Despite recent research regarding the history of the seas, including a plethora of papers, edited volumes, and monographs on the Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, and the Atlantic Ocean, the Black Sea still remains and understudied and peripheral subject to the majority of scholars. This is particularly the case for the history of the region in the so-called “Byzantine Dark Ages” of the 7th-10th centuries. So far, scholars attempting to investigate the history of trade in this period have not been an attempt to bring together the disparate archeological and literary data into a coherent methodological approach to model Black Sea trade. In a paper I prepared during my MPhil study at the University of Oxford, I attempted to use J.K. Davies’s “Linear and nonlinear flow models for ancient economies”, which models ancient trade around four major structural concepts (bandwidths, reservoirs, motors, and gates), to understand the structure and drivers of economic exchange across the Black Sea in the specified period. Firstly, I found that trade linking the different areas of the Black Sea became more regionalized and dependent on networks with the primary economic hub of the region – the city of Constantinople. Within the Empire, we see evidence of both flows towards Constantinople and flows between regions (e.g. Kherson and Amastris). However, there seem to be very few trade flows between regions outside the Empire, with trade on the Lower Danube delta being a notable exception. Whether this was a result of the lack of interest in trade between the Western and Eastern halves of the Mediterranean, different cultural outlooks on trade, or the dominance of the Byzantine navy in what has traditionally been considered “the Byzantine Sea,” remains unclear. Secondly, the reservoirs for trade were located in two locations: the first was Constantinople, where raw materials came to be remade into luxury goods that whence they then radiated out onto other parts of the Empire and outside of it; the second were the political centers of barbarian polities trading with the Byzantine capital. Several key players were responsible for this: individual traders, state officials, Byzantine aristocrats, pagan rulers, and nobles, as well as the Church. Thirdly, “trade” in this period was a preserve of the rich and the powerful, not a nascent “merchant class.” Fourthly, while the Black Sea trade was based at least in part on mechanisms of supply and demand, what this explanatory model makes clear to us is that the main driver of trade across the Black Sea as opposed to along it was political exigencies: for the barbarian groups, prestige goods helped buttress their position domestically, while for the Byzantine state, “barbarians” were a convenient partner for raw materials to be processed for the needs of the Byzantine elite class. Finally, through a comparison of the gates and motors for trade in this period, what becomes apparent is the Byzantine desire for control. In some ways, this Byzantine concern was hearkening back to Late Antiquity, when the Black Sea was in many ways a “Byzantine lake,” with trade effectively being a part of the domestic Byzantine market. This indicates a coherent and successful Byzantine trade policy to control trade in the Black Sea between the 7th and 10th centuries. If you would like to read this paper in full, discuss it, or use it in your own scholarly work, please feel free to reach out to me.