the Bism Allah in Latin letters. All crosses are replaced by pellets, so that the three figures now look oddly as if they’re holding walking canes and the cross-on-steps becomes a pole-on-steps. But it’s plainly the same type underneath it, I’m sure you’ll agree.
All of this is something that can be seen on copper coins of similar types which are presumed to come from the same period, normally guessed at between the 670s and 695 or so, in which latter year Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik seems to have begun a reform of the disparate coinages of his realm which would unite them into one system of coins with no pictures, only script, running over Arabia and Persia alike. Before then, however, and in some places also after then, coins like this that echoed, imitated and adapted previous types, both Byzantine and Persian, had been the working currency. Few of those were gold, however, and few of these ones are known; the web article I linked to above says that all the known ones are in the British Museum. Well, one of them is in the Barber Institute of Fine Arts—in fact, it and I have both spent much of the week in the School of Chemistry with an XRF machine, but let that pass—and that is the first mistake I wanted to correct.
The second, though, is that the article suggests, following a Flickr site called Taboo Numismatics to which it links, that the Arab-Byzantine type (as these adaptive coinages are canonically called) actually depicts the Prophet Muhammad. Now, one can see the argument: there is a bearded figure on it and the reverse legend names the Prophet, albeit in terms that might equally just be a profession of faith. Still, the name is there and the picture is there, and the fact that they’re not on the same face is a problem but one that also exists for the Heraclius coin.
There is also the problem that Islam is supposed to abhor images of people, of course, and as we know of recent years to be especially keen that the Prophet not be depicted. This has not always been so, however, and indeed the point of the first site that I linked to is explicitly that, that many medieval images of Muhammad from Islamic contexts are known. There are also coins for which this case would be much stronger, which take a new image of a standing figure in a headdress, carrying a broad sword, and place the legend ‘Muhammad rasul Allah’ around him. The type also exists naming ‘Abd al-Malik, and the ‘Muhammad’ version of it seems only to have been struck in Palestine, but we don’t know how they relate; it’s usual to assume that ‘Abd al-Malik introduced the design and that for some reason Palestine only struck it anonymously, but it seems equally possible to me that Palestine did actually strike a coin showing the Prophet and that ‘Abd al-Malik borrowed the design for his halfway-house pre-reform coinage. The Barber does have some of these coins, but I’m chary of putting images of them on the web right now: you can see one that was sold in 2013 here, and here’s one of the ‘Abd al-Malik ones.
Copper fals of ‘Abd al-Malik, Commander of the Faithful, struck at Manbij between 680 and 696, Barber Institute of Fine Arts A-B36
If there is to be a search for early Islamic coins showing Muhammad, therefore, it’s with the ‘Standing Caliph’ types of Palestine that it must start. The Three Standing Figures gold dinars won’t really work for it. Yes, there is the legend, but there are also many points against. In the first place, the portraiture is so exact a copy of the coins of Heraclius, right down to the barbs of the moustache, that it is clear that one of those coins was before the engraver. They would, indeed, have been fairly frequent among gold coins in the area and so the resemblance would have been noticeable more widely. What message could this be meant to send if that coin were showing Muhammad? That he had somehow been Heraclius? It seems unlikely. But even then, there are three figures: who are the others? The site I started with makes a spirited attempt to explain them as Abu Bakr, the first Caliph, at Heraclius’s right and Aisha, Muhammad’s wife, at his left, but this also won’t really work; that site has the advantage (for these purposes) of a fairly poor image that allows him to maintain that the right-most figure is veiled, but our own won’t easily allow that. It seems very much simpler to say: they’re not supposed to be anyone, but they are supposed to look like what the figures on those gold coins the people of the area knew looked like, with suitable adaptations to point out that something new was in fact going on. There is gold of the Standing Caliph type, too, naming ‘Abd al-Malik, so this presumably didn’t last very long, but in any case. I’m pretty sure that what I’ve just put online is not a picture of Muhammad!
