“It is clear that, universally, after c.550 (the rough date recurs consistently, marking the generalized crisis of the Gothic war) early medieval cities in Italy were poorer than Roman ones. Some indeed vanished altogether, and others lost their urban functions (Luni is the clearest instance among the excavated sites). But even those where urban activities survived, which include every city mentioned in the immediately preceding pages, were very much poorer, with most urban administrative functions (such as street- cleaning) reduced to a minimum, and with often very simple buildings, or Roman buildings fairly crudely reused. Were their populations also reduced?
The open fields and internal courtyards might imply so, although one must also note that here, as in the East, one-roomed houses could often imply denser settlement than the generously constructed peristyle houses and extensive temple precincts of the empire. Aristocrats themselves probably occupied fairly simple two-storeyed buildings. Even the houses of the Forum Nervae, by far the most impressive yet found, do not match the mosaic- floored town houses found regularly in imperial-period levels. If one extends one’s sights away from residential building and looks at churches, such as S. Salvatore/S. Giulia in Brescia, or the prestige foundations of Pavia, Cividale, and Spoleto, or any number of eighth- and ninth-century churches in Rome, it is true that one immediately finds good-quality brick- and stone- work, sometimes newly fired or quarried, and also the marble and mosaic traditions of the ancient world. These show a continuity of patronage of skilled artisans, as also do those buildings surviving from the Roman empire up to the present day, for artisans must always have been on hand to make sure their roofs were repaired. The existence of such specialist artisans is further confirmed in documents, such as the eighth-century price-list in the Memoratorium de mercedibus commacinorum. We must conclude, however, that there was not sufficient demand for their services to support enough artisans, in any one city, to transform residential housing as well as church architecture. The very richest aristocrats, ducal families for example, may have had houses in new brick, stone, and marble, probably resembling more elaborate versions of the two-storeyed houses of Ravenna and Rome; but they were probably few in number. The rest settled for buildings like those in the Via Dante of Verona or the Piazza Dante of Pisa, and maybe put rich hangings or frescos on the walls to cover the simplicity of the construction. Overall, the aristocracy of early medieval Italy—Byzantine and Lombard alike—although they still lived in cities, were far poorer than their predecessors, or their eleventh-century successors in their tower houses. And their neighbours, artisans or shopkeepers or servants, were poorer still.
Untitled It has become common in Italy to argue for a temporal division inside the early middle ages, between roughly the period 550–750 and the period 750–950, the first one of urban crisis, the second one of tentative revival. It is true that the documents for cities would support this, as would the global evidence for greater aristocratic wealth in the Carolingian period. One could read parts of the archaeology that way too, in particular the greater number of churches, built with good construction techniques, in the second period, and the finding of buildings such as the Forum Nervae houses. Recent excavations in Siena, too, show good-quality stone buildings beginning to be built from the ninth century onwards. I would be cautious, all the same. Rome, at least, is a very atypical city; and church-building follows its own rhythms, independent of any simple Untitled correlation with economic prosperity. It could equally well be said that sites like the Via Dante point to much longer continuities of poor construction, and it is also fair to note that the ninth and tenth centuries are as yet less well known archaeologically in most Italian cities than is the seventh. Unhelpfully, the single most unambiguous sign of renewed economic activity after 750 is the huge wealth and artisanal sophistication found in S. Vincenzo al Volturno in the early ninth century; but S. Vincenzo was one of the remotest rural monasteries in Italy.142 If this is the kind of prosperity that the ninth century could generate, then it needs to be stressed that it has not yet been recognized in most Italian cities. There may very well have been an urban revival in Italy after c.750; but this is a sector of the debate for which we must await more excavation.
With these observations about the changing nature and quality of urban building in mind, let us look again at the issue of the overall structure of Italian cities. An important question that came up in the context of our discussions of Syria and of Africa was the fate of the old forum/agora areas of cities. Italian archaeology does not allow the generation of easy parallels to those debates, for relatively few fora have been subjected to systematic analysis, given the chancy patterning of urban excavations in still-occupied towns. Some have been studied, however, and these tend to situate Italian developments with those of Africa rather than those found in the East, even in the case of major cities. At Verona, there are signs of monumental destructuration (the systematic demolition of the Capitolium) already in the 510s, and sixth-century encroachment on the open square. At Brescia, the ruined Capitolium was reused for ceramic production by 600, indicating an earlier monumental decay. At Milan, sketchier interventions indicate a fifth-century date for the same process. We should also add to this list Luni, whose forum was losing its classical appearance in the fifth century, when it was stripped of marble and underwent a period of formation of silt deposits, before wooden houses were built there in c.550. Luni is different from these other sites, because the city’s economy was equally clearly already in trouble (it was the main outlet for Carrara—then Luni—marble, so the stripping of the forum paving is particularly indicative), and it was eventually abandoned; all the same, the early demonumentalization of the forum is significant, for the city’s bishops were capable of spending substantial sums on the cathedral up to the ninth century. The forum of Florence, by contrast, seems to have been repaved in the mid-sixth.
