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CHAPTER 15
Barbarizing the Bel Paese: Environmental History
in Ostrogothic Italy
Paolo SquatritiIntroduction
Is an environmental history of Ostrogothic Italy possible? The question is
worth posing, for both Ostrogothicists and environmental historians have
chosen to avoid this field of inquiry. Pre-modern environmental history, and
not just of those Mediterranean provinces that concern us here, has had par-
ticular difficulty inserting itself into the dominant paradigms of more tradi-
tional historiography. This holds true for both the chronological and the spatial
parameters that other styles of history accept as a matter of course. Thus any
environmental history of Ostrogothic Italy must grapple with problems of
scale that derive from the accepted ways historians have for dividing up time
and space in the peninsula.1
The chronological scale of the specialist in barbarian invasions is not
perfectly congruent with the rather long durations and comparatively slow
processes of change that tend to occupy environmental historians. Gothic
authority in Italy was concentrated in three human generations between the
years 487 and 554, but phenomena like climate and pedological change are
measured over far longer spans, so a specifically Ostrogothic ecology in Italy is
hard to discern. Since trends of environmental change do not move in lockstep
with post-classicists’ accepted chronologies, concepts like Late Antiquity lose a
lot of their sharpness when applied to environmental discourse. Moreover, the
great events in an environmental narrative might include a meteorite strike or
the spread of a contagious pathogen, neither of which has a logical position in
the usual narratives based on fluctuations of political power, theological orien-
tation, or commercial connectivity, all focused on human agency.2
1 On scale: Delort/Walter, Histoire, p. 12; Hoffmann, “Medieval Christendom”, p. 45.
2 A large meteorite did fall on mount Sirente in Abruzzo about 400, but no contemporaries
seem to have noticed: Santilli et al., “A Catastrophe”, pp. 313–20.