Landowning and Labour in the Rural Economy 289
and the types of crops sown. Did living closer to a large urban centre produce
opportunities for the continuation of economic strategies such as Cassiodorus
describes at the fair of St Cyprian? Or did it render communities more vulner-
able to the effects of the warfare and sieges and plagues and epidemics that
stand like bookends at either end of our period. Or both?
Fundamentally, these questions may be boiled down to this: how resilient
were the rural populations of Italy in the Ostrogothic period? If, as seems likely,
some households or communities did indeed crumble in the face of a succes-
sion of hazards that included food shortage, plague, fiscal super-exactions, and
warfare, which ones, why, and in what circumstances? Most particularly, how
might we use seemingly descriptive phenomena such as topography, climatic
conditions, agricultural regimes, socio-economic structures, and cultural
mores as analytical tools in pursuit of our answers? While these questions
might seem disingenuous, perhaps even tendentious, they have the advantage
of taking seriously the strict chronological constraints that characterize the
Ostrogothic realm in Italy. They also force us to construct arguments about the
fates of rural populations in this period, rather than simply falling back on gen-
eralizing assumptions of widespread decline and impoverishment that seem,
increasingly, to be declining and impoverished themselves.
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