International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Elie de Rosen 
University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom; 
[e-mail]
The Economic Fate of Urban Settlements in Middle Byzantine Greece
Most Byzantine scholars agree that there was upsurge in economic activity throughout 
‘Romania’ during the Middle period- the years roughly between 800 and 1200 AD. However, it 
far from to what extent this revival impacted Greece. Although archaeologists and historians have 
produced hundreds of works that analyse the history of the Greek economy, none of them are truly 
on a multi-regional scale. Several publications come close, including Byzantine Epirus and Heaven 
and Earth; Cities and Countryside in Byzantine Greece. But the former work limits its scope to 
Aetolia-Akarnania and Southern Epirus, while the latter only offers concise reports on ten Greek 
towns and cities. In my thesis I am endeavoring to set the record straight by bringing together all the 
afore-mentioned works, and using them to investigate the development of Greek urban settlements. 
I am concentrating on four modern-day administrative regions- Phokis, Boeotia, Thessaly, and 
Western Macedonia. For the Middle Byzantine period, this corresponds approximately to the 
themes of Hellas and Thessalonica. My main investigative criteria are as follows: the demographic 
and spatial size of settlements, the size and decoration of buildings, the complexity of building 
techniques (particularly with regard to the configuration of masonry), the quantity and quality 
of pottery (one of our main benchmarks for analyzing imports), and the amount of identified 
copper/bronze coinage. I will not bother looking for gold nomismata and solidi, or silver miliaresia. 
Because these denominations remained largely outside the sphere of monetary circulation, they 
constitute a tiny proportion of the Middle Byzantine archaeological record. 

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