Environmental History in Ostrogothic Italy 393
Empire, have been connected to demographic trends despite our rather lim-
ited understanding of these trends.7
Naturally, even before the recent surge in post-classical research there
already existed an orthodoxy about the period’s population, for Italy and
elsewhere.8 The studies of Beloch and Russell, based on written sources
and limited funerary archaeology, mirrored in demographic terms the nega-
tive, indeed ‘catastrophist’ evaluation of civilization as a whole in the wake
of Rome’s ‘fall’ that held sway before the increase in post-classical research of
the late 20th century.9 Whether they allowed some demographic ‘recovery’
in the 4th century or not, the classic studies represented Italian populations
shrinking from the 2nd century onward, dramatically after 476, catastrophi-
cally during the Gothic War, and confidently postulated that no more than four
million people lived in early medieval Italy. Both the willingness to offer ‘hard’
numerical estimates of regional populations despite the weak evidence and
the equally confident use of Gibbonian rhetoric (decline, depression, disso-
lution) to classify trends in Italian population after 400 are characteristics of
this scholarship.
A major role in creating this image was played by the demography of
Rome itself. Thanks to the Roman state’s involvement in supplying free food
to the citizens of the imperial capital (the annona), some precise figures can
be advanced for the city’s inhabitants. Records of the state’s efforts to supply
grain and, increasingly in Late Antiquity, other foods for the Romans allowed
reconstructions that confirmed and authorized the minimalist demographic
narrative for Italy as a whole. The city famous for its bloated one million inhab-
itants in the 1st century seemed half as full in 400, had maybe 100,000 around
500 when Cassiodorus publicized Theoderic’s annona distributions, but barely
50,000 after 554. Thus, in 200 years (350–550), a reduction of 95 per cent took
place, a catastrophe if ever there was one.10
7 Boureau, “Une histoire”, 233–4; LoCascio, “La dissoluzione”, argued for connections
between Rome’s fall and decline in population.
8 See Bardet/Dupâquier (eds.), Histoire des populations, especially pp. 32, 133–67, 485–508;
McCormick, Origins, p. 782 summarizes: “the overall picture... represents decline:
dwindling populations, a mutating disease pool, lessening metal production, contracting
diffusion and product range of ceramics [that] followed different chronologies in differ-
ent regions.” The picture looks different viewed from the eastern Mediterranean: Banaji,
Agrarian Change, pp. 201, 213.
9 Beloch, “Die Bevölkerung Europas”, pp. 406–7, 414, 421–2; Russell, “Ecclesiastical Age”,
pp. 99–111; Russell, Late Ancient, pp. 36–7, 60, 93–4, 125–36, 172–6.
10 Durliat, De la ville, pp. 91–121; Paroli, “Le strutture”, pp. 3–28; Meneghini/Santangeli
Valenziani, Roma, pp. 21–4.