settlement inland. In Sardis the breakdown of traditional municipal life is shown by the building of a seventh-century road through the ruins of civic buildings.

The contraction of urban life was even more dramatic in the Balkans. Many cities disappeared completely during the Avar and Slav invasions, and among those surviving, settlement became confined to the fortified acropolis, as in Athens and Corinth. The evidence of finds of copper coinage points to a drastic decline in local commercial activity.

What is striking is not simply the physical decline but the complete loss of urban consciousness and the change of role. Cities lost their earlier importance as economic and residential centres, and assumed an almost exclusively military and administrative function. Significantly most showed little sign of recovery when a measure of prosperity and stability returned to the empire from the late ninth century.

Large-scale urban life was of course maintained in Constantinople, and to a lesser extent Thessalonica. Even in the capital, however, a drastic fall in population is suggested by the failure to repair the aqueduct of Valens after 626 and Constantine V's efforts to repopulate the city. By the tenth century Constantinople was again an impressive city with a population of several hundred thousand, but it remained an exceptional, parasitic metropolis. Its population catered almost exclusively to the needs of the court and administration for goods and services, and its trade and industry were rigorously controlled by imperial officials and forced to attend primarily to the needs of the state.

It is hardly surprising that an Arab geographer commented that there were only five proper cities in Anatolia in the ninth century. The contrast with the Arab world was very marked. Urban development forged ahead in the areas conquered by the Arabs, with large cities prospering not only in the Levant and Mesopotamia, such as Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad, but also in the deurbanized west, where Fez, Kairouan, Cordoba, and Palermo rose to prominence. The reasons for this revival include the existence of a vast common market, a renewed influx of gold from Africa and the east, the high status

-24-