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Originally posted by paulbiv:
Thought the date was 6th-7th century. If the latter period, then it might be worth remembering that in 634-6 the Byzantine empire lost Syria and Palestine to the Arabs, leading up to the loss of North Africa and the seige of Constantinople in 674.
Imports from the east most probably ended some time in the second quarter of the 6th century, i.e. by the mid C6, although it's possible that they continued to be used for some time after this date.
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(Little John
A historian friend tells me that artifacts from Byzantium & the Levant from the Bronze age to the post-Roman period are found all the way up the west coast from Cornwall to Iona. As for the reason why trade suddenly stopped in the mid 6th Century, I read of a record in the Irish dendrochonology recods of a catastrophic climate cooling event at about that time, backed up by contemporary records from the Greenland Ice cores which posited a massive volcanic eruption at about that time. Bede, in his history, records a famine and plague of such intensity as to leave "insufficient living to bury the dead." Was there not a plague in Byzantium at about that time? If all this is actually contemporaneous it would explain a great deal.
These imports are found along the western seaboard in Britain, and in Ireland, but only sporadically. they also do not go all the way up the Bristol Channel
We shouldn't necessarily just look to one (i.e. an envionmental) cause for their end, but rather need to look at the complext political and economic situation in the eastern empire (although there's a danger with circular dating on this, as the termination of imports has in the past been dated by references to problems - including plague - in the east, and we must be careful of taking the texts too literally).
Bede was speaking about 200 years after the end of mediterranean imports (and therefore his testimony is of limited use), influenced by Gildas, writing c. AD 540. However, Gildas, too, was speaking in retrospect of an earlier plague (i.e. one that pre-dates the supposed end of imports - he even claims that imports 'used to' come up the Severn and Thames, but is more probably referring to those of the Romano-British period). Plague probably (but not certainly) hit the west some time after the mid 6th century: king Maelgwn (a contemporary of Gildas) is reported as dying of the plague in one of the annales (but this ref. was much later, and therefore certainly of dubious use for this period)
some areas in the west continued to have imports, but from the continent, in the mid-late 6th century, and again later, probably in the 7th century (but these were less common in the southwest of Britain, and more-so in Ireland, Wales and especially the north of Britain)