The most accessible study of the Arab-Byzantine coinage is Clive Foss, Arab-Byzantine Coins: an introduction, with a catalogue of he Dumbarton Oaks Collection, Dumbarton Oaks Publications 12 (Washington DC 2008), which does discuss the Muhammad problem. Note that Tony Goodwin, “The Arab-Byzantine coinage of jund Filastin – a potential historical source” in Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies Vol. 28 (Leeds 2004), pp. 1-12, also argues that the Standing Caliph coinage of Palestine is earlier than ‘Abd al-Malik’s. To Tony Goodwin also goes the honour of publishing the Barber’s dinar, along with some others from this part of the collection, as “Some Interesting Arab-Byzantine Coins from the Barber Institute Collection” in Numismatic Circular Vol. 111 no. 4 (London 2003), pp. 196-198. It remains for me and my collaborators to get any more of them out there…
Leeds 2014 Report IV and Final
The 2014 bookfair, International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds
I should, given that I’d missed the dance the previous night, have been up bright and early on the following and final day of the 2014 International Medieval Congress, but I confess I was not. I had had a couple of sessions in mind to go to, but in fact by the time I was fully operational it was just too late gracefully to get in, and so I gave into temptation and went to the bookfair to check along a few final stalls I hadn’t yet reached. With that achieved, and coffee consumed, I threw myself back into academia for the last two sessions.
1607. Law and Empire: editing the Carolingian capitularies, II
The earlier one of these sessions was one of those I had been thinking of going to, and once I’d been to the second I regretted my failure, as it was very much on my interests. It was, I gathered, part of a thread coming out of the ongoing work to re-edit the disparate body of texts emanating from the Carolingian empire which we call ‘capitularies‘, because they are arranged by capitula, headings or articles. This covers everything from programmatic law through sermons to meeting agendas and so many problems arise, which the speakers were variously facing. This was the running order:
- Jennifer R. Davis, “Manuscript Evidence of the Use of Capitularies”.
- Matthias Tischler, “Changing Perceptions of a Carolingian Constitution: the legal and historiographical contexts of the ‘Divisio regnorum’ in the early 9th century”.
- Karl Ubl, “Editing the Capitula legibus addenda, 818-819, of Louis the Pious: text and transmission”.
The first problem tackled was : did anyone ever actually use the legislation that the Carolingian kings issued like this? Doubts have been raised, even though they were later compiled into something like a new lawcode for Emperor Louis the Pious (814-840), because however interested the court may have been in them, only one citation of them is court has so far been located, making them vulnerable to an old argument by the late Patrick Wormald that early medieval law-making was about performance, not about actually trying to govern people’s behaviour.1 Professor Davis had however found a private manuscript that collects capitulary legislation, perhaps, given its contents, made for a courtier bound for Italy who needed to know about the laws there, and she argued that this was the tip of a lost iceberg of people making their own legal handbooks of the bits they needed from the central law-bank at the court.
Part of Charlemagne’s789 capitulary, the Admonitio Generalis, in St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 733, DOI: 10.5076/e-codices-csg-0733, f. 13r. (http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/list/one/csg/0733), Professor Davis’s chosen manuscript.
There was heated discussion after this, because who loves categories more than legal historians? And who loves questioning them more than modern social historians? But one of the questions that was being asked throughout, but especially by Professor Ubl, was just what kind of an edition one can make of a text like the Capitula legibus addenda, of which there are thirty-two different versions none of which are evidently definitive and all of whose constructions are, as these papers had shown, potentially informative. Professor Ubl wanted a born-digital edition but it wasn’t quite clear how it would work yet. I thought that a kind of database of clauses, from which a website could cook you up any given manuscript, would still actually give you a form of text to print, but there were reasons my notes don’t let me recall why this wouldn’t answer. I still like it, though. Anyway, then there was lunch and then it was the final straight.
