introduction

with the demise of a political economy based around the Mediterranean, the early eighth century signalled a new beginning in the history of Europe. Henri Pirenne, writing in the early decades of the twentieth century, was the first historian to underline the significance of the break: but his monochrome picture of regression, and ‘an economy of no markets’, is no longer acceptable; nor is his explanation in terms of an external factor, the rise of Islam. Instead, the new economy can be credited with its own dynamic, and the collapse of a system driven by the Roman state seen not as putting an end to exchanges but diversifying them. The new economy had a dual base, in the agrarian wealth of the western European land mass from the Pyrenees to central Germany, and in an exchange system orientated towards the northern seas into which the great rivers of the land mass drained. The vast wealth on which Roman emperors had gorged was a thing of the past: eighth- and ninth-century kings had to make do with smaller slices of diminished cakes. Yet a revised, revived, version of the past seemed still within reach. The resources available to kings, in moveables as well as land, were increasing, and competition, inside and outside realms, produced a new momentum. The reorientation of the west brought into view societies around the northern periphery of the Roman empire which, though remote from its centre, had felt the impact of the empire’s existence: Scandinavians, Irish and Anglo-Saxons would all respond to the creation of a new concentration of power in the west.