Environmental History in Ostrogothic Italy 391
Quite like the asymmetries between the time of the Environment and the
time of History are the asymmetries created by the different geographies used
in ecologically informed and politically informed recreations of the past.
Restricting one’s purview to those parts of a territory or ecosystem found on
one side of a political frontier (itself liable to have moved a lot in late antique
Italy) can produce distortion. The attempt to take the ecological particulari-
ties of places as co-evolving with people necessarily bases itself on particular
topographical features such as hydrological catchment basins, mountains and
valleys, coastlines and lagoons, and marshes and forested areas, marginalizing
the delimitations that humans lay over them. Furthermore, the environmen-
tal history of Ostrogothic Italy, like any other environmental history, is bound
to emphasize micro-topographical difference and to qualify and localize any
broader claims. This is especially true for a territory as various as that of the
Italian peninsula, long celebrated for the contrasts that made ‘the beautiful
country’ (il bel paese in Italian).
Perhaps it is exactly this inability to say much that is generally true and uni-
versally applicable to the whole peninsula or the resuscitated Roman Empire
of Theoderic (extending from the Balkans to Galicia) that brings environmen-
tal history closer to other historical perspectives. Nowadays the best synthesiz-
ers of post-classical history in Italy resort to regional diversity as the only viable
master narrative, the best way to make sense of a period about which we know
too much to create tidy narratives.3 Because post-classical social, cultural,
and economic histories hesitate to reconstruct distinctive patterns for the
period following the deposition of Romulus Augustulus, they tend to resemble
environmental history. Thus an environmental history of Ostrogothic Italy is
possible as long as we are flexible about what we mean by environmental his-
tory and Ostrogothic Italy. If we consider the latter to have been an integral
part of the western Mediterranean, within which took place various ecologi-
cal processes that transcended political, linguistic, and religious boundaries,
then an environmental history becomes feasible. And if we accept that envi-
ronmental knowledge about pre-modern places is patchy and based on scat-
tered sources that do not complement each other, then an Italian-Gothic story
might emerge, though one in close connection to Lombard, Byzantine, and
wider Mediterranean stories.
3 This is the strategy of such overviews as Christie, Constantine to Charlemagne; Arthur, “Italian
Landscapes”; Zanini, Le Italie.