Environmental History in Ostrogothic Italy 409
consumers, they affected the flow of energy and concentration of materials in
the ecosystem.73
A nice example is Otranto, whose location at the southern opening of the
Adriatic lent it special strategic prominence for the eastern Roman Empire.
The town however shrivelled after mid 500s and was virtually abandoned by
700, as it had been once before in the 2nd to 3rd centuries. If Otranto before the
7th century seems to confirm Zanini’s observation that Italy’s coastal commu-
nities were more cosmopolitan than inland cities, the town’s immediate needs
for food and fibre nonetheless were satisfied locally. The town’s extraction
of energy from its hinterland was selective: foxes, quail, crane, and roe deer
became food sources in late antique Otranto, while sheep and pigs moved the
hinterland’s biomass into town by grazing around it and offering their flesh,
milk, and skins to people who lived inside the walls. Late antique Otrantines
ate more cattle than their earlier and later fellow citizens. They also consumed
local marine resources, in the form of sea bass, drumfish, and cockles, which
they seem to have preferred to the sea snails more common in ancient and
high medieval strata. Though there is virtually no evidence for the Murex shells
Cassiodorus described as the backbone of Otranto’s economic life, the aggre-
gate impact of this extraction was not insignificant.74
At Otranto and elsewhere, this was not just a matter of exploiting agri-
cultural production and the gathering activities on its margins, for with very
limited access to outside sources of manufactured goods, iron smelting and
especially pottery production were forcibly regionalized, making an imperative
of firewood extraction, even in places with little easily accessible hardwood
fuel. Deposits in Swiss peat and Greenland ice suggest that airborne pollution
from smelting was at its millennial low point between 650 and 950, yet the end
of the empire’s fluid distribution networks intensified cities’ exploitation of
nearby resources, relocating and fragmenting the (reduced) impact of urban
demand to immediate hinterlands.75
Whereas underpopulated cities could exercise surprisingly strong trans-
formative influences on their surroundings, post-classical rural settlements
73 Broich, “Wasting of Wolin”, pp. 187–99 is an eco-moral parable of unsustainability, but is
also a reminder that post-classical towns could ‘waste’ their hinterlands.
74 Zanini, Le Italie, pp. 146–7, 155–8; D’Andria/Whitehouse (eds.), Excavations at Otranto 2,
pp. 335–6, 340–2, 345–6, 349–52. Otrantine Murex: Giardina, “Cassiodoro,” pp. 54–61.
75 McCormick, The Origins, p. 53, on smelting pollution. See also his review of ceramic pro-
duction, pp. 53–60.