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Continuitists, catastrophists, and the towns of post-Roman northern Italy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 August 2013

Bryan Ward-Perkins
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‘continuisti’, catastrofisti e la città dell'italia settentrionale post-romana

Negli ultimi quindici anni si è sviluppato un vivace dibattito sulla natura delle città nell'Italia settentrionale post-Romana. Tale discussione ha avuto luogo poichè resti di questo periodo rinvenuti in recenti scavi urbani si sono rivelati sistematicamente poco appariscenti. In questo articolo l'autore discute i principali articoli e libri — elencati e brevemente descritti in bibliografia — che hanno contribuito al dibattito. In particolare viene evidenziato che, sebbene gli studiosi tendono a giungere a conclusioni molto diverse su quanto ‘urbanizzate’ le città post-romane fossero, di fatto hanno molto in comune per quanto riguarda i dati specifici in discussione. L'autore ipotizza che la differenza nelle conclusioni raggiunte dagli studiosi è dovuta in gran parte alle diverse aspettative su cosa una ‘città’ dovrebbe essere. Tale divergenza è stata incoraggiata dalla natura molto diversa dell'evidenza materiale e dei testi scritti e dalle differenze in aspettativa tra romanisti e medievisti, tra autori italiani e britannici e tra storici ed archeologi. Le città dell'Italia post-romana si sono rivelate un vivace campo di battaglia nel più ampio dibattito sulla natura della ‘Dark Age’.

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Papers of the British School at Rome , Volume 65 , November 1997 , pp. 157 - 176
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Copyright © British School at Rome 1997

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References

1 Some of the ideas I express here have already been given a brief airing in Ward-Perkins, B., ‘Urban continuity?’, in Christie, N. and Loseby, S.T. (eds), Towns in Transition. Urban Evolution in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Aldershot, Scolar Press, 1996), at pp. 11–13Google Scholar. The geographical area I am covering is basically the Po plain and Tuscany, with the occasional glance as far south as Rome. One detail of presentation in the present article needs explaining: references are given in full in the text or footnotes, except for those works marked by an asterisk (thus: *Brogiolo, 1993). These are listed, by date of publication, in the bibliography of principal works discussed, given at the end of the article. This article is intended to be the first in a series of review and discussion articles in Papers of the British School at Rome covering major themes in Italian studies.

2 Dabrowska, M., Leciejewicz, L., Tabaczynska, E. and Tabaczynski, S., ‘Castelseprio, Scavi diagnostici 1962–1963’, Sibrium 14 (1978–1979), 1–138Google Scholar; Leciejewicz, L., Tabaczynska, E. and Tabaczynski, S., Torcello. Scavi 1961–62 (Rome, 1977)Google Scholar.

3 Luna, (modern Luni): Ward-Perkins, B., ‘Two Byzantine houses at Luni’, Papers of the British School at Rome 49 (1981), 91–8Google Scholar. Brescia: *Brogiolo, 1984 and *Brogiolo, 1993. Verona: *La Rocca Hudson, 1986.

4 Ward-Perkins, ‘Two Byzantine houses’ (above, n. 3).

5 *Hodges and Whitehouse, 1983: 32; *Carandini, 1994: 28 ‘i sintomi … dell'agonia delle città’.

6 *Wickham, 1989: 146 (he is here seeking to pass back the ‘burden of proof’ in response to a challenge set by *Hodges and Whitehouse, 1983, at p. 53).

7 This change is the theme of * Ward-Perkins, 1984.

8 See the map in *Ward-Perkins, 1988: 17, fig. 6; but note Gelichi in *Francovich and Noyé, 1994: 569, fig. 1, for an improved version for Emilia-Romagna.

9 See, most recently, Harrison, D., The Early State and the Towns. Forms of Integration in Lombard Italy (Lund University Press, 1993), chaps V and VIGoogle Scholar.

10 *Ward-Perkins, 1984: chaps 4, 8 and 9; *Brogiolo, 1993: 55-65, for the ducal palace at Brescia.

11 *Brogiolo, in press.

12 For Rome, stressing the continuity rather than the slump: Coates-Stephens, R., ‘Dark age architecture in Rome’, in this same volume of Papers of the British School at RomeGoogle Scholar.

13 *Carandini, 1994: 31–3 favours an eleventh-century date for the re-emergence of real towns.

