Connectivity, autarky, plague and borders: thoughts on a lost round table

As the prospect of a normal academic year vanishes far behind us, the fact that our team is not in fact going to be standing in front of a room of people in two weeks to explain what we think we've found out about frontiers in the last few years is really quite a relief. Quite apart from, y'know, the risk of catching our deaths, I wouldn't have time to prepare, and I'm sure my colleagues are in similar-looking but isolated and locked-down boats! But it has prompted me to reflect a bit on our current situation, as every house's threshold becomes a tiny frontier over which we hope we can prevent crossing by the 'novel coronavirus'. If, as I suppose I am, one's in the habit of seeing everything as describable through the language of frontiers, how do we look at this now?

Well, in the first place, I have to confess, I didn't really want to do this year's International Medieval Congress anyway. While I have every faith in this project, the fact of the matter is that the fates have so far prevented us from making the kind of splash with our publications that we want to, and speaking for myself at least, after the last year of dispute and tribulation I didn't have anything ready to say even before the advent of Covid-19. I could see that coming already back in September, when we submitted the session. It was really only the fact that the theme was Borders this year which made me feel that we really had to be there. So while I never would have asked for this situation, that is one tiny silver lining in it for us. Of course, now everyone's in that set of distinct boats as well...¹

All the same, you can take the medievalist out of the discourse but you can't, apparently, take the discourse out of the medievalist, by which I mainly mean, I am naturally thinking about the current situation in the light of the things I know as medievalist. I'm definitely not the first or only person to be seeing medieval parallels here; scholars of the Black Death are working quite hard not to be pleased at the sudden relevance of their global pandemic to this one, not least because the scholarship on the Black Death has been getting to some really interesting places about variation between symptoms and causative organisms and so on which may turn out to be very relevant to what we're now facing and how differently it seems to be taking people.² But there the relevance is very obvious. What have frontiers to do with something like a disease which plainly has no regard for them?

UK Border Control passport check queues in 2019, from Georgina Wright, 'British citizens in Europe after Brexit', UK Institute for Government, 1 March 2019 [accessed 22 June 2020]

Well, hold on there. Disease doesn't travel by itself, on the breeze. Well, all right, some do, but not very far and so far it doesn't seem like this is one of them. No, disease is carried by its carriers, be they rats as in the fourteenth century (or more likely marmots, we are told, in fact) or be they international travellers as now. And this bears directly on one of Rethinking the Medieval Frontier's agenda questions: can your frontier be closed? For the pre-modern state, it has often been doubted that any political organisation could really keep people from crossing its borders completely, or that they would even want to, though some certainly seem to have tried.³ But apparently, neither can we: even when the threat is literally death for thousands, we're going to keep letting at least some people come in and go out, despite the fact that, like coins having left the mint, we have little or no control over what happens next. I'm not saying that we should be closing our borders and watching all new arrivals' movements – I'm saying that if we wanted to, we could not. Our interconnection is now too complete to be cut off like that; it would cause disaster in predictable ways, whereas the disease isn't predictable as yet. So no-one's going to try except, apparently, New Zealand, which can do it because of two factors: one, it is an island nation and so can actually watch for and stop incomers in a way that landward states just can't (and we already know that islands are a special sort of frontier); and two, it is a major exporter of food, and can readily manage to feed its population on its own production. I'm sure there are some things New Zealanders are already missing, and the loss of revenue will presumably be considerable; but they can at least do it. These are not circumstances that apply in many other places, and even New Zealand probably wouldn't be able to manage it without modern surveillance technology to watch for incoming traffic.

What we are talking about there, then, is that unfashionable word, autarky, or self-sufficiency. It used to be assumed that this was the basic state of human economies, and that trade only arose with a certain level of social hierarchy (and the economic surplus which that requires).⁴ Equally, it's nowadays easy enough to find the opposite view, that human societies have always been involved in exchange with neighbours, with varying degrees of willingness, and statements that trade (and therefore connection between communities) is somehow 'natural' are not too hard to find.⁵ I have sympathies with both views, feeling along with some of the foundational works on which I rely that the basic task of human economies is to resource human existence and that therefore subsistence must come first and nothing necessarily need follow, as well as that not all evidence for trade really does evidence that particular form of exchange, but also that when you have networks of exchange for things like obsidian tracking hundreds of miles across the medieval-contemporary Americas, one has to admit that people in quite flat social hierarchies will still sometimes put a lot of time and effort into getting stuff without which they could have, if they had wanted, managed.⁶ But whether it's 'natural', 'primitive', 'regressive' or just plain possible or not, it is clear that we are now mostly a long way from it; New Zealand has a unique situation that enables it, for a while, but the rest of us are stuck with the reality that whatever is out there will be crossing our borders because we daren't really close them.

