Italy

Italy’s relative importance within the western empire increased during late antiquity. This was due both to the practical division of the empire itself after 395, and to the loss of territory in the west and in Africa to the barbarian kingdoms. A moment of major significance came when Honorius transferred the imperial capital of the western empire from Milan to Ravenna in 402. Ravenna had been important under the empire as the headquarters of the Roman fieet in the Adriatic, and as such had been a center of shipbuilding and some commercial activity. The main harbor was at Classis, about four kilometers from the city, and the site had been chosen for defensive reasons. The marshes and canals of this coastal region provided a buffer against attack from the land, while the harbor guaranteed communications and enabled supplies to be brought in by sea. After 476 Ravenna continued to serve as the administrative center first of Odoacar’s kingdom and then of Ostrogothic Italy, and in the 560s was transformed into a dependency of Byzantium, the Exarchate. The city is famous above all for its extraordinary monuments associated with the rulers who made their homes there: the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, constructed around 450; the baptisteries respectively for the orthodox Catholic and Arian Gothic communities; the basilica churches of the first half of the sixth century, S. Apollinare Nuovo, S. Apollinare in Classe, and S. Vitale (Plate 5.6), which contain the finest surviving ecclesiastical mosaics of late antiquity; and the circular Mausoleum of Theoderic (Plate 6.1). The lavishness and quality of these buildings provides a corrective to the impression of political weakness that is implicit in all narratives of the final generations of the western empire. They bear witness to the vigor of the Ostrogothic court. Whereas the written sources, above all the Variae of Cassiodorus, portray Theoderic and his successors as rulers of Italy in the style of western emperors, operating in close concert with the Italian senatorial aristocracy, the art of Ravenna shows close links to the cultural world of the eastern empire and the court at Constantinople.

Ravenna depended on a northern Italian hinterland, which comprised the Po Valley to the west, and Istria, across the Adriatic, to the east. Cassiodorus described the latter as Ravenna’s Campania, “the storeroom of the royal city, covered with olives, glorious for its corn, rich in vines, where all crops flow in desirable fertility, as though from three udders generous in their milk.” The sea produced ish and shellish, but also substantial tax revenues which were collected both in gold and in kind (Cassiodorus, Var. 12.22, trans. Barnish). Most of the produce which was consumed in Ravenna must have been brought in by sea through the port at Classis, and excavations here are an important index of Ravenna’s rise and decline. There is no evidence for commercial activity after 700.101

The overall picture of Italian settlement in late antiquity suggests that rural settlements became fewer and more impoverished between the third and seventh centuries.102 The evidence of several recent rural survey projects in central Italy suggests that the numbers of sites occupied around 500 were only 20 percent of the igures for the irst century. Smaller sites in particular virtually vanish from the record.103 By the seventh century the lack of coinage in circulation, especially in northern regions, suggests that the market economy had in large part collapsed.

On the other hand the population and economy of southern Italy appears to have held up. No comparable decline in settlement numbers is apparent in Apulia, Basilicata, and Lucania, and the cities of Lucania and Bruttium were still going concerns in the early sixth century.104 This was due to the growing contribution made by south Italy to the needs of Rome itself. Rome’s economic horizon had begun to shrink during the fourth century, as Constantinople acquired the status of an imperial capital and received imports, especially from Egypt, that had previously been shipped to Italy. Under the Vandals the city no longer received tax grain from Africa. It drew instead on local resources and there was a huge trafic in food staples from the Italian countryside to Rome, whose population still approached half a million in the mid-ifth century. The implications of Rome’s continuing food requirements and their impact on the economy especially of southern Italy has been explored in a remarkable study by Barnish. Legal sources, literature, and archaeological evidence can be combined to produce a picture of complex and vibrant economic activity with wide social ramiications. These factors help to explain why southern Italy remained prosperous when areas to the north were in sharp decline. The recent excavations of villa sites in Samnium and Lucania demonstrate that they were heavily involved in pig-rearing, unquestionably to supply the Roman market, where pork had been added to the grain ration of the early imperial period. During late antiquity wine production in southern Italy appears to have outstripped the output from Etruria, Latium, and Campania, which had traditionally supplied early imperial Rome. Amphoras of the type Keay LII, which occur in considerable quantities between the late fourth and late ifth centuries at Rome and Marseilles, as well as at other coastal sites of the western Mediterranean and the Adriatic, were produced in Calabria. They suggest large-scale wine exports.105

Between the fourth and sixth centuries these developments particularly benefited senatorial families, which had consolidated their wealth in great estates, particularly in the south and in Sicily. The infiuence of such families, and their importance to Italy’s rulers, emperors and kings alike, is best illustrated by a famous letter, penned by Cassiodorus in the name of Theoderic, which asked the Senate to confirm the rank of patricius on his own father after he had served as governor of Sicily, the province that virtually adjoined the family’s main estates in Bruttium. The letter refers to the achievements of the honorand’s father and grandfather as well. His grandfather had defended Bruttium and Sicily against the Vandals around 440. His father had been a member of a delegation to Attila acting on behalf of Aetius, but had subsequently retired from public service to the family estates in Bruttium. Another branch of the family had distinguished itself in Constantinople in the later fifth century (Cassiodorus, Var. 1.4). Cassiodorus himself retired from service in 537, and transferred from Ravenna to Constantinople at the end of Belisarius’ campaign in 540. He returned to Italy after the peace of 554 to his family estate at Squillace in Bruttium, now to create a monastic retreat amid a community of monks and a library of Christian literature. His retreat from the challenges of secular politics mirrors that of the emperor Justinian in his later years.

A serious down-turn in the villa economies only seems to set in after the first quarter of the sixth century. This was due to a complex interplay of factors, including the climatic disasters of the 530s and 540s, the declining population and market in Rome, the impact of the Roman invasion of 536 and the Gothic wars, which devastated Italy for nearly twenty years up to the mid-550s, and perhaps above all the ravages of the plague (see pp. 412-6 and 481).106

Italy now became a frontier province of the east Roman Empire. The Longo-bards (Lombards) invaded Italy in 568 and began a lengthy struggle for control with the east Roman exarchate. Their impact may be compared with that of the Berbers in Africa at this period. Unlike the Ostrogoths, who had taken control of Italy with Roman blessing and exploited the Roman administrative framework, the Longobards had no stake in the Roman Empire or interest in perpetuating it in a modified form. Italy was divided into a patchwork of protectorates between the newcomers and the Romans. There are many indications of discontinuity on city sites, even when these continued to be occupied. Wood replaced stone as the main building material in many areas; imported pottery was entirely supplanted by local coarse wares; population levels certainly dropped. It is a matter for debate how far these indications should be seen as symptoms of absolute economic and social decline, or of a radically altered social system. It is hard to dispute that most identifiable traces of the political and economic structures of the ancient classical world had now disappeared.107 But this is not quite the end of the story. The Latin language was not supplanted by a Germanic dialect, the Lombard aristocracy in the eighth century had tombstones carved that transparently mimicked Roman gravestones of the early imperial period, and Lombard leaders were buried in Roman-style sarcophagi.108 They, like the Burgundians, continued to assert a claim to a form of Roman identity after Roman political power had collapsed.