The Origins of the Manorial Economy: New Insights from Late Antiquity

Introduction: Aristocrats, Peasants and the Transformation of Rural Society, c.400–800

“…Rather, there are signs of a marked continuity in patterns of land use. Moreover, as expounded elsewhere, there are arguably late Roman antecedents for the bipartite division of land between a directly worked estate demesne on the one hand and peasant‐held plots on the other, supposedly characteristic of the late Merovingian and early Carolingian villa (Sarris 2004). Clearly, there is still room for debate – although positions are drawing closer.…”

Arboriculture and Viticulture as Investment in the Early Islamic Levant: An Archaeobotanical and Historical Investigation of the Site of Ashkelon

“…Economic and Land-use History of the Byzantine and Early Islamic Levant Economic and land-use histories of the Byzantine through the Early Islamic periods in the eastern Mediterranean have been brought to light through historical and archaeological analyses (Hodges and Whitehouse 1983;Sarris 2004;Decker 2009;Taxel 2018). The Byzantine economy was built on regional and long-distance trade of staple commodities and luxury items across the Mediterranean (Safrai 1994;Decker 2009).…”

“…Current understandings of regional patterns of land tenure posit that land was divided into large manorial estates in the Byzantine period, concentrating the majority of the cultivable land in the hands of an elite minority of the population (Sarris 2004;Wickham 2005;Decker 2009). Large estates owned by wealthy families in the Byzantine period were maintained under a bipartite system, worked by a mix of servile laborers and tenant farmers who rented the land and paid part of their yield to the owners (Sarris 2004).…”

“…Current understandings of regional patterns of land tenure posit that land was divided into large manorial estates in the Byzantine period, concentrating the majority of the cultivable land in the hands of an elite minority of the population (Sarris 2004;Wickham 2005;Decker 2009). Large estates owned by wealthy families in the Byzantine period were maintained under a bipartite system, worked by a mix of servile laborers and tenant farmers who rented the land and paid part of their yield to the owners (Sarris 2004). There is historical and archaeological evidence for this pattern of urban-dwelling elite owning large estates in the country, specifically in the Byzantine diocese of Oriens, 94 Forste whose boundaries roughly align with those of Early Islamic Bilad al-Sham, also referred to as Syria-Palestine, making it the land-tenure pattern inherited by the Muslim administration (Decker 2009).…”

Resilience and livestock adaptations to demographic growth and technological change: A diachronic perspective from the Late Bronze Age to Late Antiquity in NE Iberia

“…In this area, the culturally and politically atomized landscape attested during the Iron Age was transformed following the Roman conquest, and further modified through its integration within the Roman Empire, which grouped many communities under a previously unseen level of large-scale economic connectivity [ 15 – 20 ]. This first ’globalized system’ on a Mediterranean scale experienced a major crisis during the 6 th c. AD, leading to its deconstruction and a re-localization of production, which retracted and became more autarchical during Late Antiquity [ 17 , 21 – 23 ].…”