We should finally add Rome, where the forum area was huge and complex; here, the main forum (the Foro Romano as it is now called) was still the focus of monumental building into the seventh century, with the column of Phocas of 608, and the Fora of Nerva and Trajan were still being maintained as late as the ninth century (the start of the century for the former, the end for the latter). As already stressed, Rome was always highly atypical, however. Its curia building, on the Foro Romano, was still used by the Senate into the late sixth century (it was converted into a church after 625), and its monuments maintained for a long time an intensity of symbolic meaning and state-supported protection, which those of other cities could never match. All the same, many were in decay by 500—there were simply too many to maintain—and one of the fora, that of Augustus, even though it adjoined those of Nerva and Trajan, was already a quarry in the sixth century.
Fora in Italy maintained a spatial centrality. Many had become markets by the ninth or tenth centuries at the latest, as with Brescia, Milan, Pavia, Florence; others may have done (we do not have the documents elsewhere), and most remained at least open spaces, although these were usually rather smaller than in classical times, that is, substantially encroached on (even if this did not necessarily occur in our period). But it is likely that they began to lose their monumentality by or before the Gothic war, sometimes substantially earlier, much as in Africa. Interestingly, Italian curiae seem to have survived longer than in Africa; although they had long since vanished from building inscriptions, they are regarded as normal in the Variae, and some (as at Ravenna, Rieti, or Naples) are referred to after 550 in documents and letters. We cannot, that is to say, conclude that a demonumentalized forum automatically means that a curia no longer existed. But it is likely, all the same, that the latter were much less important; by 550 practical power in cities was in the hands of bishops, local senators, and other notables, whether or not there was still a curia.
Italian archaeologists invented the term citta ad isole already cited, and there are some cities in the peninsula where some spatial destructuring undoubtedly occurred, following on from the monumental weakening of forum areas. Brescia may be one example, with a cathedral-curtis ducalis area in the south-west of the city separated from the public (later monastic) area in the north-east by a decaying and underpopulated forum area. Lucca has been canvassed as another, given the apparently early weakening of the forum area (in the second and third centuries), with a late Roman refocusing of the city in the cathedral area in its south-east corner, and, by the eighth century, a wide array of churches in the city’s suburbs as alternative settlement foci, with open areas between them.
A third example of fragmentation is certainly Rome, whose third-century walls included after c.600 only perhaps a twentieth of its late Roman population, grouped, as it would appear from recent work, in a set of what could be called urban villages, maybe as many as a dozen, held together by a common politics and, probably, a continuing ritual of processions across the old classical centre. Brescia and Rome are parallels to the fragmented tendencies of some of the African cities, and indeed Rome is a better example than any of them, although a dangerous one to generalize from, given the huge space inside its walls. How typical they were is, all the same, not clear. Cities fragment because their centres have become less powerful, because new foci, like churches on the edge of town and outside city walls, become more important, and, crucially, because their demography and urban economic activities become too weak to root all these foci in the same urban fabric. My sense of the evidence for Italian cities is that in the case of those which maintained their political importance—as in almost all of the examples cited above—they maintained that essential level of coherence in their urban structure. We have the surviving street plans; we have no cases in Italy of the closed-off urban fortresses documented for some cities in Africa. We have eighth-century evidence of urban artisans (goldsmiths, cauldron-makers, and others) for Lucca, of urban subdivisions for Lucca and Ravenna. And, of course, we have the evidence of the urban aristocrats—the source of demand for the artisans—which fits with what else we know about Italian cities. All of these mark a tendency towards the maintenance of a considerable degree of urban vitality, at least in the successful cities of the peninsula; hence, probably, their continued spatial coherence. The survival of fora as market areas probably reflects that economic vitality, but would have further reinforced the continuing coherence of the urban fabric.