We've wandered there away from the Middle Ages as they're commonly counted, so let's wander deliberately back. Obviously, given the way the Black Death spread in the fourteenth century, the polities of the era mostly either didn't want to or were not able to close their borders either, and that tells us something about their world and the possibility of autarky in it. Almost everywhere in Europe was affected by the plague in that era, but still, certain places were not; we have to assume that these were islets of disconnectivity in which autarky was not just possible but normal, and they just never got their plague carriers (and therefore suffered worse in subsequent waves that did get through).⁷ But there weren't many of them (and indeed, from the look of Boccaccio's Decameron, they were quite endangered by people from outside trying to escape to them for safety). This tells us of frontier spaces that were busy and criss-crossed with traffic even when that was dangerous. The fourteenth-century world, it seems, was all up close to each other, and so they caught diseases from each other. But was it ever thus?

Here it's instructive to remember that, although because of volumes of source survival we know much more about it, the fourteenth century was not Europe's first brush with yersinia pestis. The major plague event of the sixth to seventh century is now known, from biological evidence, to have been that vexing micro-organism's fault as well. This has caused some confusion, because the very limited records of what is often called the 'Justinianic Plague' after Emperor Justinian I, whose campaigns to recover Italy for the Roman Empire it messed right up, show relatively few elements in common with the fourteenth-century pandemic. Some of the dissimilarities are at symptom level; but there's also an epidemiological disjuncture, because as far as we can tell the Justinianic Plague spread far less far and fast. While it affected Italy and Byzantium pretty badly, not least doubtless because of the busy traffic between the two set up by the war, there are area whose whole source profiles, scanty though they be, just never mention it; and in Britain, while the 550s is a terrible time to hope for detailed records, Ireland at least could offer some and doesn't mention it. In fact, the plague didn't recordedly turn up in England or Ireland until more than a hundred years later, in the 660s, when it carried off kings and churchmen in considerable numbers, as Saint Bede the Venerable, who lived through it, tells us. But by then the Mediterranean was done with it and there's no mention of it down there at all.⁸

In the same year of our Lord 664, there happened an eclipse of the sun, on the third day of May, about the tenth hour of the day. In the same year, a sudden pestilence depopulated first the southern parts of Britain, and afterwards attacking the province of the Northumbrians, ravaged the country far and near, and destroyed a great multitude of men. By this plague the aforesaid priest of the Lord, Tuda, was carried off, and was honourably buried in the monastery called Pægnalæch. Moreover, this plague prevailed no less disastrously in the island of Ireland. (Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, III.27)

So what does that difference mean? Can it just be that a disease which would later kill a third to half of its target populations just went unnoticed in many places in the sixth to seventh centuries? That the collapse of the political and ecclesiastical systems means we don't have sufficient records for it to have made it to mention? (Let's remember that the fourteenth-century chronicler of chivalry, Froissart, who also lived through the plague, gives it three paragraphs which imply it was all over and done with in a few years, just before spending approximately fifteen times as much space on an inconclusive sea battle.⁹ It just wasn't on topic for him!) Well, maybe, but maybe we should start, as Hubert Mordek long ago cautioned his readership, with the assumption that the sources know what they're talking about.¹⁰ Even if it is an argument from silence, the silence needs an explanation, and the simplest one seems to be that plague did not travel as easily in the sixth century as it would in the fourteenth century.

Here come the frontiers again, therefore. If we see the current pandemic as a sign that our frontiers can't be closed, and the Black Death as a sign that they couldn't be then either, does this mean that in the sixth century they could be? That seems like the wrong deduction to make; it has the same problem as the opposite case, that one would expect it to be mentioned somewhere, or at least that there was plague. The safer alternative would therefore seem to be that the frontiers simply weren't being crossed as much, that they were, while geographically still in more or less the same places, much bigger and emptier in the sixth century than the fourteenth. This makes a kind of sense: populations were lower, a previously long-distance and international-scale economy under the Roman Empire had fragmented and simplified, material cultures had ceased to rely on imports and gone, yes, autarkic in a lot of places.¹¹ By the fourteenth century, however one explains the change, that was no longer true. And now, our frontiers are so closely knit that they interweave, with 'airside' enclaves and embassies not included in the country where they're geographically located and where one can pass into or out of a country by walking through a door or across a line which is drawn deep within it. We were never going to get away without these results once a pathogen found a way to travel with us; but in the sixth and seventh centuries, apparently, some places could. And that makes their frontiers, their spaces between, a lesson of a kind for us, even if it's not one we're equipped to take right away. Connectivity may or may not be natural; autarky may or may not be either. But where one meets the other, the study of frontiers has something to tell us.

This has gone on for longer than I meant; sorry. I'm not getting out much at the moment! But I hope, all the same, that it shows why we keep on with this project, and I also hope that all our readers and indeed we ourselves all come through this safely to talk about it more in future! Stay safe...

