Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of maps
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of charts
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Commerce, communications, and the origins of the European economy
- PART I THE END OF THE WORLD
- PART II PEOPLE ON THE MOVE
- PART III THINGS THAT TRAVELED
- 10 Hagiographical horizons: collecting exotic relics in early medieval France
- 11 “Virtual” coins and communications
- 12 Real money: Arab and Byzantine coins around Carolingian Europe
- Things that traveled
- PART IV THE PATTERNS OF CHANGE
- PART V COMMERCE
- Appendices
- Bibliography
- Index
Things that traveled
from PART III - THINGS THAT TRAVELED
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2015
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of maps
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of charts
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Commerce, communications, and the origins of the European economy
- PART I THE END OF THE WORLD
- PART II PEOPLE ON THE MOVE
- PART III THINGS THAT TRAVELED
- 10 Hagiographical horizons: collecting exotic relics in early medieval France
- 11 “Virtual” coins and communications
- 12 Real money: Arab and Byzantine coins around Carolingian Europe
- Things that traveled
- PART IV THE PATTERNS OF CHANGE
- PART V COMMERCE
- Appendices
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Some 200 foreign relics, over 100 documentary mentions of mancosi, more than 500 Arab coins and 250 Byzantine coins have expanded, dramatically, the evidence which bears on the great question of Mediterranean communications at the origins of Europe. In their circumstances of preservation and origin, they are mostly independent of the 669 travelers whom we got to know in Part II. Close scrutiny of five different sets of things has yielded five patterns over time and space. They overlap in a number of important ways, and we can no longer entertain the idea that those convergences result from some strange coincidence of source preservation. They stem from the medieval reality to which each series of witnesses independently testifies.
The oldest and largest set of relics from Sens allowed us to glimpse the currents that conveyed holy objects, or at least knowledge of shrines, across the Mediterranean toward north central France. In the Merovingian age, these currents linked to Gaul ports of Asia Minor, Africa, and the Levant. In the eighth century, most Byzantine ports vanish: only Constantinople and Ephesus remain. At Chelles, eighth-century communications with Byzantium look similar, though with special accents that may reflect special links between the Frankish and Byzantine dynasties. But the most striking element is certainly the role of the Caliphate in suggesting or supplying cults to both Sens and Chelles in an era when historians reckon communications with the Middle East to have been at rock bottom.
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- Information
- Origins of the European EconomyCommunications and Commerce AD 300–900, pp. 385 - 388Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002