Early Islamic marketplaces have been studied almost exclusively for their art historical and architectural values, by Maxime Rodinson in the preface of El señor del zoco en España, while their functioning and process of development have not yet been fully elucidated. It is also believed that marketplaces in early Islam functioned as their late antique predecessors, with apparently nothing bequeathed from pre-Islamic Arabia, where dedicated spaces for trade were extremely rare. This chapter considers what happened to urban marketplaces in the Near East after the Muslim conquests, to look at the fate of the late antique legacy under the new Arab masters—a people with contrasting indigenous commercial traditions—in the context of new power dynamics from 700 to 950. It explores the ways in which early medieval marketplaces differed from the late antique past, and the role they played in the agrarian society of early Islam.
The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, III, States, Ressources and Armies. Princeton, The Darwin Press, 1995 (reed. 2003), 491 p. (Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam, 1).