1. I mean, we're in some bad boats, though they don't need discussing in this post. But if you compare the various perspectives in Michael Brown, ‘Without Stronger Academic Governance, Covid-19 Will Concentrate the Corporate Control of Academic Publishing’, Impact of Social Sciences, 17 April 2020 <https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2020/04/17/without-stronger-academic-governance-covid-19-will-concentrate-the-corporate-control-of-academic-publishing/>; Timothy Devinney and Graham Dowling, ‘Is This the Crisis Higher Education Needs to Have?’, Times Higher Education (THE), 14 May 2020 <https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/crisis-higher-education-needs-have>; Giuliana Viglione, ‘Are Women Publishing Less during the Pandemic? Here’s What the Data Say’, Nature, 581.7809 (2020), 365–66 <https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01294-9>, what I see is men urging action but not in any agreed direction and women shouldering the burden, and speaking personally, in that framework at least the crisis has regendered me.

2. A good reset benchmark in that scholarship would be The Medieval Globe, Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death, 1.1–2, ed. by Monica Green (2014) <https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/41704>, but since then there has been a fight on to pinpoint the origins of the disease using genetic data, and we could now add, among much more, Hans Ditrich, ‘The Transmission of the Black Death to Western Europe: A Critical Review of the Existing Evidence’, Mediterranean Historical Review, 32.1 (2017), 25–39 <https://doi.org/10.1080/09518967.2017.1314920>; Monica H. Green, ‘Putting Africa on the Black Death map: Narratives from genetics and history’, ed. by Gérard Chouin, Afriques : Débats, méthodes et terrains d’histoire, Sillages de la peste noire en Afrique subsaharienne : une exploration critique du silence, 9 (2018) <https://doi.org/10.4000/afriques.2084>; and Ann Gibbons, ‘Ancient DNA Traces the Black Death to Russia’s Volga Region’, Science, 2 October 2019 <https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaz7019>. The most immediate grab for relevance I've seen, however, I must admit, has not come from the Black Death people but from a modernist, Matthew Reisz, in ‘Plague Historian: “There Are Precedents for What Seems Unprecedented”’, Times Higher Education (THE), 19 April 2020 <https://www.timeshighereducation.com/people/plague-historian-there-are-precedents-what-seems-unprecedented>.

3. Rebecca Darley, 'Trading with the Enemy across the Byzantine-Sasanian Frontier', unpublished conference paper, International Medieval Congress (session: Rethinking the Medieval Frontier II: Defining and Dissolving Borders in the Late Roman and Byzantine Empires), University of Leeds, 7 July 2016, which I do hope some day to be able to put before you; until then there's Zev Rubin, ‘Byzantium and Southern Arabia: The Policy of Anastasius’, in The Eastern Frontier of the Roman Empire, ed. by D. H. French and C. S. Lightfoot, British Archaeological Reports (International Series), 553 (ii) (presented at the Colloquium held at Ankara in September 1988, Oxford: B.A.R., 1989), ii, 383–420 <https://www.academia.edu/50768079/The_Eastern_frontier_of_the_Roman_empire>, and a number of works which repeat the same information; but Rebecca is set to overturn all these.

4. This is such an old debate that my default cite for it is Luis G. de Valdeavellano, ‘Economía natural y monetaria en León y Castilla durante los siglos IX, X y XI (notas para la historia económica de España en la Edad Media)’, Moneda y crédito, 10 (1944), 28–46, for me about as far as one can go in that framework.

5. For example, Anthea Harris, ‘Britain and China at Opposite Ends of the World? Archaeological Methodology and Long-Distance Contacts in the Sixth Century’, ed. by Anthea Harris, Reading Medieval Studies, Incipient Globalization? Long-Distance Contacts in the Sixth Century, 32 (2007), 91–104 <https://www.reading.ac.uk/web/files/GCMS/RMS-2006-09_A._Harris,_Britain_and_China_at_opposite_ends_of_the_world.pdf>.

6. The foundational works I mean would here be Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean 400 - 800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), or for short Wickham, ‘Rethinking the Structure of the Early Medieval Economy’, in The Long Morning of Medieval Europe: New Directions in Early Medieval Studies, ed. by Jennifer R. Davis and Michael McCormick (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 19–31; Philip Grierson, ‘Commerce in the Dark Ages: A Critique of the Evidence’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5, 9 (1959), 123–40 <https://doi.org/10.1017/S0080440100017576>. On the obsidian trade networks, see Traci Ardren and Justin Lowry, ‘The Travels of Maya Merchants in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries AD: Investigations at Xuenkal and the Greater Cupul Province, Yucatan, Mexico’, World Archaeology, 43.3 (2011), 428–43 <https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2011.607613>.

