How the Mediterranean Created Wealth

Gone Medieval

History Hit

History

4.6 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 23 May 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What does archaeology tell us about how regions in the Mediterranean built their wealth between the 10th and 12th centuries? How did economies grow in Egypt, Tunisia, Sicily, the Byzantine empire, Islamic Spain and Portugal, and north-central Italy? And what were their trading relationships with each other?

In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis talks to Professor Chris Wickham, author of The Donkey and the Boat: Reinterpreting the Mediterranean Economy, 950-1180. Based on a completely new look at the sources, his research is forcing a rethink about how economies worked in the medieval Mediterranean.

This episode was produced by Rob Weinberg.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit.
0:02.6	To listen to all of our episodes, add free and watch hundreds of history documentaries
0:06.8	download the History Hit app or go to historyhit.com forward slash subscribe.
0:12.4	And if you're an Apple listener, you can subscribe for new, add free episodes within the app.
0:23.0	Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval, I'm Matt Lewis.
0:25.8	The commercial revolution is a term that crops up sometimes when talking about the
0:29.8	medieval period. It's been viewed as setting the field for global trade networks and
0:34.8	revolutionising medieval economies. A new book that's fabulously entitled The Donkey
0:40.0	and the Boat seeks to reassess this long-held understanding.
0:44.1	The author is Chris Wickham, who is Professor Emeritus of Medieval History at Oxford and Birmingham
0:48.8	Universities, and I'm delighted Chris is joining us to explore medieval trade and trading
0:53.2	routes a bit further. Welcome to Gone Medieval, Chris.
0:55.7	It's a pleasure to be here.
0:57.3	Thank you very much for joining us.
0:59.1	I guess to start off with, what was the commercial revolution?
1:03.2	Whereabouts in the medieval period are we and what are we talking about?
1:07.6	Essentially, it's a period in which trade and exchange, production, urbanism all develop
1:13.4	really quite substantially. And you can identify it in Mediterranean, you can identify it in
1:19.4	much of Western Europe.
1:21.2	Starting in the middle of the 10th century, but at different speeds in different places,
1:25.8	in Italy it really takes off around about 1200 in Flanders, what's now Belgium a century
1:31.0	earlier perhaps, and then it gradually extends across the whole of Europe and the Mediterranean
	...

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