By David Yoon for the American Numismatic Society (ANS) ……
In order to function, governments rely on the ability to exercise power over people. This ability is always limited, though, and even more so in preindustrial times than it is now. Before modern technology, one of the biggest limiting factors was distance: over any substantial distance it became very difficult for rulers to control, influence, or even know what was happening.
For periods when the routine documentation of administration has not survived, there is no direct way to see how the exercise of governmental power was affected by distance. However, we know that many economic activities underlie the exercise of pre-modern state power, such as the collection of taxes, the payment of armies, and the movement of people and goods for specific purposes. Coins, as objects used within many forms of economic activity, get moved around not only by personal economic activities but also by the activities that governments use to accomplish their goals.
Mapping coin finds, therefore, can give us some clues about how well state power worked over long distances. It is not perfectly correlated, because many different kinds of behavior combine to create the patterns of coin deposition that we observe, but government activity is typically a part of the picture, and sometimes an important part.
Using data from the FLAME Project based at Princeton University, we can see how some very different patterns of coin finds in the first half of the eighth century in the Iberian Peninsula correlate with different ranges of governmental action.
This map (Fig. 1) shows two hoards that were formed in the first decade of the eighth century, when the Iberian Peninsula was ruled by the kings of the Visigoths. These coins were minted in 16 different places around the kingdom, and they show how some mix of private and public economic activities could move coins around. As one would expect, coins were somewhat more likely to be from nearer rather than farther places, but the economic networks could move them hundreds of kilometers.
Soon after, probably in the year 711, an Umayyad army under the leadership of Musā ibn Nuṣayr invaded Spain from North Africa and, within a decade, achieved control over the Iberian Peninsula, which became a new province of the caliphate, called al-Andalus. This map (Fig. 2) shows Umayyad silver coins dated to the first decades of al-Andalus (and before, representing older coins that were already in circulation during the 710s).
It is immediately clear that coins were moving much longer distances than in the previous map. Large amounts of coinage were evidently moving from the core regions of the caliphate to peripheral areas like al-Andalus. This is the pattern to be expected of an empire investing in a military effort on its frontier: apparently the armies in al-Andalus were being paid, at least in part, with coins that represent tax payments within the core regions of the caliphate.
It should be noted that the invasion was not a momentary event. Substantial military forces were sent to al-Andalus on multiple occasions up to the early 740s. However, the expansion of Umayyad territory in western Europe ended around 733, and from this point the central government seems to have directed less economic investment into building power in the region, as other areas–such as campaigns in Central Asia and revolts in North Africa–took priority.
This third map (Fig. 3) shows how the Umayyad state was directing fewer resources to al-Andalus, and at the same time more coinage was being produced locally. As a result, although a few coins were still moving long distances, particularly from North Africa and from the main silver mint of the caliphate at Wāsiṭ in what is now Iraq, the coin supply was beginning to return to a regional economy somewhat like that of the Visigothic kingdom.
Within a period of about five decades, these three maps have shown two different kinds of political activity, as seen through its interaction with the monetary economy. Under ordinary economic circumstances, it seems that economic networks—again, this may be merchants or it may be the state’s fiscal system—moved valuable goods like precious-metal coins around over moderate distances, typically up to a few hundred kilometers. On a day-to-day basis, the exercise of power tends to rely on these existing networks of action and connection.
However, a larger political formation with directed goals could cause movement to happen over much larger distances – 3,000 to 5,000 kilometers, from Persia to Spain. This is far beyond the spatial range of most economic activity in the early eighth century, and it shows an extraordinary deployment of state power. By using numismatic evidence, it is possible to see the difference between the ordinary and the extraordinary in the exercise of state power.
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