Conversely, it must be repeated that the material poverty of Italian cities cannot be denied. Italy’s new two-storeyed buildings simply mark changes in the way prosperous town-dwellers wished to live, and represent themselves to others, in the same way that the fortified houses of Sbeıtla and Belalis Maior do; they are signs of vitality, not weakness. But they are a minority. The subdivided houses and the wooden buildings built precariously on Roman foundations show a clear technological involution, which is greater than that visible in Africa. Italian cities, one can propose, maintained a greater density of settlement and structural coherence than did those of Africa, but that density by now consisted of buildings that were very different from those normal in cities elsewhere in the Mediterranean, and indeed much poorer. It has been argued elsewhere in this book that Italy was substantially damaged by the Gothic and Lombard wars, more seriously than any other region was harmed by war in our period apart from, perhaps, the seventh-century Byzantine heartland. After c.600 Italian aristocracies, although still city-dwelling, were also much less rich in their landed property than those of, in particular, Francia. Italy’s cities maintained their classical spatial structure, but were unusually poor, in the same way that Italy’s political and territorial structures changed rather less than those of elsewhere, and its aristocrats changed their habits less than elsewhere, but were all much poorer.
The seventh-century crisis in the Byzantine heartland produced a process in which the continuing force of the state, and the attraction of its hierarchies, accelerated the abandonment of most of its classical cities, with urban elites concentrating in a smaller number of centres. This process did not occur in Italy, whether Byzantine or Lombard; here, by contrast, cities tended only to fail in economically marginal areas like the southern Appennines, the Alps, or the underpopulated coast of southern Tuscany. In richer areas they persisted in, at times, quite dense networks, as with the southern Exarchate and Pentapolis in the Byzantine lands, or northern Tuscany in the Lombard lands. The reorganization of the Byzantine state in its heartland was much more centralized than in Italy; the various sectors of Byzantine power in the peninsula were arguably more conservative than in the Aegean and Anatolian areas, and also steadily drifted away from imperial control. The local state was weaker as well; tax-raising slowly broke down even in Byzantine areas, as it had done in the Lombard kingdom by 600, thus further decreasing the economic hegemony of even local power centres, Rome or Ravenna or Naples. There was thus no obvious reason for a notable from (say) Senigallia to be tempted to relocate to (say) Ravenna, and even less for any such ‘rationalization’ to take place in the Lombard lands.
City elites, whether rich or poor, stayed in their own cities, and their heirs would eventually act as the core of the autonomous city-based polities of later centuries, urban polities which had no parallel either in the states of the southern and eastern Mediterranean or in the fragmented rural lordships of tenth-century Francia. Urban Italy was thus both materially poor and culturally conservative in the early middle ages. Signs of this are the praise-poems for Milan (739) and Verona (c.800), which are highly unusual in the centuries after 600 as specific panegyrics of the fabric of cities, with few parallels anywhere in the former empire. (Constantinople and Rome both have them, although in each case they are peculiar texts, with no generic parallels. Alcuin’s poem on York spends most of its space on the qualities of local bishops, and very little on the urban fabric. The only other example known to me is the Anglo- Saxon poem The Ruin, a nostalgic evolution of barely comprehensible glory.) They praise the walls, the forum, the streets, an aqueduct (in Milan), the amphitheatre (in Verona), and the network of churches in both, in the same way that late Roman panegyrists like Ausonius and Sidonius had—the only novelty was the churches, generally ignored in the late Roman tradition. But, as we have seen, they lied about the state of the fora: the classical image they sought to present evidently did not have to have be directly reflected on the ground. Whether this was simply self-deception, or else, more specifically, the tunnel vision of a rich minority, does not really matter; the fact is that, in cities of mud and poor wooden buildings, it was possible to talk as if the buildings of imperial Rome were still standing.
Paul the Deacon at the end of the eighth century, too, expressed the devastation of a seventh-century epidemic at Pavia in terms of vegetation being allowed to grow on the forum and plateae of the city: an image of the country invading the city which has exact parallels in the later Roman empire, but which was still resonant in the very different material world of the early middle ages in Italy. Italian conservatism maintained classical civic ideals, and thus, by extension, the concept of urban living for its elites, through the greatest economic crisis in the history of the peninsula. These ideals were still operative in the period of economic revival, and acute political decentralization, which can be clearly seen in the eleventh century at the latest.”
- Chris Wickham, Framing The Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800 (London: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 649-656
