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The archaeological evidence shows that the trade transportation housing and manufacturing infrastructure of the western Mediterranean remain intact through the 500’s AD. The coastal towns and cities of Italy and Greece remained intact until the 640’s.

Its always been generally known that the moslem armies destroyed the Mediterranean world on the African side of the Mediterranean in the 640s and Spain a little later. (Just what a significant role they played can’t be appreciated until one visits the Roman ruins in Libya.)What modern archaeology is showing is that the coastal cities of not just Spain but also Italy and to some extent Greece —were destroyed in roughly the +640’s. They don’t have the smoking gun. But its highly likely that Moslem raiders flattened all the coastal towns on the northern Mediterranean shore—and carried off their booty.

That booty sustained the moslem world until about 900 AD.

The Romans did the same thing to the Thracians in the second century—because the Thracians had enormous deposits of gold. My WAG is that the Thracian gold sustained the roman empire for a century or more...or about the same amount of time as the moslems sustained themselves on plundered Mediterranean gold.

A major revelation to me a year or two ago was the answer to the question—where did all the money come from that sustained the world’s first economic bubble. The tulip speculation of Holland in the early 1600’s. The answer is that the money came from Spain-Spanish pieces of eight.. The Spanish in turn pulled the (mostly)silver and gold from mines in Peru and Mexico because of a mining innovation in the 1560’s. That gold and silver sustained the Spanish for a century or two...or about the same length of time as the moslems and the Romans —before the Spanish too went into decline.

But the manufacturing/trading countries continued to flourish.