The exploitation and control of woodland and scrubland in the Byzantine world

Abstract

A welcome and necessary aspect of the renewal of studies of the Byzantine economy has been the analysis, sometimes in both the technical and the broader organisational aspects, of the production and redistribution of particular goods. One only has to think of some recent work concerning mining and metallurgy, minting, silk-production, glass-making, potteries, shipping, and salsamenta, to realise the potential significance of such studies, the need for the historical study of all types of economic activity, and how unilluminating has become the incantation of such statements as that the Byzantine economy was ‘overwhelmingly' rural (almost invariably made with reference to the primary products of a narrowly defined agriculture), or that centres of population were ‘characterised by consumption', or even that commercialised redistribution was ‘feeble’ and stagnant in the Early Byzantine period.