In March 537, outside the walls of Rome, Gothic soldiers under King Witigis broke open the aqueducts feeding the city. The water stopped, and so did the grain mills the water turned.
No mills meant no flour, and no flour meant no bread for a population under siege. Belisarius, the Byzantine general holding Rome, built mills on rafts in the Tiber so the current would turn the wheels.
Situations like this epitomized what the end of Rome looked like for the poor and needy. One day you have bread, the next you don’t, all at the whims of kings and generals.
What came after Rome’s end varied from place to place across its vast empire. In Britain, the material world came apart so thoroughly that people ended up living much worse than their pre-Roman ancestors, while in places like the Syrian hills, peasant villages found themselves much better off.
Bowls get worse
Roman Britain employed a vast factory system, in which wheel-thrown pottery was produced in industrial kilns in Oxfordshire and the New Forest and shipped to farmhouses a hundred miles away. Roads and a working currency made it worthwhile for potters to fire ten thousand bowls instead of ten.
That factory system couldn’t sustain itself for long after 410. The kilns went cold, and British households returned to low-quality handmade pots fired over open bonfires. Their own ancestors had given up this approach centuries earlier.
This drop in quality has led historians like Bryan Ward-Perkins (The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, 2005) to argue that people in Britain actually reverted to pre-Iron Age living conditions.
The coins support this story. Bronze nummi (small change for everyday transactions) stopped being struck at Trier, Arles and Lyons around 395. The Rome mint issued its last SALVS REI PVBLICAE nummi in 402. Philippa Walton and Sam Moorhead’s 2006 survey of late Roman bronze in Britain notes that “only a handful of nummi are known to have arrived” in the decade after that.
Post-Roman buildings follow a similar pattern, with stone, mortar, and roof tiles disappearing from the record and being replaced by thatch and wood.
Even the animals shrank during this period. Bones from British sites show cattle getting smaller during the transition, returning to Iron Age dimensions. The selective breeding that produced big Roman beasts only paid when there was somewhere to sell the meat.
Where Nothing Fell
Britain’s collapse was not the same as the Roman world’s collapse.
In the limestone hills east of Antioch, between what are now Aleppo and Idlib, roughly 700 cut-stone villages went while the western empire fell apart. Forty of these villages were listed by UNESCO in 2011.
The money came from olive oil sold into a Mediterranean market that hardly noticed the western empire was gone.
Farmers there built houses with carved doorframes, cisterns and bathhouses, and most of the sites were not abandoned until sometime between the eighth and tenth centuries. Peasants in Syria were at their wealthiest after Rome fell in Italy.
The Enemy Are Kinder Than The Tax Collectors
Around the 440s, a priest in Marseille named Salvian wrote a book arguing that Rome had brought everything that was happening to it upon itself. His evidence was that Romans were fleeing the empire to the “barbarians”
The passages below are Eva M. Sanford’s translation of Salvian’s Latin, published in 1930.
“So you find men passing over everywhere, now to the Goths, now to the Bagaudae, or whatever other barbarians have established their power anywhere, and they do not repent of their expatriation, for they would rather live as free men, though in seeming captivity, than as captives in seeming liberty.”
Salvian believed they were fleeing the tax system. Rome taxed the countryside hard to keep a professional army in the field. Taxes were collected by town councilors, who were personally liable for any shortfall, giving them every reason to squeeze.
“They seek among the barbarians the Roman mercy, since they cannot endure the barbarous mercilessness they find among the Romans,” Salvian wrote. About the poor he was blunter. “To such men the enemy are kinder than the tax collectors.”
He also claimed the flight was permanent.
“Hence all the Romans in that region have but one desire, that they may never have to return to the Roman jurisdiction. It is the unanimous prayer of the Roman people in that district that they may be permitted to continue to lead their present life among the barbarians.”
Citizenship itself had gone from an asset to a liability, in his account. “Hence the name of Roman citizen, once not only much valued but dearly bought, is now voluntarily repudiated and shunned.
The Year The Sun Went Out
In 536 the sun dimmed over Europe and the Mediterranean for more than a year.
Three officials wrote it down as it happened. Procopius is quoted here in H. B. Dewing’s 1916 translation from the Greek, Cassiodorus in Thomas Hodgkin’s 1886 translation from the Latin, and Michael the Syrian in J. B. Chabot’s of 1901.
Procopius recorded that “the sun gave forth its light without brightness” and that “it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse.”
Cassiodorus, running the civil service for the Ostrogothic king in Italy, described rays turned “bluish,” a noon that cast no shadow, and a year of “a winter without storms, a spring without mildness, and a summer without heat.”
Michael the Syrian wrote that “the sun was darkened and that its eclipse lasted a year and a half.”
The physical record agrees with these statements. Irish oak shows almost no growth rings for 536 and another collapse in 542, as documented by the dendrochronologist Mike Baillie.
Greenland and Antarctic ice both carry heavy sulfate deposits dated to 534, give or take two years, the signature of a volcanic dust veil. Ulf Büntgen and colleagues named the cold stretch that followed the Late Antique Little Ice Age in Nature Geoscience in 2016, running it from 536 to roughly 660.
Peasants recorded the same event in the only terms that mattered to them. The Annals of Ulster note “a failure of bread in AD 536.” The Annals of Inisfallen extend it, reporting “a failure of bread from AD 536 to 539.”
Plague arrived five years after the dust veil, in 541, and returned in waves for two centuries. Mortality figures for it are contested, and it is still argued over whether it killed a third of the eastern Mediterranean or a far smaller share.
What Was Left
The institution that survived to organize daily life was the Church. Bishops took over functions that town councils had held, such as feeding the poor and settling disputes, and by the seventh century the parish was the unit to which an ordinary person belonged.
Writing was the loss nobody disputes. Roman walls carry casual graffiti scratched by bakers and prostitutes and bored schoolboys. Afterward literacy pulled back into monasteries and clerical households and stayed there for centuries.
Latin itself came apart in the mouths of the people still speaking it, splitting over several hundred years into Romance languages.
The clearest record of what ordinary European working life amounted to was kept accidentally in Greenland.
Lead released by European smelters, which tracks mining and minting and the economy that required both, peaked in the first two centuries of the empire at nearly four times the level of the late Republic. A 2018 study in PNAS, drawing on more than 21,000 chemical measurements, found that emissions fell when the Antonine Plague hit in 165 and did not return.
“The high lead emissions of the Pax Romana ended exactly at that time and didn’t recover until the early Middle Ages more than 500 years later,” said Andrew Wilson, the Oxford archaeologist on the team.
