Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

380 13. specialized production and exchange
expanding and prosperous rural population in certain regions (particularly
in the east) shows that this did not happen universally; but it is possible that
heavy taxation was a real problem in poorer parts of the emire. 58
Even if rates of taxation were perhaps not often so harsh as to ruin local
economies, the decline of tax, which seems to have happened in many
regions of the west during the fifth and sixth century, should have
benefited all those areas that had been net-contributors to the Roman
state’s finances, just as it damaged those areas that had been netbeneficiaries.
59 However, strangely enough, in no case that I know of can
the ending of taxation in a particular region be linked to any evident rise in
that region’s prosperity. The establishment of a Vandal kingdom in Africa
in the early fifth century, for instance, must have meant that no taxes in gold
and kind now went overseas to Rome, to Ravenna and to the armies north
of the Alps, and that all the former tax revenue of the region was now being
consumed locally. Yet, despite some evidence that goods once sent to
Rome in tax were now sold elsewhere, the ‘Vandal boom’ that should have
followed is apparent neither in the well-dated excavations at Carthage nor
in the more impressionistic evidence from the interior. 60
Similarly, the slow decline of taxation in Gaul through the sixth and
seventh century is exceptionally well documented in Gregory of Tours’
Histories and in hagiographical material. 61 In this case, the beneficiaries
should have been the peasantry and the local towns, who previously had to
forward their taxes to the various Merovingian kings. But, again, there is no
trace in the evidence that towns like Tours and Poitiers boomed in the late
sixth and seventh century as a result of the exemptions they had obtained,
nor that this period was a golden age for the peasantry of Gaul. One suggested
answer to this problem is that the new wealth of the untaxed regions
was real, but is invisible to us, because it was consumed in ways that do not
show up archaeologically: by peasants eating better, and by aristocrats displaying
their wealth through perishable goods, such as clothing, and
through items, like jewellery, which have not survived because they were
later melted down. 62
As argued above in discussing prosperity, that peasant diet improved is
perfectly possible, though not at present demonstrable. However, I think it
is very unlikely that the sixth- and seventh-century aristocracy had more
perishable luxuries than their Roman predecessors, if only because we
know that the Roman aristocracy revelled in every available luxury item
58 Rates of taxation: Jones, LRE 819–21; Wickham (1984) 11–12; Agnellus, Lib. Pont. Eccl. Rav.cap.
111 (seventh-century Sicilian estates). Impact of taxation: Jones, LRE 819–23.
59 Durliat (1990b) argues for continuing taxation and a continuing paid army in the early medieval
west; but see Wickham (1993) for what I believe to be a convincing demolition of this thesis.
60 Shift in direction of African exports: Reynolds (1995) 112–16; Fentress and Perkins (1988) 213.
61 Lot (1928); Goffart (1982). 62 Wickham (1988) 110 and 121–4.
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