Michael McCormick’s magisterial study of the “Origins of the European Economy” has redrawn our understanding of the economic history of the Early Middle Ages

Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce AD 300 – 900
By Michael McCormick
Cambridge University Press 2001

For fifty years debate has raged about early European commerce during the period between antiquity and the middle ages. Was there trade? If so, in what – and with whom? New evidence and new ways of looking at old evidence are now breaking the stalemate. Analysis of communications – the movements of people, ideas and things – is transforming our vision of Europe and the Mediterranean in the age of Charlemagne and Harun al Rashid.

This is the first comprehensive analysis of the economic transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages in over sixty years. It brings fresh evidence to bear on the fall of the Roman empire and the origins of the medieval economy. The book uses new material from recent excavations, and develops a new method for the study of hundreds of travelers to reconstitute the communications infrastructure that conveyed those travelers – ship sailings, overland routes– linking Europe to Africa and Asia, from the time of the later Roman empire to the reign of Charlemagne and beyond.

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Fatimid cosmography, The Book of Curiosities, housed in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. Source: Wikipedia

Medieval Histories

Origins of the European Economy

Michael McCormick’s magisterial study of the “Origins of the European Economy” has redrawn our understanding of the economic history of the Early Middle Ages

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