Landowning and Labour in the Rural Economy 285
Conclusion: Rural Populations under Pressure?
Broadly speaking, I have argued throughout this chapter in favour of enduring
continuity in the structures and practices that constituted the rural economies
of Italy under the Ostrogoths. Patterns of landownership and exploitation were
heterogeneous, and that heterogeneity appears to have persisted. Strategies
of labour exploitation among large landowners appear to have intersected
with the socio-economic strategies of smaller agriculturalists in a labour mar-
ket that continued to be dynamic and multidimensional. Market exchanges
endured, even if the geographical scope over which goods travelled is likely to
have contracted, together with the volume of goods that travelled.
Nevertheless, rural populations of the period experienced a collection
of sudden, acute events that cannot fail to have impacted upon the socio-
economic resources available to them and upon their capacity to exploit those
resources. Our sources attest instances of food shortage or famine, which
are likely to have been attributable to a variety of causes. Most particularly,
we observe shortages of grain in Rome caused by drought in Africa, Gaul, or
elsewhere, which led to an interruption in the transportation of grain from
those areas to Rome.99 These events will have placed pressure on the produce
of agriculturalists in Rome’s immediate hinterland and further afield in Italy.
A description by Boethius of the catastrophic effects of forced sale of grain
in Campania in the early 520s, for example, gives a sense of what the local
impacts of these more distant events could have been.100 We may also imagine
instances where food shortages could be exploited by producers or suppliers
from other regions, and a letter of Cassiodorus offers glimpses of Athalaric’s
attempts to control such speculation in Gaul.101 We observe the effects of both
the war between Theoderic and Odovacer and the Gothic Wars of Justinian’s
generals upon urban contexts, in the form of famines and epidemics in
besieged cities, and we may imagine both direct and indirect consequences of
these events on rural populations as well.102
99 Stathakopoulos, Famine and Pestilence collects primary references and secondary litera-
ture. See, in the present context, nos. 75 (pp. 246–7); 77 (p. 248); 86 (p. 261).
100 Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, 1.4.12(8), with Stathakopoulos, Famine and Pestilence,
p. 261.
101 Cassiodorus, Variae 9.5, with Ruggini, Economia e Società nell’ “Italia Annonaria”, pp. 262–
76; Loseby, “Mediterranean Economy”, p. 618.
102 See the series of events recorded by Procopius, Gothic War 2, and collected by
Stathakopoulos, Famine and Pestilence, pp. 270–7. Note also Cassiodorus, Variae 12.28.