We introduce the notion of a matroid  over a commutative ring , assigning to every subset of the ground set an -module according to some axioms. When  is a field, we recover matroids. When , and when  is a DVR, we get (structures which contain all the data of) quasi-arithmetic matroids, and valuated matroids, i.e. tropical linear spaces, respectively. More generally, whenever  is a Dedekind domain, we extend all the usual properties and operations holding for matroids (e.g., duality), and...