14 *Brogiolo, in press. Admittedly the apparently total disappearance of domus-type aristocratic houses is puzzling; since rich landed aristocrats certainly lived in towns from as early as charters survive to document their presence (from the eighth century in Lucca, a little later elsewhere), and since rulers undoubtedly continued to enjoy some domestic luxuries, like private bath-suites. Indeed eighth- and ninth-century charters occasionally describe private houses with balnea (*Ward-Perkins, 1984: 146–8). But, as yet, no early medieval house with such sophistications as a marble or mosaic floor, a hypocaust, or a bath-building has been uncovered. (I have recently been told that an imposing ninth-century house has now been excavated in the forum area of Rome; but I have not seen it, and it is, as yet, unpublished.)

15 For instance *Brogiolo, 1984: 52-3; and Brogiolo in *Francovich and Noyé, 1994: 562.

16 *Ward-Perkins, 1988: 20; *La Rocca Hudson, 1986: 53–9. I have been a particular exponent of the argument that the survival of a Roman street-pattern (which is quite common in northern Italy) is evidence of continuous fairly dense settlement in the post-Roman period: *Ward-Perkins, 1984: 180; *Ward-Perkins, 1988: 20. This argument was already criticized, on the basis of excavated north Italian evidence, by Brogiolo (*1987: 31–5); and I have now retracted it in part, having become aware of evidence from Rhodes and Antioch, which shows that former street-patterns can survive very well in an entirely rural environment: Ward-Perkins, B., ‘Can the survival of an ancient town-plan be used as evidence of dark-age urban life?’, in Manasse, G. Cavalieri and Roffia, E. (eds), Splendida Civitas Nostra. Studi archeologici in onore di Antonio Frova (Rome, Quasar, 1995), 223–9Google Scholar.

17 The choice of wood can be culturally and environmentally determined, and in no way indicative of economic stringency, as housing in much of modern North America and Scandinavia shows. But the wooden houses of early medieval Italy are scarcely very sophisticated in construction, and both rulers in their palaces and saints in their churches always preferred to dwell in solid mortared buildings (often inherited from Antiquity). It is therefore very apposite to consider whether there was some survival of a domestic building tradition more impressive than the Brescia houses.

18 *Ward-Perkins, 1988: 21; *Carandini, 1994: 30 ‘qualche rara casa è ancora, almeno in parte, di pietra (seppure in tecnica orripilante, come a Verona)’; *Brogiolo, in press, ‘edifici … costruiti di recupero legati con terra e pochissima malta’.

19 *Carandini, 1994 is particularly rich in belittling alternatives to casa (which he does also use): ‘capanna/hut’, ‘casetta/houselet’, ‘casupola/hovel’, ‘costruzione di tipo rurale/building of rural type“, as well as the neutral ‘struttura/structure’.

20 Brogiolo (*1984: 50) refers to the Luni ‘houses’ as ‘capanne di legno’; though by the time of *Brogiolo, in press, he has softened his language to ‘case di VI secolo’.

21 *Wickham, 1981: 81–2.

22 *Carandini, 1994: 28 ‘Un minimo di attività intensiva e di decoro è essenziale alla città e dove essa manca, come accade oggi in alcuni centri nordamericani, la città muore o si traduce in quegli insediamenti di case con giardini dei sobborghi, che sembrano delle campagne concentrate più che delle città vere e proprie’.

23 See, for instance, the papers by Jarnut, and Gasparri, in Società e Storia 46 (1989)Google Scholar; and Harrison, The Early State and the Towns (above, n. 9).

24 Thinking along these lines is very evident in the works of Brogiolo, who knows well and confronts the textual evidence, and in *Hodges and Whitehouse, 1983, who totally ignore the written sources for Italy but explicitly challenge them elsewhere (for example, on pp. 83–5, in relation to northern Europe). The title of Carandini's article (*1994), ‘… secondo un archeologo’, also takes up the theme — unsurprisingly, since he has spent much of his career battling against ancient historians reluctant to accept the evidence of pot-sherds.

25 This comparative approach is central to my article, *Ward-Perkins, 1988.

26 Kennedy, H., ‘From polis to madina: urban change in late antique and early Islamic Syria’, Past and Present 106 (1985), 3–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an analysis and critique of part of his argument, see Ward-Perkins, B., ‘Urban survival and urban transformation in the eastern Mediterranean’, in Brogiolo, G.P. (ed.), Città altomedievali nel Mediterraneo occidentale (Mantua, Padus, in press)Google Scholar.

27 *Carandini, 1994: 28 ‘La crescita sproporzionata e desolante della stratificazione (per il degrado dello smaltimento delle acque), i crolli degli edifici pubblici, privati e dei servizi (strade, acquedotti e fogne), le rare capanne o casupole collegate da poveri percorsi e scorciatoie, gli accumuli dei rifiuti (l'idea stessa di pulizia è scomparsa), i riporti di terra per le colture, i terreni abbandonati (le famose “terre nere”) e le tombe relative ai nuclei rimasti abitati sono i sintomi principali dell'agonia delle città’.

