392 Squatriti
The Population Problem
Essential to such a history is demography. As the foremost practitioner of
medieval environmental history, Richard Hoffmann, succinctly put it in his
contribution to a general history of European environments, “Europe’s medi-
eval demographic experience... is central to its environmental history”.4 Thus,
understanding what happened to a landscape or seascape in the past, or how
environmental relationships evolved in any slice of the ‘long’ Middle Ages,
requires understanding the numbers and the distribution of people on the
land. As the very recent past has shown us, in shaping economic and ecologi-
cal patterns the sheer size of a territory’s population is at least as relevant as
the technologies available and the cultural outlook. Equally powerful are the
other behaviours of a population, its average life expectancy and death rates,
its fertility levels, and shifts in these. In the first millennium, demographic con-
straints worked differently than they do in the modern world, after the ‘demo-
graphic transition’ to low birth and death rates; but, as Hoffmann argued, the
importance of demographic facts in shaping environmental relations remains.5
The problem of course is that for the Italian peninsula, and even more for
the 5th and 6th centuries, demographic data are scarce and unreliable. Few
and intractable sources have understandably discouraged scholarly engage-
ment in post-classical demographic history: the decline of the ancient epi-
graphic habit, the paucity of administrative documents, and the indifference
of late antique authors to issues of population mean historians’ usual sources
are of little avail.6 Yet it is demography that in the current efflorescence of
post-classical scholarship remains the key unresolved question, the one that
would unlock the most ‘Dark Age’ doors, not just the environmental ones. As
the issue is significant, but studies few, the fragile data can be forced into the
service of paradigms, and indeed there is a tendency for the theoretical models
of medievalists to prop themselves up on thin demographic foundations: thus
numerous significant moments in medieval history, like the end of the Roman
4 Hoffmann, “Medieval Christendom”, p. 47. See also Delort/Walter, Histoire, p. 189.
5 For an orthodox environmental history of the modern “weight of numbers” see Ponting,
A New Green History, pp. 231–64, 409–11. Aside from the radically higher growth rates of the
past 200 years, relevant differences between modern and pre-modern demography include
medical remedies to natural checks on population, and the contemporary ability to keep
population size out of balance with agricultural productivity by using fossil fuels (pp. 87–9).
6 Cassiodorus (Variae 11.39) is a partial exception: he noted that Rome’s urban fabric arose
when there were more Romans around than in 533.