“Islands in the Stream”: Re-Assessing the Byzantine Insular Economy between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (ca. 550-c. 900)

This contribution focuses on the economic implications of numismatic evidence from some of the most important islands of the Byzantine eastern (Crete and Cyprus) and western (Sardinia, Sicily and partially the Balearics) Mediterranean from early seventh to early ninth century. Historians have used the evidence of coinage to create false perspectives of how Byzantine insular economy changed, being mainly interested in how large the supposedly rarefied currency circulating on these islands was as a measure of their declining wealth from the second half of the seventh century on. In this paper I will argue that the monetary indicator gives us enough evidence pointing to a certain degree of economic prosperity on the abovementioned islands during the period under scrutiny, as even the more distant ones (like Sardinia and the Balearics) continued to play an important role in the political, fiscal, administrative and religious structures of the Byzantine Empire. For instance, and as it has been recently shown for the Sicilian monetary circulation from the late seventh century onwards, the rarefaction of bronze emissions vis-à-vis metrological and ponderal adjustments could owe less to an economic maelstrom brought about by the Arab raids than to the revised fiscal needs of the state. A similar trend can be sketched for Cyprus, Crete, Sardinia (where the African mint was relocated after the fall of Carthage to the Arabs in 698) and the Balearics (where an exceptional continuity of late seventh to early ninth century Byzantine bronze currency has recently been documented); indeed, for the abovementioned islands, we can conclude that a less-monetized economy did not imply a point-blank collapse of the economic life or their role as a simple military and administrative bulwark at the frontier of the empire. With this in mind, this paper will also try to show how the analysis of coinage and monetary circulation chimes with other types of material evidence allowing us to point to a relatively higher welfare of the Byzantine insular world compared to the Anatolian plateau, the Aegean region and the Balkans.