Is there anyone out there who has some information or references on the demographic changes that occurred from Roman times to the “dark ages”?
Percentage of population living in cities/urban centers, percentage employed in agriculture, changes in amount of short and long range commerce, what slice of the population made its living as craftsmen or full time tradesmen, etc.
For the dark ages side of things, I am primarily interested in how things compared in what was the European part of the western Roman empire, Britannia, Gaul, Dalmatia, Rhaetia, etc. Not so much the African provinces.
By coincidence, I just finished reading The Fall of Rome, by Bryan Ward-Perkins. He disputes the current theory that the fall of Rome was less a sacking by barbarians and sudden collapse, with Europe gradually evolving into something different, and instead says that it really was a collapse, and the Dark Ages really were dark.
I’ll come back to this in the next day or two – he does go into some differences from Roman Europe to Dark Ages Europe. I distinctly remember him showing that, in the agricultural sphere, Roman-era cattle were significantly larger than Dark Ages cattle, which got smaller as knowledge of breeding was lost (and perhaps the food supply available to feed cattle diminished).
I think the big changes were caused by the following:
-no army to protect Europe from barbarian raids
-no road maintenance
-no navy (to suppress Mediterranean pirates)
The reversion to small local government meant that travel became dangerous, and food could not be transported long distances. That is why Rome dropped from over 1 million to less than 10,000 (no more grain ships from Egypt).
Brittania was abandoned ca. 407 AD-it rapidly fell to invaders, and reverted to a village based civilization.
A primary task of the Roman Navy, IIRC, was to control pirates in the Mediterranean. It stands to reason that decay of the central government resulted in sea trade being significantly more dangerous and less common due to pirates.
You can actually see the collapse in Mediterranian trade by charting the number of shipwrecks found by time-period. This is generally seen as the result of a collapse in political and economic networks needed for trade rather than pirates though (by the fifth century I doubt it would make much sense to be a pirate simply because there weren’t any ships to capture).
I can’t find it now, but there’s a graph of lead-pollution in the Greenland icesheet by year that tracks the shipwreck graph pretty closely. The pollution was caused by European mining activity, and so is another strong piece of evidence for a general decline in economic activity over the same time-period.
I have always found the “the Middle Ages weren’t so bad” theory to be a form of noble-savageism. Western scholars go native and argue that other cultures are actually awesome all the time; this is just the same thing but chronologically. You really have to ignore or spin a lot to do this for the 500-1000 period, though. The number of forests in Europe with Roman-era buildings underneath kind of says it all; the actual space in which human civilization prevailed physically shrank.
I think a lot of it comes from trying to convolve the Dark Ages and Middle Ages, especially the High Middle Ages into one really long time period. You can certainly point to plenty of things in 1350 that show Western Europe was becoming a more advanced society, but that was only after it had almost a full millennium to recover from the collapse.
As I think the graphs of shipwrecks and lead pollution (and plenty of other sources of evidence) show pretty clearly, there really was a huge fall in economic activity, urbanization, political activity, art and literacy. And it took centuries to recover.
I think this is a factor in the shift to smaller cattle. If you’re running a large estate and have a significant market for your beef, bigger cattle are a plus. If have a smaller market because you’re living in a village or near a small town and you have no refrigeration, smaller cattle are easier to feed and you have less meat to distribute before it goes bad.
Thanks for this book tip, I just picked it up and blew through it. I second the recommendation. It’s absolutely a good point he’s making, to look more at material culture when thinking about these things.
I’m absolutely on board with the idea that the lights really did go out in many ways in Western Europe for a while. Although, I don’t mind talking about the end of the Western Empire as “transformation” rather than collapse, as long as one keeps in mind that it’s sometimes the kind of transformation that falling down a flight of stairs might cause for your mood, state of dress and general health.
