A new account of the Mediterranean economy in the 10th to 12th centuries, forcing readers to entirely rethink the underlying logic to medieval economic systems. Chris Wickham re-examines documentary and archaeological sources to give a detailed account of both individual economies, and their relationships with each other. It is not every day that one encounters a book that aims to overturn a paradigm and establish in its place the foundations of a new one; rarer still is it to find that the author succeeds in that task. But that is exactly what Chris Wickham achieves in his mammoth new book.