"Italy, Cyprus and Artistic Exchange in the Medieval Mediterranean." Al-Masāq, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2
This contribution explores the economic roles of cities in the early medieval economy, through the presentation of a range of archaeological datasets that can all be linked to urban production and/or consumption. The individual classes of evidence each highlight aspects of economic exchange that, when combined, help to flesh out a general model of the systems of exchange at work in post-Roman Iberia. These systems revolved around cities whose individual experiences varied according to local circumstances and whose participation in the wider trade networks also depended heavily on local conditions. As a supplement to the written sources of this period, the archaeological materials surveyed here contribute to an emerging picture of elite and non-elite economic activity in the sixth and seventh centuries. This in turn shapes a more nuanced understanding of the role played by cities in the transition from late Roman to post-Roman economic and political circumstances.
This article presents and compares direct and indirect markers of economic and social strategies of peasant communities from two territories in central Portugal. Over the last fifteen years, several archaeological research projects have revealed new data on the settlements and economic strategies of peasant communities between the fifth and the eleventh centuries. These new data revealed much about the daily lives of such communities, the products consumed and their economic activities. Archaeological markers of peasant economic strategies can be approached through direct evidence: remains of productive structures, tools, produce, and material culture. Likewise, indirect markers, such as occupation patterns and settlement layout, help shed light on shifting priorities and alterations in land use. To adequately frame these peasant communities in relation to broader economic scales, it is also necessary to consider the possible relationships between rural settlements and contemporary administrative, political, and religious centres.
The article aims to examine the deceitful practices employed by traders in the eastern Mediterranean. It investigates three principal types of deception that Italian merchants in the Kingdom of Cilician Armenia and in Cyprus used in order to conceal prohibited products and their routes to Mamluk ports between 1260 and 1310. The papacy issued several decrees that prohibited Christian merchants from trading in various strategic items, such as timber, iron and slaves, in the harbours of Islamic states. However, despite these bans, Christian merchants continued trading in such items by devising methods to conceal this traffic. Current literature has so far focused on the items that were shipped across the eastern Mediterranean and their destinations; however, there is a gap in knowledge about who these merchants were and the methods they used to circumvent the prohibitions while shipping the goods. This research aims to fill this gap by answering questions about the conditions of the trade and the covert methods used for the transportation of prohibited goods to Mamluk ports.