I’m thinking that the most important contribution of modern “optimistic revisionism” (as it were) about the “Dark Ages” has to do with pointing out of how local a phenomenon it was. Yes, you could say that the lights go out in the Western Empire, more so in some areas than in others. But it is the Western Empire. The East goes on trucking, and as Ward-Perkins also points out, was maybe more prosperous than ever in the fifth and sixth centuries. Although Greece, Thrace and Asia Minor run into some trouble of their own after a while, The Levant and Egypt never has any kind of “dark age” at all. There, even the transition to Arab rule isn’t cataclysmic, as it is a matter of replacing one empire with another.
It really was common, and sort of still is, to end the story in 476, to talk about the Western Empire as if it is the whole world, and to think of the Eastern Empire as meh, not important. But the Byzantine story (or Eastern Roman if you prefer, I don’t mind the term Byzantine) is still the Roman story. And I mean Roman story in the most obvious sense, not some “other, but equally important” story. For one thing, stop at 476 and you’ll miss out on Justinian. People seem to forget that North Africa, Italy and part of Spain actually became part of the Empire again for a while. You were saying that the story of the Roman Empire ends when the city of Rome is no longer part of it the Empire? Um, Justinian takes it back. So now what are you going to do?
I do kind of stop paying attention at the end of the reign of Heraclius, though, ca 640. That’s arbitrary, too, but when the East loses 3/4 of its territory I think it’s fine to call that the point where we enter the Middle Ages, and that we are now dealing with a Byzantine successor state. If nothing else, for the sake of bookkeeping and keeping oneself sane.
Excellent source. It seems like the trading practically ceased in few decades. Whatever wrecks was found after that probably belonged to Byzantines. You can only imagine what this did to million citizens of city of Rome. They probably flocked to countryside in masses which much have been highly unpleasant experience for everybody.Those who remained probably started to practice urban agriculture. I have been in Ostia, the port of Rome. I highly recommend going there. After the trade ceased the place was abandoned and soon was buried under sand etc. So it is still in relatively good shape.
The ironic part is that it is the continued ambitions of Byzantium that, in effect, made the lights go out in much of what used to be the Western Empire.
The mechanism was Justinian’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to take these territories back into the empire, when they were (at least in the case of Italy) being ruled by perfectly acceptable Gothic kingdoms.
With his great genereal Belisarius, Justinian could defeat these folks - but he could never pay to completely re-absorb these territories; so the attempt caused wide-spread ruin, which was never made good. Imperial overstretch at its finest.
Absolutely! The Ostrogoths were actually doing OK, and they could even have ended up reuniting the West in their own way. They had de facto control over the Visigothic Kingdom as well at that point. All while soaking up Roman cultural influence from their subjects. Yup, looking pretty dandy, all things considered.
Then Justinian shows up and absolutely ruins everyone’s day, leaving Italy a bloody mess. Oops.
It feels a bit like a historical Monty Python sketch.
Good observations. As in Brittania, people tried to carry on the old Roman way of life, but with the (two) army legions gone, who would stop the Picts from invading and raiding farms and remote towns? Cities depend upon reliable food shipments from the countryside-when that ceases, the cities must be abandoned. i wonder what Londonium looked like in the decades after its abandonment. Rome was reduced to about 10,000 people-most living in abandoned temples, churches, etc. it must have looked a lot like present-day Detroit.
I happen to have read recently a brief passage about this (in a book otherwise dedicated to the contrary : the countryside during the middle-ages).
Basically, by the Carolingian era (what you’d call “dark ages”, I guess), cities had essentially dissapeared in western Europe except in northern Italy. Towns would have been something like the bishop seat and a number of farmers tilling the fields around the “town”. Even most of the production (kitchenware, clothes, tools, etc…) were produced in landed noblemen’s domains or by people themselves at home. Apparently, the reappearance of “mass produced” products (and of better quality) marks a significant evolution (and a rebirth of towns as centers of trade). Out of my head, I think around the 10-11th century.
Thank you to everyone. The reason I asked this question is that in a discussion, I asserted that the transition to the western european “Dark Ages” was primarily a his for the ancient equivalent of the “middle classes” which were reduced hard. The traders, craftsmen, scrioes, and specialists of all sorts. As well as the urban population. But I had to stop as I realized that this is not something I actually know. It is just reasoning that seems intuitive.