1715. Networks and Neighbours, VII: relationships of power in the Early Middle Ages
I have a certain loyalty to the Networks and Neighbours strand at Leeds, mainly out of self-interest since I am in the journal, or will be, but also because the organisation behind it is quite the creation for a then-bunch of postgraduates, and it is doing several quite important things in terms both of methods and of subject of publication. This session was no longer being organised by the same crew as are behind the journal, however, and I should have realised that. The order of ceremonies was this:
- Paulo Henrique de Carvalho Pachá, “The Visigothic State and the Relations of Personal Dependence: transition, transformation, and domination”.
- Michael Burrows, “Lower Class Violence and the End of the Roman Empire”.
- Renato Rodrigues Da Silva, “Donation of Land and State Building in 7th- and 8th-century Northumbria”.
Senhor de Carvalho set up for us a separation of aristocracy and state in Visigothic Spain: he argued that king Wamba had tried to bring it about and that Ervig, his successor, was able to gain power by conceding a rôle in government to part of the aristocracy, thus splitting them while still looking conciliatory. This is certainly one way to read the texts, but not perhaps a new one, and was reacting to a book published in 1978, what may no longer need doing.2 Mr Burrows picked up the terms of his sources in distinguishing a ‘more humble’, lower class from a ‘more honest’, upper class in the late Roman Empire, and asked what our sources, written largely by the latter, thought of the former resorting to violence. You would think the answer obvious but Christianity, because of its founder’s interest in the poor and because of the way that mob action sometimes brought about what seemed to our writers like the will of God, made some of those writers find a space for rightly-guided popular violence, thus making some of it seem legitimate in the terms of the time. Lastly Senhor Rodrigues tried to put the limited evidence that donations of land were made in pre-Viking Northumbria (we don’t have any charters, but we have some sources that talk about them existing) into the context of political turmoil in that kimgdom in the eighth century. Since we don’t have any of the relevant donations, the links between them and events never really crystallised for me here, and I was left wondering how Senhor Rodrigues thought it all joined up.
Any unsympathetic feelings I had for the panellists, however, evaporated in horror during a five-minute mini-lecture that a commentator delivered to Senhor de Carvalho, condemning him for not having read many things which got listed and bombarding his argument with a supposedly-revisionist view of the development of Spain that was clearly based on the even older work of Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz. Senhor de Carvalho had spine enough to point this out, whereupon the commnetator, who was from Valladolid as he told us although I never identified him, dismissed Senhor de Carvalho contemptuously as a Marxist. This was quite the rudest attack I’ve seen an academic deliver upon a junior scholar, and I felt I had to go and reassure Senhor de Carvalho afterwards that we had all met such people and that they should not be allowed to triumph. I had had my own reservations about the paper, yes, but this was a whole circle of Hell below anything I would ever say, or mean, in a postgraduate session or indeed elsewhere. Professor Ian Wood exemplified how this could be done by also offering Senhor Rodrigues a reading list, but one couched as possibly-helpful suggestions, and the other questions were also, I think, intended to guide and suggest rather than demolish. I understand rage at wrongness as much as anyone, but I also regard such anger as a sign that it’s not views of the early Middle Ages that are threatened… To remember that was, alas, and through no fault of the panellists, the most striking lesson of this final panel, and pondering it I departed southwards, many books the richer and another International Medieval Congress down.
The Leeds 2014 bookhaul, reconstructed for this post. What is now mainly evident is how very sure I was that I would still be teaching Anglo-Saxon England whatever happened, which I shall somehow have to contrive to do even now, because the sunk costs of my library are just awful otherwise!
1. An eloquent statement of doubt on this score, and the lone legal citation, can be found in Christina Pössel, “Authors and recipients of Carolingian capitularies, 775-829” in Richard Corradini, Rob Meens, Pössel & Peter Shaw (edd.), Texts and Identities in the Early Middle Ages, Forschungen zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 12, Denkschriften der phil.-hist. Klasse 344 (Wien 2008), pp. 253-274, online here. The work of Wormald referred to is “Lex Scripta and Verbum Regis: legislation and Germanic kingship, from Euric to Cnut” in Peter Sawyer & Ian N. Wood (edd.), Early Medieval Kingship (Leeds 1977), pp. 105-138.