28 The information on Brescia is collected and presented in *Brogiolo, 1993.

29 There is also a notable difference between British and Italian scholars in their discussions of the role of the Lombards in urban change. The British (for instance Wickham and Ward-Perkins) view early medieval Italy as a single socio-economic unit subject only to slow and generalized ‘Braudelian’ change, whereas some Italians (for instance, Brogiolo throughout his works, and Delogu in his foreword to *Francovich and Noyé, 1994) follow historical fashion in Italy, and see the settlement of the Lombards and the subsequent Lombard-Byzantine wars as very significant in the decline of towns. The British are perhaps stuck in a thought world of the 1960s, which shunned the event and the individual as a significant force in History; while some Italians may be reluctant to accept that their ancestors abandoned romanità without a big shove from the North.

30 *Carandini, 1994: 32: ‘Agli inizi del IX secolo la città era occupata da poche decine di migliaia di persone, per lo più povere’. The ‘mostly poor’ is typical of the rhetoric of his article, and, I think, unhelpful, since it could probably be said with equal justification of Augustan or renaissance Rome.

31 Darby, H.C., Domesday England (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977), 302–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Ginatempo, M. and Sandri, L., L'Italia delle città. Il popolamento urbano tra medioevo e rinascimento (secoli XIII-XVI) (Florence, Le Lettere), especially p. 195, prospetto 1 and first cartinaGoogle Scholar.

33 See, for example, the title of the recent book Towns in Transition. Urban Evolution in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (above, n. 1), where ‘transition’ is strictly neutral and ‘evolution’ perhaps slightly positive in tone; or the chapter on ‘Urban change …’ in Cameron, A., The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity AD 395–600 (London and New York, Routledge, 1993), 152–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Carver, M.O.H., Arguments in Stone. Archaeological Research and the European Town in the First Millennium (Oxford, Oxbow Monographs 29, 1993), 50Google Scholar. The text is seriously marred by spelling mistakes and other evidence of having been rushed. For a useful critique of its arguments, see Halsall, G., ‘Towns, societies and ideas: the not-so-strange case of late Roman and early Merovingian Metz’, in Christie, and Loseby, (eds), Towns in Transition (above, n. 1), 235–61Google Scholar.

35 *Wickham, 1989: 147–8; Wickham, C., ‘L'Italia e l'alto medioevo’, Archeologia Medievale 15 (1988), 110 and 121–3Google Scholar.

36 From one footnote (*Carandini, 1994: 25, n. 19) it would seem that the author, an ex-Marxist, is also keen to use his article to distance himself from his former political loyalties. With some possible justification, but with quite a cheek from someone who spent years arguing for the ‘slave mode of production’, Carandini accuses Wickham of being overinfluenced in his work by ‘ideological leanings towards Communism’ (‘una inclinazione ideologica communistica’).

37 Wickham in his summary of the proceedings (*Francovich and Noyé, 1994: 742–7) has become markedly less ‘optimistic’. For instance, he now accepts that the prevalence of wooden housing should be seen as evidence of economic decline, not of cultural change. On the other hand, Brogiolo's article (at pp. 555–66) has a much less apocalyptic tone than some of his earlier work.

38 Brogiolo's recent work has begun to produce a more precise and nuanced picture of change.

39 If scholars do move on, it is strongly to be hoped that they do not leave unpublished their earlier research projects. Only Brogiolo has a good record of pushing his sites to full publication.

40 Work on this period in the Mediterranean would also be helped by a wealth of comparative material from northern Europe, where several decades of archaeological work have already transformed our knowledge of the growth of towns from the eighth century onwards. For some very promising preliminary results from Rome and Venice: Paroli, L. and Delogu, P. (eds), La storia economica di Roma nell'alto medioevo alla luce dei recenti scavi (Florence, All'Insegna del Giglio, 1993)Google Scholar; and the preliminary reports of excavations behind San Pietro in Castello in Venice, Quaderni di Archeologia del Veneto 7 (1991, pp. 92–103)Google Scholar and 9 (1993, pp. 72–80).

41 The fierce tone of this article is exceptional in what has been in general a good-tempered series of exchanges. The tone can probably be explained by the fact that, even more than British archaeologists, Italians are fiercely territorial over their data. One positive feature of the early medieval towns debate has been the way that it has drawn a number of archaeologists out of the bunker of their own particular regione, or even provincia. However, crossing into another person's patch is still a delicate and dangerous business. It must also be said that the archaeology of some towns, including the very important sites of Aquileia and Ravenna, continues to operate as if the world outside simply did not exist.