The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization by Ward-Perkins Bryan

Author:Ward-Perkins, Bryan [Ward-Perkins, Bryan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2005-06-22T16:00:00+00:00

Patterns of Change

There was no single moment, nor even a single century of collapse. The ancient economy disappeared at different times and at varying speeds across the empire. If, for the sake of simple and ready comparison, we show this process in graph form for five separate regions of the empire—from Roman complexity in around AD 300, to the dramatically simpler world of around 700—we can immediately see substantial differences, but also some similarities, between what happened in different areas (Fig. 6.1). Inevitably, these graphs are a gross simplification of a mass of difficult, and sometimes disputed, archaeological evidence, but I hope the basic patterns that I have shown are reasonably close to the evidence currently available, and therefore more helpful than harmful.1

There is general agreement that Roman Britain’s sophisticated economy disappeared remarkably quickly and remarkably early. There may already have been considerable decline in the later fourth century, but, if so, this was a recession, rather than a complete collapse: new coins were still in widespread use and a number of sophisticated industries still active. In the early fifth century all this disappeared, and, as we have seen in the previous chapter, Britain reverted to a level of economic simplicity similar to that of the Bronze Age, with no coinage, and only hand-shaped pots and wooden buildings.2

Further south, in the provinces of the western Mediterranean, the change was much slower and more gradual, and is consequently difficult to chart in detail. But it would be reasonable to summarize the change in both Italy and North Africa as a slow decline, starting in the fifth century (possibly earlier in Italy), and continuing on a steady downward path into the seventh. Whereas in Britain the low point had already been reached in the fifth century, in Italy and North Africa it probably did not occur until almost two centuries later, at the very end of the sixth century, or even, in the case of Africa, well into the seventh.3

Turning to the eastern Mediterranean, we find a very different story. The best that can be said of any western province after the early fifth century is that some regions continued to exhibit a measure of economic complexity, although always within a broad context of decline. By contrast, throughout almost the whole of the eastern empire, from central Greece to Egypt, the fifth and early sixth centuries were a period of remarkable expansion. We know that settlement not only increased in this period, but was also prosperous, because it left behind a mass of newly built rural houses, often in stone, as well as a rash of churches and monasteries across the landscape (Fig. 6.2). New coins were abundant and widely diffused (Fig. 5.9B-E, at pp. 114–15), and new potteries, supplying distant as well as local markets, developed on the west coast of modern Turkey, in Cyprus, and in Egypt. Furthermore, new types of amphora appeared, in which the wine and oil of the Levant and of the Aegean were transported both within the region, and outside it, even as far as Britain and the upper Danube.

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