Environmental History in Ostrogothic Italy 399
were also strangely uniform in gender and age, whereas the disease is thought
to have been egalitarian.33 Thus it is the various signs of depopulation dis-
cussed above that provide the best data on the impact of the pandemic in Italy.
The circularity of the logic here is evident. Italy in the 6th century does not fur-
nish much fodder for debates on the ‘plague’ and its impact in Mediterranean
Late Antiquity.
As for the second most famous environmental agent in the history of
the period—climate—the difficulties are opposite. The evidence is super-
abundant, and growing fast thanks to contemporary concern for ‘climate
change’. The evidence is also contradictory, enough to discourage building
causal bridges between the fairly clear fact that European and Mediterranean
climates got colder and wetter (on average) in the 5th and 6th centuries and
the social or economic repercussions from this.34 Moreover, the increasingly
refined micro-regional knowledge palaeo-climatologists produce suggest that
in a geographically varied peninsula like Italy there could be major differ-
ences in how a given landscape experienced and responded to fluctuations
in climate.
Such fluctuations were normal. Climate changes, always. It usually does so
at a pace incommensurate with human perception, though that never discour-
aged people from noting weather events as unprecedented or meaningful.
Since the meaning of meteorological phenomena was contested, weather rhet-
oric in Late Antiquity (like today) was political. Thus Cassiodorus’ celebrated
letters, so full of the natural history that everyone mines to prove it rained or
flooded a lot or was really cold in the early 6th century, are actually polemical
texts whose inclusion of environmental detail legitimated Amal policies and
justified the activities of Amal agents who, decades after the fact and exiled
in Constantinople, had a lot of explaining to do.35 And, far from being natu-
ralistic observations of what transpired, Ostrogothic meteorological sources
constructed reality following late antique philosophical principles. The Variae
were a tool of mid 6th-century political debates among aristocrats, and so were
Cassiodorus’ accounts of nature. To take them as straightforward evidence of
facts on the ground, or in the skies (like the “dust veil event”), is unwise.
33 Giovannini, Natalità, pp. 10–11.
34 Luterbacher et al., “A Review,” p. 148. Mediterranean dendro-archaeological data is
scanty, making more meaningful the lack of any trace of the “dust veil event” Cassiodorus
described around 537 (Variae 12.29) on the wood used to fix Constantinople’s harbours:
Pearson et al., “Dendroarchaeology”, p. 3411.
35 Bjornlie, Politics, pp. 269–79. Chapters 3 and 10 in this volume follow Cassiodorus more
closely.