408 Squatriti
The process sometimes called ‘ruralization’ meant that smaller cities
throughout Italy forged tighter bonds with their immediate hinterlands
whence arrived an ever increasing share of the food, fuel, and fibre that sup-
ported the urban population. If firewood, the fuel of life, had never been
a trans-regional commodity and tended to reach urban hearths from within a
restricted catchment area, the fibres, legumes, and grains that had circulated
more widely in Roman times tended to limit their movements and to flow
towards consumers in short circuits during the 5th and 6th centuries.71 This
can be envisioned best for pottery, which requires clay and water and wood to
make, but was transferred very far from its original place of fabrication in the
classical Mediterranean, and did so much less by 500. By 600, with few excep-
tions in the eastern Roman-controlled territories of the peninsula, Italian
urban populations had greatly reduced their connection to Mediterranean
supply networks of all kinds.72 Between 400 and 600 or so, when urban sizes
had to be congruent with local productive possibilities, the ecological footprint
of urban demographic clusters therefore shrank in size.
In the process, despite the reduction in absolute numbers of consumers,
as in Rome, the regional impact of urban demand may have intensified. Poor
communication infrastructure and limited state investment in the movement
of resources forced urban communities to exploit what was locally available
to the hilt. Unlike Roman towns, which could obtain surpluses from hinter-
lands and amass them for redistribution (not just for local consumption), post-
classical towns did not usually export the products of their environs, at least
not on a large scale. Unmaintained, sewers conveyed less waste, limiting the
metabolic transfer of rich organic material beyond city walls. In this way cities
became ecological sinks in their more localized hinterlands. Yet post-classical
towns exercised an appropriative magnetism on the area immediately around
them that modified ecologies. Thus, while rural Italy was lightly inhabited
by tiny settlements that affected natural processes relatively little, closer to
urban centres like Naples, Pavia, Perugia, Siponto, or Verona, pockets of more
intensive ‘footprinting’, biomass removal, and landscape modification per-
sisted. Reduced and transformed as post-classical urban communities were,
they still created islands of more humanized space because, like all clusters of
71 On firewood see Galetti, “Alimentare il fuoco”, pp. 819–20.
72 How the Eastern Roman state maintained more complex circuits of supply for its Italian
centres is a theme in Zanini, Le Italie, pp. 167–8, 202–8. A finely studied example is Pescara:
Staffa, “Quindici anni”, pp. 159–66.