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Four Years of Corruption 351
trying to detect is scarcely revealed by what little of this research
illuminates the dark seventh-to eighth-century core of
the Pirenne period. 4 Finally, the supposed tendency of pirates
of the period to raid inland riverine settlements, rather than to
behave as Barbary corsairs on the open sea, is taken as undermining
our use of piracy as an index of connectivity (wrongly, as
more recent and more detailed and recent research has shown). 5
And that is all, even in the longest review by an early medievalist.
Our interpretation of the evidence for continued Mediterranean
‘connectivity’ in the early Middle Ages is ignored
altogether by Richard Hodges, the reviewer from whom we
had expected some sharp dissent because we disagree with his
rightly influential refashioning of ‘the Pirenne thesis’. 6 Edward
Peters, a ‘high’ medievalist, does embrace the early Middle
Ages in his review, but he still does not have much space for it
because he reviews CS alongside Michael McCormick’s vast
and impressive Origins of the European Economy: Communications
and Commerce AD 300–900. It is a strange and irritating
coincidence that this important work should come out so soon
after CS that no debate could take place between McCormick
and ourselves about our assertion of ‘connectivity maintained’
across the seventh and early eighth centuries, an assertion that
has obvious repercussions for McCormick’s discerning the
‘early growth of the European economy’ 7 during the Carolingian
period rather than after it. Peters, however, does no more
than mention our section on the early medieval depression, the
‘Pirenne period’. This is presumably because—à la Pirenne—
for him the Mediterranean economy has to ‘hit bottom’ (p. 50)
in order for the northern European economy to come to life.
And we are interpreted as portraying the Pirenne period as
4
Squatriti 271 n. 22 does not offer a huge bibliography of what we missed.
Compare CS 567–9.
5
Squatriti 272. Compare M. McCormick, Origins of the European Economy:
Communications and Commerce AD 300–900 (Cambridge, 2001), 170,
199, 233, 264, 428–9, 519, 768. McCormick’s dossier of early medieval travellers
suggests that the dangers of pirates have been overestimated; but that
does not affect our argument that open-sea piracy, quite clearly attested in the
period, is some index of minimum levels of seafaring.
6
There is a brief but highly informed discussion in Fentress and Fentress
215–17.
7
We allude to G. Duby’s 1974 monograph of that title (in translation).