Thank you. Do you have the books name? Or perhaps some before-after numbers?
Yet, even in this period, the RC Church managed some semblance of order-there was a pope in Rome, with appointed cardinals and bishops. I guess the church was the real successor of the old Roman government. Plus, there were the monsaterys, which kept literacy and learning alive.
I heard that after the fall of the city of Rome, only a fraction of the population was left, the aqueducts quit working, wild animals were running through the streets and people were living in squalor. Is this true?
It is true that many smaller cities were abandoned entirely, and it is true that even in the case of major cities the population diminished greatly due to a combination of “white flight” (which started during the later days of the Empire, in response to the increasing squalor and insecurity - the nobs went to live behind their walls and guards and slaves in big semi-autonomous rural domains that became the anchoring points of villages and great nobles’ domains in the carolingian period), epidemics caused by said squalor and, well, rampaging dudes with swords.
But the major cities, those that had architecture worth something and solid walls, those that were sitting on major commercial arteries & roads etc… still were important, and populated. And, as you say, they formed the backbone of what extralocal administration remained, on the back of the bishops of the RC Church who acted both as spiritual guides and secular lords.
Outside of the *latifundiae *and the remaining major cities however, populations did become highly mobile - both because of a switch in agricultural practices (the Franks were more into cheese and herding than the wheat, olives and wine trio favoured by the Romans ; and they didn’t really practice crop rotation so when the soil they used started getting shitty they’d just move), and because, again, rampaging dudes with swords.
Simplifying a lot, the typical social structure at that point was clans of maybe 10 or so extended families living together in a packed bunch of wooden huts that would last for 5-10 years, then picking up sticks and settling someplace else. Eventually in the 9th-10th the migrations & military chaos kind of settled down ; the nobs started raising castles everywhere (which provided an anchor point for new, fixed settlements) and the church & monasteries also encouraged permanent settlements for various reasons.
One notable item, where France & Germany are concerned, was that Charlemagne mandated baptismal at birth for everybody (before that baptisms were opt-in, done for adults only, and always by bishops at the cathedral), which meant that there needed to be some form of disseminated churchly presence to cover the entire population - they couldn’t be expected to trek all the way to the Big City any time a tyke was born, that was likely to die within the year anyway. Which meant dotting smaller churches and curates all around the place.
Once you have a fixed church, you can have a village settling around it, encouraged by various means (including the basis of the feudal contract : protection and legal rights in exchange for loyalty). A larger village means a more stable foodbase, which in turn means some guys can become specialized artisans. And, almost coincidentally, a permanent settlement *also *means you can have a local lord taxing the villagers’ cocks off and mustering them for war as needed.
But I’m sure old Charlie only had the purest and most pious devotion at heart ;).
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Yet, even in this period, the RC Church managed some semblance of order-there was a pope in Rome, with appointed cardinals and bishops. I guess the church was the real successor of the old Roman government.
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Yes and no. Yes, in that the Church maintained the administrative regions and provinces of the old Roman empire on paper at least, tried to keep records, also had a hand in organizing defense, the maintenance of inherited structures etc… all at their very local level. But no, in the sense that there really wasn’t much centralization going on. The pope didn’t appoint the bishops : the local kings did that (for the most part). Which means the bishops were really more loyal and more close, in a personal ties kind of way, to the kings. And because at the time the kings and their kingdoms really came and went…
So it really was a fractional order being maintained, if you follow my meaning.
And that’s really what was lost when the wheels fell of the Western Empire (and what the Carolingians tried to bring back, with debatable success) : coordination and coherence *between *the various provinces and subdivisions of the land ; a shared currency along with an actual, enforceable taxation system ; the ability to construct and maintain infrastructure beyond the 5-10 miles around a given place (like the Roman highways f’r’instance) ; the ability to organize the defence of a large geographic space by coordinating all military forces available in it etc…
It took a while to build that back up. Even if they didn’t have to build it all up from scratch.
