Article of the Month - August 2021
 “The Adriatic Sea 500–1100: A Corrupted Alterity?”
(Richard Hodges: Archaeology, University of East Anglia)

Richard Hodges, "The Adriatic Sea 500–1100: A Corrupted Alterity?"
in Byzantium, Venice and the Medieval Adriatic: Spheres of Maritime Power and Influence, c. 700–1453,
Magdalena Skoblar ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. 15–44.

Nomination Statement:
Not merely an archaeologist's site report, this book chapter provides an overview of the author's many years excavating at Butrint (Albania). It begins by evoking Pirenne, but goes on to interrogate Braudel and Horden and Purcell. It clearly explains what is at stake in the author's findings for Mediterranean Studies writ large, especially in terms of understanding the Late Antique-Early Medieval period in terms of the longue durée. Hodges' work at Butrint brings into view regional connectivity during the centuries in question that changes our understanding of the rise of Venice, the role and meaning of Muslim advances in the ninth century, and the efficacy of administrative control from Constantinople as a response. Hodges rightly insists that study of the medieval Mediterranean must take into account the large corpus of archaeological knowledge that has been collected over recent decades, thereby throwing down a gauntlet for Horden and Purcell's promised second volume of The Corrupting Sea.

Summary & Author’s Comment:
This essay reviews ‘the Pirenne period’ of the lower Adriatic Sea between the sixth and eleventh centuries, essentially arguing that the projected volume two of Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s ambitious and challenging homage to Braudel, The Corrupting Sea, needs to look carefully at the local conditions through the lens of recent (that is, post-2000) archaeological research in order to grasp the trends of the period. 

This archaeology reveals two patterns: first, that the impact of the Pax Romanais an aberration in a long Adriatic Sea history driven by economic interactions between points at the maritime terminuses of riverine corridors; and second, that the collapse of the Roman Mediterranean in the seventh century was far more profound than most historians have acknowledged and raises questions about the revival of economic interactions by stages between the eighth and eleventh centuries. 

The archaeological example of Butrint shows how Adriatic Sea interactions thrived in late antiquity, to collapse in the later 6th and early seventh centuries. Eighth century Butrint amounted to little more than two or three towers in the western defenses, while its ninth- to tenth-century iteration amounted to a central-place outside the town in the old Roman urban suburb. Only by stages from the later tenth century was a walled town revived. This archaeological evidence shows that, during the period 500–1100, only for the first half of the sixth century and again in the eleventh century was it a unified region with a commercial reach to much of the Mediterranean and, indirectly, to the northern and Asian worlds. 

 Adriatic Sea history after AD 500, it is concluded, has been peddled as one particular story, anchored inevitably around the great city of Venice and its imperial genesis. On this platter it is either corrupted, or unified and global! On the other hand, the measurements of this sea’s prehistoric and Roman antecedence were episodic but ultimately in the Augustan age aspired to form part of a larger unified Mediterranean community, becoming the cockpit of monotheistic religions. After the collapse of the Roman Mediterranean, much as Pirenne believed, there was a reversion to early prehistoric networks and ultimately, by the eleventh century, aspirations of Iron Age proportion to be unified. In this incipient High Medieval iteration, though, it is the impact of the Indian Ocean, the awakening of the north African littoral and the rise of north-west Europe that triggered Mediterranean Christian leaders to invest. These observations may have puzzled Braudel as much as they would have thrilled him, to judge from his reaction to hearing Pirenne lecture in 1931.

Keywords: Butrint — Adriatic Sea — Mediterranean Sea historiography — late antiquity — Mid-Byzantine — trade — urbanism — Sea, corrupting

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