In Charlemagne’s Survey of the Holy Land, Michael McCormick rehabilitates and reinterprets one of the most neglected and extraordinary sources from Charlemagne’s revival of the Roman empire: the report of a fact-finding mission to the Christian church of the Holy Land. The roll of documents translated and edited in this volume preserves the most detailed statistical portrait before the Domesday Book of the finances, monuments (including exact dimensions), and female and male personnel of any major Christian church.

Setting these documents in the context of economic trends, archaeological evidence, and a comparison of Holy Land churches and monasteries with their contemporaries west and east, this study shows that the Palestinian church was living in decline as its old financial links with Byzantium slackened. In recounting Charlemagne’s move to outflank the Byzantine emperor, McCormick constructs a microhistory of the Frankish king’s ambitions and formidable organizational talents for running an empire.

Supplementing McCormick’s major synthesis, The Origins of the European Economy, this volume will be indispensable reading for anyone interested in medieval rulership and economics, and in the history of the Holy Land, its Christian communities, and its late antique monuments.

How are markets in antiquity to be characterized? As comparable to modern free markets, with differences in scale not quality? As controlled and dominated by the State? Or as a third way, in completely different terms, as free but regulated? In Trade and Markets in Byzantium seventeen scholars address these and related issues by reexamining and reinterpreting the material and textual record from Byzantium and its hinterland for local, regional, and interregional trade. Special emphasis is placed on local trade, which has been understudied. To comprehend the recovery of long-distance trade from its eighth-century nadir to the economic prosperity enjoyed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the authors analyze the variety and complexity of the exchange networks, the role of money as a measure of exchange, and the character of local markets. This collection of groundbreaking research will prove to be indispensable for anyone interested in economic history in antiquity and the medieval period.