Environmental History in Ostrogothic Italy 411
on woodland use in the anaemic demographic conditions (and weak state
control) of late antique Italy are warranted. It stands to reason that in a tem-
perate place where few people lived, and where no state attempted to build
fleets or vast public works necessitating lumber, trees would do well.80 Indeed
one of the central building blocks of both scholarly and popular reconstruc-
tions of early medieval landscapes is the relentless, menacing, rapid, and
basically barbaric advance of the forest.81 Yet palaeo-botanical evidence,
increasingly available even for Italy, does not consistently confirm the story
of the general, uncontrolled re-forestation of Italian countryside. Although a
post-imperial wilderness of trees covering hillsides, valley bottoms, and moun-
tains would match our preconceptions of uncivilized and disorderly times,
pollen diagrams tend to offer a more variegated and less bosky image of Italian
landscapes. The notorious ‘landscapes of fear’, dark with the ominous shadow
of impenetrable woods and pullulating with dangerous woodland creatures,
seem to be literary creations, mostly restricted to the pages of chroniclers and
hagiographers.82 Certainly there was much woodland in a sparsely populated
peninsula (as there were many swamps, ample heath, grasslands, and other
types of uncultivated spaces with fewer romantic associations for modern
historians, who therefore neglect them), and certainly forests are dynamic,
quickly adapting to climate conditions or biological invasion.83 But Italy’s for-
est was no awe-inspiring wilderness. Rather it was largely a managed, produc-
tive space—one form of the humanized landscape, or semi-natural landscape,
that characterized Late Antiquity.84 In environmental terms, human deflec-
tion, or tampering with natural succession processes in the woodland, altered
80 Shipping is a good example of how state policies affected woodlands and their exploita-
tion: see McCormick, The Origins, pp. 87, 95–6, 103–5, 113 and Giardina, “Allevamento”,
pp. 101–5. Late antique ships were faster, more manoeuvrable, and more capable of carry-
ing cargo than imperial-era ships; they were also cheaper and easier to build, consuming
lumber more efficiently. How such improvements square with a declining commercial
economy (and better lumber supply) is unclear: Gertwagen, “Nautical Technology”,
pp. 158–60. Public baths, whose firewood supply Roman authorities managed, are
another example: a modest bath complex required some 200 tons of hardwood per year:
McCormick, The Origins, p. 97.
81 e.g. Thirgood, Man and the Mediterranean Forest, pp. 42–7. The “return of nature” image
remains vigorous: see Squatriti, Landscape, pp. 1–23.
82 e.g. Di Cocco, “Viabilità”, pp. 21–9, based on a literal reading of Vita S. Hilari.
83 Delort/Walter, Histoire, pp. 157–9.
84 Wickham, “European Forests”, pp. 500–1, 533–42 is still an excellent guide. He stressed
property regimes as the key to the growth and contraction of woodland, pp. 486–97.