7. See Bruce M. S. Campbell, ‘Physical Shocks, Biological Hazards, and Human Impacts: The Crisis of the Fourteenth Century Revisited’, in Le interazioni fra economia e ambiente biologico nell’Europa preindustriale, secc. XIII-XVIII. Economic and Biological Interactions in Pre-Industrial Europe from the 13th to the 17th Centuries, ed. by Simonetta Cavaciocchi (presented at the Quaranteunesmia Settimana di Studi, Instituto Internazionale di Storia Economica ‘F. Datini’, Prato, 26-30 Aprile 2009, Firenze: Firenze University Press, 2010), pp. 13–32 <https://digital.casalini.it/9788884535962> [accessed 15 November 2016].

8. A few years ago there was some fairly obvious standard reading on the plague of the sixth and seventh centuries, but recent work has thrown almost all of it into question, so that one can now really only recommend recent, combative, articles. They would be: Peter Sarris, ‘The Justinianic Plague: Origins and Effects’, Continuity and Change, 17.2 (2002), 169–82 <https://doi.org/10.1017/S0268416002004137>; Mischa Meier, ‘The “Justinianic Plague”: The Economic Consequences of the Pandemic in the Eastern Roman Empire and Its Cultural and Religious Effects’, trans. by Steve Robbie, Early Medieval Europe, 24.3 (2016), 267–92 <https://doi.org/10.1111/emed.12152>; and then Lee Mordechai and Merle Eisenberg, ‘Rejecting Catastrophe: The Case of the Justinianic Plague’, Past & Present, 244, 2019, 3–50 <https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz009>; Merle Eisenberg and Lee Mordechai, ‘The Justinianic Plague: An Interdisciplinary Review’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 43.2 (2019), 156–80 <https://doi.org/10.1017/byz.2019.10>; Lee Mordechai, Merle Eisenberg, Timothy P. Newfield, Adam Izdebski, Janet E. Kay and Hendrink Poinar, ‘The Justinianic Plague: An Inconsequential Pandemic?’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116.51 (2019), 25546–54 <https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1903797116>. We are at least now clear it was in fact the same organism behind it: see on that Marcel Keller, Myria A. Spyrou, Christiana L. Scheib, Gunnar U. Neumann, Andreas Kröpelin, Brigitte Haas-Gebhard, Bernd Päffgen, Jochen Haberstroh, Albert Ribera i Lacomba, Claude Raynaud, Craig Cessford, Raphael Durand, Peter Stadler, Kathrin Nägele, Jessica S. Bates, Bernd Trautmann, Sarah A. Inskip, Joris Peters, John E. Robb, Toomas Kivisild, Dominique Castex, Michael McCormick, Kirsten I. Bos, Michaela Harbeck, Alexander Herbig and Johannes Krause, ‘Ancient Yersinia Pestis Genomes from across Western Europe Reveal Early Diversification during the First Pandemic (541–750)’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116.25 (2019), 12363–72 <https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1820447116>. On the later effects in England, meanwhile, there is really only J. R. Maddicott, ‘Plague in Seventh-Century England’, Past & Present, 156, 1997, 7–54 <https://doi.org/10.1093/past/156.1.7>, which given all this bioarchaeology must be due an update by now.

9. Froissart, Chronicles, trans. by Geoffrey Brereton, Penguin Classics, L200 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 111 as opposed to pp. 113-119.

10. Hubert Mordek, 'Karolingische Kapitularien' in Überlieferung und Geltung der normativer Texte des frühen und hohen Mittelalters, ed. by Hubert Mordek (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbeke Verlag, 1986), pp. 25-50 (p. 30): '[M]an muss der Überlieferung immer die Chance geben, recht zu behalten', or in English, roughly, 'One must always allow the sources the possibility of being right.'

11. A set of perspectives coming partly out of Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), to which Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages, is a useful counterweight (and it does weigh a bit!); one could also compare Tamara Lewit, ‘“Vanishing Villas”: What Happened to Élite Rural Habitation in the West in the 5th-6th c?’, Journal of Roman Archaeology, 16 (2003), 260–74 <https://doi.org/10.1017/S104775940001309X>. A number of other scholars would of course insist that nothing of any significant kind like this really happened: for them see Walter Goffart, ‘Rome’s Final Conquest: The Barbarians’, History Compass, 6.3 (2008), 855–83 <https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00523.x>, and in more detail, Jean Durliat, Les finances publiques de Diocletien aux Carolingiens (284-889) (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke, 1990). That I don't credit that point of view is not least down to Chris Wickham's reply to the latter, ‘La chute de Rome n’aura pas lieu’, trans. by André Joris, Le Moyen Âge: revue d’histoire et philologie, 99.1 (1993), 107–26 <https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5619795d/f110.image>, printed in English as ‘The Fall of Rome Will Not Take Place’, in Debating the Middle Ages: Issues and Readings, ed. by Lester K. Little and Barbara H. Rosenwein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 45–57.