398 Squatriti
lengthening of average life spans, and hence an increase in average fertility.
This Carolingian-era rise in population seems to have come at the same time
as landlords began what Wickham calls “the caging of the peasantry”, or the
reduction of rural autonomy and living standards associated with the develop-
ment of villages and “incastellamento”.28 Peasant self-regulation and agency is
clearly not the whole story in Italy’s post-Roman demography.
Regardless, these new, sophisticated demographic analyses complicate our
picture of a tiny and impoverished late- and post-Roman population caught
in a “high pressure demographic regime” (high birth and death rates that
erase each other, keeping overall numbers low), and basically at the mercy of
every environmental force, from disease to weather. The “low pressure demo-
graphic regime” (low fertility and mortality rates) postulated by Giovannini
may not modify the sense most scholars have that Italian population shrank
after 300, and remained low until at least the 10th century, but it does have
interesting implications for our understanding of environmental conditions in
Ostrogothic times.
Secret Environmental Agents
Population collapse in 6th-century Italy can appear necessary to make sense
of the wobbly states and ruling classes of that time.29 Beyond the dislocations
of the Gothic War, it has been the epidemic formerly known as Justinianic
Plague that has enjoyed most favour to explain 6th-century demographic and
social change. Whatever it was, the Early Medieval Pandemic that erupted
541–4 and recurred in 558 deeply alarmed some contemporaries, most of
them Constantinople-based.30 For Italy we lack contemporary descriptions,
although pope Gregory I mentioned lethal diseases in his lists of cataclysms
during the last decade of the 6th century and Paul the Deacon also described
such ravages in Italy 250 years later.31
For an epidemic assigned the role of historical ‘protagonist’, the early
medieval pandemic also left few direct archaeological traces of itself.32 The
mass burials at Castro dei Volsci are the best evidence available. Their date
is uncertain, but the skeletons were in 6th-century contexts. The dead
28 Wickham, The Inheritance, ch. 22.
29 Martin, “L’évolution”, p. 354.
30 Hoffmann, Environmental History, p. 55, advocates the new name.
31 Christie, Constantine to Charlemagne, pp. 461–2, on under documentation.
32 Stathakopoulos, “Invisible Protagonists”; Stathakopoulos, “Death”, pp. 108–12.