wealthy merchants become frequent in documents from Lombard Italy and elsewhere, and in the ninth century a number of cities which were under nominal Byzantine authority such as Amalfi and Venice became active centres of trade with the east. Ironically therefore international commerce took off at the very time when the Arabs were making their naval presence felt in the central and western Mediterranean, and political reality forced cities such as Naples to enter into close relations with the Islamic world, which included the payment of protection money and trading in slaves. By the tenth century the extent of trading links is shown by descriptions of south Italian ports by Arab geographers and by the circulation of an Islamic coin, the tari, in the south of the peninsula.

Other, non-commercial channels remained important for the diffusion of goods. Papal sources abound with references to oriental relics, vestments, and ornaments, many of which must have arrived in Rome as official gifts, and many luxury textiles came to the west by official or unofficial diplomatic means. When the western envoy Liutprand of Cremona was caught smuggling a silken garment out of Constantinople, he was engaging in a widespread practice which the Byzantines sought to prevent to maintain the rarity value of such items.

The question of Mediterranean unity is therefore more complex than a simple following of Pirenne's views would suggest. Ties between east and west changed in nature and extent, but never ceased completely. An awareness of the rich and powerful east survived in the west, kept alive by diplomats and pilgrims rather than traders, while the east had little reason to reciprocate interest in an impoverished west. The flow of artistic objects and luxury goods imported from the east had an important impact in the west, not least in furnishing a raison d'être for a number of trading cities, whose steady growth was to have startling repercussions on the economy and culture of Europe, but the effects were confined to a narrow élite. As in the Roman Empire, the economy remained overwhelmingly agrarian, and the peasantry who made up the vast majority of the population lived a harsh life of poverty and self-sufficiency, dominated by the demands of local lords and, in the east,

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