2. That book being none other than Abilio Barbero & Marcelo Vigil, La formación del feudalismo en la Península Ibérica, 2nd edn. (Barcelona 1978), which of course even I thought worth many blog posts, so I am conscious that I would have done little better at that stage. Still, on this subject I’d probably have started with Roger Collins’s Visigothic Spain 489-711 (Oxford 2004) and gone on with the commentary in Joaquín Martínez Pizarro (transl.), The story of Wamba: Julian of Toledo’s Historia Wambae regis (Washington DC 2005) before I got back to Barbero and Vigil. These were, signally, not among the suggestions made by the commentator mentioned below…
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The kind of maths we should not do
A lot of the problems any historian of the early Middle Ages faces are about how typical any given piece of evidence is. When so little survives, can we generalise from the few fragments we have across the great spaces where we simply know nothing? I came up against this while writing the post some time back about widow warlords, where as you may remember I wound up trying to argue for a level of social occurrence that could be common enough to be frequent while still being statistically unusual. The question remained then: how unusual? And this led me to thinking about the best evidence I have for female presence in local society, the good old Vall de Sant Joan hearing, and then the temptation stole upon me to do some very bad maths.
Aerial view of the Vall de Sant Joan de les Abadesses. I know I use this picture a lot but I find it really hard to get tired of. However, I can no longer find where I got it from, so if you happen to own it do let me know…
Y’see, the Vall de Sant Joan hearing seems to be really good evidence for population size, at least by our starvling early medieval standards. We do not know the whole population of the area, but we think we know how many households there were in it, and we know what size it was: 269, by my count, and about 7 km2.1 Now, we could just multiply up, because the Vall de Sant Joan is in some sense a jurisdictional term and we know how many of those there were in the tenth-century county of Osona, give or take a few for changes, and it’s thirty-seven. If each contained this many households, tenth-century Osona would have been a county of nearly ten thousand households.
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There probably aren’t that many households in the Vall de Sant Joan now, for a start, though I wouldn’t mind going back again to look (albeit this time with a car). Image by Espencat (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
In fact, that is really unlikely to be true, because this was a frontier county and we’re counting its very inward corner, where we can document, more or less by the fact that we can document anything but also by the nature of the actual documents, that an ambitious lordship interest was moving people in here and encouraging settlement that is quite unusually dense.2 Such a figure is likely to be a massive over-estimate. So what should we do instead? Now, here the words of my old colleague Ted Buttrey come back to me with force:
“What should we do? We should do nothing. Nothing can be done. There is no solution to this problem, beyond inventing new data to push the inquiry into the realm of the fanciful. This is uncomfortable but it is true. If we allow ourselves, in our frustration, to confect the missing data, we will to that extent have destroyed our own purpose. To create quantitative studies built of imaginary data, to force an answer by assuring ourselves and others that we know what we do not, and cannot, is to compromise everything that we hold important. Each of us builds, and others build upon us: when we dress up guesses as data we do permanent damage to our scholarship, and to the scholarship of others.”3
He is right, of course, I know he’s right. He is also right that bad guesses get out there and get used even when they are explicitly qualified as such.4 So I must not, I must not attempt to correct the above error by breaking the data down, down to the level of households per villa (which would be 12·2 NO STOP IT), and then multiplying up by the number of villae in Osona. I should not do that not least because we don’t know with any certainty how many villae there were in Osona around the year 913, which is when this data would be comparable, probably not even in total for the tenth century which would add many more than there then were and would fail in any way to counter for the factor of population change over that century; I should not do that because, again, villae in the Vall de Sant Joan were probably over-many and over-stuffed compared to other areas and though those two errors might tend in opposite directions, we cannot know that they would cancel each other out; I should not do it because any operation involving multiplying up a small number to obtain a large one necessarily multiplies the error in that number just-as-many-fold; and I should not do it for many other good solid reasons of mathematical rigour. And in fact I will not. But it is sorely tempting, just because it’s hard to rid myself of the idea that if I could allow for enough factors, this would actually be a better basis for early medieval population figures than we currently have anywhere else.5 But every one of those corrections would be another piece of fiction, an error to be multiplied up. Ted again has the correct admonitions:
“When we enter on these kinds of calculation, we can be confident of two things. First, the answer will be wrong. Whatever it is, it will be wrong, since it cannot be right—once you are guessing, the number of possible permutations is gigantic. Worse, where the errors lies, and how serious they are, cannot be determined… Secondly, we can be confident of something else: when we publish this sort of thing, no matter that it be all set about with caveats and qualifications, the very fact that we thought it worth publishing will give it credibility.”6
And that is of course exactly the pain of it; there are figures that are thought credible abroad already that I feel must be wrong, because the person who put them together on the evidence we don’t have made his own set of assumptions about how the lack of evidence should be countered, and now I prefer my assumptions to his and would like to put into circulation alternative figures that are no more verifiable but feel more likely to me. But this will not make things better. Ted can have the last word, albeit he gives it to someone else:
“We should take to heart the dictum of a character in Umberto Eco’s novel, Foucault’s Pendulum, who explains, ‘For every complex problem there is a simple solution; and it is wrong.'”7
1. The reason we assume that the document, which is a vast parchment recording the names of people who swore that Abbess Emma of Sant Joan de Ripoll had been given the valley to settle by her father Count guifré after he expelled the Saracens from it, records households is because about half of its signatories are female, and mostly appear with a male partner. This looks like an attempt to implicate all the conjugal pairs of the valley in what was in fact a political fiction (see Jonathan Jarrett, “Power over Past and Future: Abbess Emma and the nunnery of Sant Joan de les Abadesses” in Early Medieval Europe Vol. 12 (Oxford 2005 for 2003), pp. 229-258, DOI: 10.1111/j.0963-9462.2004.00128.x), but since there are others who aren’t in pairs, it must also be more than that. Hence, households seems likely. The argument is made most thoroughly in Gaspar Feliu i Montfort, “Sant Joan de les Abadesses: algunes precisions sobre l’acta judicial del 913 i el poblament de la vall” in S. Claramunt and M. T. Ferrer i Mallol (edd.), Homenatge a la memòria del Prof. Dr. Emilio Sáez: aplecs d’estudis dels seus deixebles i collaboradors (Barcelona 1989), pp. 421-434. The count of these households I just redid from a spreadsheet I constructed when writing the thesis that lies behind Jonathan Jarrett, Rulers and Ruled in Tenth-Century Catalonia: pathways of power (Woodbridge 2010), where you can find more detail at pp. 35-51. The area I estimate from the map in Jordi Bolòs & Victor Hurtado, Atles del Comtat d’Osona (798-993) (Barcelona 2001), pp. 94-95 at p. 94. Thus my doubtless inaccurate estimation is already one basic source of error!
2. This is the basic story of Jarrett, Rulers and Ruled, as above and also pp. 57-64.
3. Theodore V. Buttrey, “Calculating Ancient Coin Production: facts and fantasies”, The President’s Address in Numismatic Chronicle Vol. 153 (London 1993), pp. 335-351 at p. 351.
4. My best example is another numismatic one, an article by Warren Esty, “Estimation of the size of a coinage: a survey and comparison of methods” in Numismatic Chronicle Vol. 146 (London 1986), pp. 185–215, which pitted a range of statistical techniques then in use to reason up to ancient currency sizes from current surviving evidence against each other by means of a randomly-generated virtual hoard, and concluded that all were more or less rubbish but a combination of two the least rubbish way to do this, the result of which has of course been that his least-worst method is now the standard among those who do such things…
5. I look here with especially narrowed eyes at Georges Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy: warriors and peasants from the seventh to the twelfth century, transl. Howard B. Clarke (London 1974), pp. 11-13, which does exactly the trick Ted decries (Buttrey, “Calculating ancient coin production”, pp. 349-350) of surrounding the data with all kinds of cavils and conditions and then rhetorically building on it just the same.
6. Buttrey, “Calculating ancient coin production”, pp. 349-350.
7. Ibid. p. 339.
A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe