Why the Fall of Rome set Europe back 1,000 years (with Bryan Ward-Perkins)

welcome to the toll stone podcast i'm garrett ryan and i'm joined today by professor brian ward perkins professor ward perkins who has been in oxford for many years studies late antiquity the period that includes among much else the decline and fall of the western roman empire over the course of his career he studied everything from the cities of late roman italy to the cult of the saints but to non-specialists he's most familiar as the author of the 2005 book the fall of rome and the end of civilization unlike most books with such dire titles his book focuses less on why rome collapsed than what happened um when the empire began to decline and so other talk about that book today with professor ward perkins and more generally about how archaeological evidence illuminates and illustrates our understanding of asian history so professor ward perkins welcome to the program thank you i'm very nice to be here oh and likewise this is a pleasure for me as well i find this a wonderfully fascinating period to explore um and so i wanted to begin by by saying so the subtitle of your book is the end of civilization um the collapse of this intricate and fragile world at once cultural material that have been sustained in some important ways by the existence of the western roman empire yearbook explores the evidence for that worlds that systems demise and i want to start by asking how much seemingly unassuming potsherds and clay tiles can tell us about the consequences of rome's fall okay well i should first of all start by saying that i began life as both a historian and an archaeologist so i've worked in the field quite a lot and the most extraordinary thing that you notice when you're dealing with roman sites and then post roman sites is the extraordinary decline in just the quantities of evidence roman sites produce masses of stuff and for instance field survey where you walk over fields looking for sights roman sites are very easy to find there are tiles all over the place there are shiny bits of pot for you to pick up whereas early medieval sites which are mainly made of wood with very little pottery incredibly difficult to find you can actually chart rural settlements in the roman period in large parts of the empire very accurately you can't do that in the early middle ages because the quantities of stuff drop off but it's not just quantities pots are very very good indicators of economic sophistication because you don't make a lot of money making an individual pot you might you know if you're picasso but i'm in an ordinary domestic pot cells are very little they're difficult to transport they're heavy they're easy to break uh so in a sense they're not they're sort of basic goods uh and crucially looking at them carefully you can see how they've been made have they been made on a fast wheel are they standardized in size are they glazed uh effectively and efficiently and to a standardized way uh all those sorts of things are indicators and furthermore you can even tell where pots were made because often we have the kiln site with the wasters and specific types come from specific kiln sites and then if you're in any doubt you can do a petrological analysis and actually look at the clay and look at the inclusions in the clay and work out where that clay came from so from pots you can tell where they're made what sort of quantities they're made in how standardized are they and what is the quality and then crucially what is their distribution and in the roman period there are massive massive pottery industries producing hundreds of thousands indeed millions of pots to standardize tights and distributing them very widely all over the mediterranean in the late roman period from north africa particularly but also even in a province like britain which is obviously slightly less developed there were substantial pottery industries which were producing these goods to in large quantities and crucially to a very very high standard that pretty much goes in the post-german period in britain it absolutely goes there are no pottery industries after about 450 at the very latest in the mediterranean people do continue to make pots but the large-scale pottery industries like that of north africa completely disappear the quantities drop off dramatically and also the quality drops off dramatically i mean and the nice thing about pottery is it is a basic good and i think you can reasonably argue that if you have a complex pottery industry you probably well i would i would actually say certainly got uh industries that are producing things like shoes clothes furniture other basic things which don't happen to survive so well in the soil because i should have said the other wonderful thing about pottery it survives unbelievably well it's a decent piece of pot is virtually indestructible i think one can probably say with some confidence that 99 of the pots that were ever made in the roman world exist in bits somewhere uh it's it's very very durable well i i believe it i once i remember i was walking in alexandria troas um you know by china calais and it's not been excavated um so it's just you know olive orchards and you know wheat fields but uh the farmer had tilled his fields recently and you could barely see soil it was just a sea of roman pottery every step was crunch crunch crunch you must have been hundreds of thousands i could see you know within those few acres i was walking um and it is so you know i guess you know for me um what astonishes me so much is how uh by our standards an underdeveloped economy can produce so much um and how it's i guess profitable really for people to make this low-cost good for what seems to be a mass market yeah no i mean that and it it is the only explanation there has to be an effective market and an effective distribution system and as i say pots are not easy to move because they're heavy and they're friable so if you can move pots over hundreds of kilometers you'll be moving other stuff as well i mean we do know about other stuff from documentary evidence but sadly i mean things like clothing and leather unless unless you've got a waterlogged deposits they don't survive at all but i would say that pots are a very very good indicator of all of a whole range of goods basic goods and crucially they're not these are not aristocratic items you actually find them in peasant contexts in the middle of the countryside they're distributed very very widely it's something i was struck by when reading your book that you know obviously in the middle ages there's a luxury market that survives to some degree in various sorts of goods you know like oh you know uh gold belt buckles you know or you know a few finely made pieces of jewelry but it's this mass market that vanishes you know the market for the middle and lower end um and i think that's one of the things that feels most modern about the roman economy that it has this again a consumer element that we almost don't expect i suppose looking at it from the modern world no absolutely i mean in the early middle ages there are some wonderful things are made i mean you only have to look at the sutton who ship burial which is of around 625 in britain and the jewelry is magnificent with inlaid garnet croissant work and the other thing that they make which is spectacular is very very fine weaponry but very fine weaponry for the absolute elite in the roman period you have lots and lots of very basic swords made for legionaries but in the early middle ages you have these spectacular pattern-welded swords made for this the extreme aristocracy and actually the assumption and i'm sure it's correct is that uh people at a lower level at the very best they've got a spear because the bit of iron at the top of a spear is not very much iron uh whereas in the roman period you've got you know all legionaries have a sword they probably have body armor as well i mean the scale is just completely different and there is this spectacular uh craftsmanship going on but at a super elite level you know i remember i was at a sardis i believe and there were the remains of a late roman factory there was claimed to be a armaments factory of some sort that was run for the army and we know these things existed from the other the no titian and atatium for example these you know state-run factories um and it is remarkable it's not factories in the industrial sense not like there's clanking gears or anything but there are groups of people performing specialized tasks to mass-produce these goods things like swords or shoes or whatever else for the legions and then shipping them um often very impressive distances as you were saying yes no so that's very interesting because there are there are there are state-run enterprises right for the army but for instance something like pottery uh the state has no interest in pottery that's actually market uh i mean this is an an issue that's much debated you know to what extent does the roman economy actually run by the state and making things for the state i'm very much on a wing which is a lot of people are on that wing as well saying there is actually a very substantial market in the modern sense i mean unaffected affected by the state in certain ways because the state for instance maintains ports mainly for its own purposes the state builds roads for its own purposes the state produces coinage which it needs for taxation and the state crucially provides peace and so there are it says it were dependent on the state but it is actually i mean exactly like our markets are dependent on state um but there is an independent market force at work right yeah that the way of putting it at this state you know protects and facilitates but it is not the economy it's just the container of the economy in some sense yes and i would argue that actually the fact that the state can run factories in order to make weapons and as it were clothing for the military is precisely because the wider economy can sustain that kind of thing the state actually needs the wider economy just like the wider economy needs the state which is exactly like today right right i mean if our economy collapses uh the state uh has to shrink as we are all witnessing at the very present yeah right yeah the the grim part of that symbiosis yes it's not a cheerful moment oh yes that's probably why i i always wonder why the fall of rome is so popular and i think there's just this perennial echo where people look to you know the most ethical collapse of the western memory i guess but i would have said the thought of rome should cheer us up very considerably because the nature of the economic collapse at the end of the roman empire we have seen nothing remotely like that now okay we should fear the possibility of that happening but we have not seen anything remotely like it so we can be cheerful oh yes that is that is heartening uh we're not back to friable pottery yet right um but uh but anyway so to return to the we were saying about the roman economy and this is sort of the debate about its nature i know there was you know at least a couple decades ago this you know one of these cloister debates about you know how how primitive or modern roman economy was how embedded it was and social structures um and that seems to been resolved in i guess kind of the compromise modernist style direction where people seem to think there was growth in the roman economy over time albeit slow growth um and that it function as you said with state enterprise moving alongside in many ways contained by private enterprise um so i wanted to ask kind of a sense of general scale you know the size of their own roman economy is by pre-modern standards quite impressive again as attested by pottery and other material records and so i guess at what point in your opinion after the fall does the european economy reattain um its roman levels if we can judge that from any metric it's a very complex question of course no no it's it's a very interesting question uh i mean if you if you take pottery it's a long time afterwards uh one's talking about you know after a thousand uh but maybe pottery isn't a good enough indicator um it's it's really difficult to tell but you're certainly talking centuries afterwards and that i mean britain the collapse is particularly dramatic and the first uh wheel turned pottery is only made in the 700s so that's sort of 250 and that's the first and these are very small industries much more of local than the roman ones and really the sort of quantities of material you know i would say 11th 12th century so i mean that's that's pretty dramatic yes yeah but and italy too uh i mean i've worked a lot in italy um you know you dig a roman site and the you know that you you filled fines trays with bits of pot and you've got too much frankly i mean you know you've got a problem processing the stuff you have no problem processing material in the sixth seventh eighth ninth uh probably again eleventh twelfth that you start to get that but of course there are one or one would say you know well actually that's only one indicator so it's difficult but certainly centuries wow yeah i mean that is uh an impressive uh divot you know in the economic curve and you know we've spoken about pottery as this this wonderful proxy for economic health and economic activity what are some other useful uh proxies in your opinion for for judging um how in the ecological record for how an economy is doing an economy and society are doing and i mentioned for example things like cow bones uh the size of like a cow femur for example as an indication of uh of such things yes i mean animal bones should be very very good uh because you can measure the size of the animal from the bones much more difficult which would really what we want to know which is the quantity of these animals uh with pottery as i say you can build up a sort of concept of quantity with bones it's so dependent on where they're throwing them away and how many people there are i mean but in my book actually i produce a little drawing which shows a pre-roman cow a roman cow and a post jamaica and the ramen cow is bigger than the cow before and afters i actually have got into a bit of trouble with that uh because the guy who's uh a statistical analyst uh he he contacted me and he said i'm deeply shocked by this drawing because what i'd done i had taken i've taken the length of the bones and the cow is taller definitely and we can say roman cows are taller but the drawing also shows that it's fatter i built it to the same size but larger and this statistical guy said well actually you can't prove that it's fatter it might have been a taller thinner cow which makes it a less efficient cow than than i draw so it's much more difficult with with other things though there is one thing which i use in my book which i think is and actually there's another thing i can think of now immediately i mean the thing i use in my book is tiles and bricks oh yes in many parts of europe there isn't much stone uh you need bricks i mean things like the poe valley or you know huge areas of britain i mean there just isn't stone so i mean brick is the most effective building material tiles make a very good durable roof you can make a roof with wooden shingles which are just wooden tiles or you can thatch a roof but it's nothing like as durable as a tiled roof i have a friend who works in india and he read my book and that was the thing he most liked was the fact that i said that you know tiled rose were good he said yes uh in india that's you know they say a real roof as opposed to you know one made out of perishable materials um and the romans made thailand brick in huge huge huge quantities and tile and brick is even that's heavier than pottery the amount of money you make from a brick or a tile is really very small uh in comparison to the effort of moving it but they move this stuff in massive quantities those industries just disappear i mean even admittedly in the mediterranean there's so much time and brick from the ramen period knocking around that they can keep reusing it all right but they more or less stop making new tyler brick and i think actually if i thought of when does that industry pick up it's probably 10th century do you start making uh you know large quantities of new bricks rather than using old roman ones i mean admittedly you've got the old rubber ones you might as well reuse them but it's actually more difficult reason using a brick because they come in different sizes so your mortar layers are all problematic whereas a nice standardized new brick you know put one there put one there put one there but one it's actually more efficient i remember i was taken aback when i first discovered that bricks were reused you know in the middle ages i was assumed that you know sure stone dress stone that makes sense but that they would take the trouble of you know stripping the mortar from bricks and reuse those in the walls i think really brings across um how much um techniques technologies have changed arguably that's what we should be doing now yeah right i guess yeah it's like for instance in i'm just i'm reading a book at the moment about immediately post-war germany i mean you know the german cities were just flattened um they're saving a lot of bricks and reusing them i mean it is actually a sensible thing to do as well yeah it makes sense i just you know yeah one of these things i assume is so labor-intensive it wouldn't be worthwhile yes well i suppose one of the problems is that these days the mortar is so hard that actually getting it off the brick would be not worth it whereas if you've got quite a nice soft lime mortar you can probably scrape it off so i think these days actually we've we've created that we've made a problem for ourselves to make it more difficult when we use them oh yeah well that portland cement right but uh um and uh and yes well we'll thank you for all that um you know i i think that i guess my imagination at least you know the most impressive proxy if you want to call it of all for the roman economy um are the cityscapes the public places of roman cities you know these grand often collinated for uh basilicas uh temples um which define in my imagination i'm sure mentioned imagination of many people um what uh classical city looks like and these spaces um seem to cease being maintained vanish effectively over the course of late antiquity in most parts of the empire and of course it's a very gradual transformation and it takes place for many reasons in many ways but i think you've gotten at one important part of it with your project on statues which examined you know the massive evidence for uh public statutes across the mediterranean world and from that data set um when and i guess how do you see these commemorative habits which are so closely tied to this idea of the classical city uh changing across the former roman world big question i know but big question we're moving in a rather different direction because this is really about kind of civic consciousness rather than about the economy the the thing is that cities are changed dramatically by the economy unquestionably but at the same time there is this internal political and sort of civic change about what a city is about i mean the roman city had this well i mean it's a it's a myth but it's a living myth of it being you know a center of civic politics where you have to have civic buildings to match that civic politics and you have to put up statues to people in order to honour them it is to some extent a myth in the imperial period uh because it's the idea that actually cities don't have much power the emperor has the power and the imperial officials have the power and actually the statues they put up are generally two imperial officials in order to flatter them and towards the end of antiquity that myth starts to crumble somewhat and they just stop bothering and also in terms of the civic spaces i mean as you say our image of a roman city is of a beautiful forum marble pavement columns a capitolium facing out a market building uh a building for the curia for the um civic officials that all does go but it is also true that in late antiquity they they moved their focus of patriots to churches and they started i mean something like saint peter's olsen peters is a was a very impressive building and that actually stood right the way through the early middle ages one shouldn't sort of underestimate the i mean there is a degree of continuity in places like rome um you know of impressive buildings that the old forum totally disappears but actually there's new focus of patronage around places like peters where peter was buried right which are i guess successors in many ways to those earlier classical public spaces you know if not an appearance at least in uh yes i mean they've got a totally different function because they're i mean they're all focused around the new religion and they're not civic in any way and if they're and they're not putting up statues to local benefactors i mean there but that's a that's a sort of political change that's running alongside an economic change yeah well and that's a very important distinction that i think i sort of abide in my question there um that right yeah so the cities always are by the imperial era an artifice a construct that continues from some sort of almost culture cultural inertia really into late antiquity the idea that a city should look a certain way and that whether it's because the economic changes the economic conditions change so much or the new religion whatever else changes thought ways so much that investment is no longer a worthwhile one to make and yes that's all right i guess that's important to qualify that the economic changes are part of this grander transformation but it is important to realize that cities are dramatically affected by economic transformation oh yes of course the best indicator for that actually would be to look at private housing i mean private housing in the roman period is solid uh i mean admittedly it varies a bit when you go to britain quite a lot of it's in wood but you'll always have quite a lot of impressive domestic housing that all disappears i mean even in italy which is a surprise it's remarkably difficult to find urban houses of the seventh eighth centuries um they're almost certainly almost entirely of wood and and also unquestionably the number of people living in cities drops i mean dramatically uh in britain cities disappear totally but the oppression is a bit of an outlier but i mean even in italy i don't think anybody would claim that many people were living in cities in the seventh century as there were in the fourth for instance and i mentioned this in the book um briefly about this apparent decline in general population as well as urban population i know this is hard to trace you know in the evidence because of course you're looking for things like elusive wooden houses and that friable medieval pottery whatever else but there does seem to be this you know demographic trough um in these centuries um is that still the consensus is an old idea that i'm spouting here or well as i say it's extraordinarily difficult to prove uh mainly because people in the post-roman centuries are so difficult to find so is it that we can't find them or are they not there but there are indications that areas of cultivated land shrink so i think most people would agree that there was a fall in population but it's impossible to quantify and actually impossible to prove categorically yeah that's so often right but okay uh that it is very interesting you're thinking about this this world that's changed so profoundly but we can kind of it's hard to put our finger on the pulse and exactly how it's changing um so speaking of your work in italy um on these different cities um so obviously you know across central northern italy cities change profoundly across say the four or five centuries of late antiquity but the city of rome itself um is perhaps the greatest example of at once change and i guess continuity in some ways um could you talk a bit about how the city of rome changes between say that the tetrarchic period you know say the year 300 and let's say you know the year 800 when you know charlemagne is showing up again a vast span of time i'm sorry to throw so much at you in one question no no that's fine yeah i mean rome was exceptional in the roman period much the largest city of the empire population possibly around a million we don't really know but a very very large population full of very wealthy aristocratic families uh sustaining uh the emperor in the fourth century stops living in rome he moves up near at the frontiers up to milan a place like tria uh in germany and that probably represents something of a dent in the prosperity of rome already in the fourth century then in the fifth century um does the crisis of the germanic invasions was the loss of control over provinces like gore britain and spain uh and crucially the loss of africa to the vandals uh in the 430s and unquestionably the wealth of rome shrinks it's still a very important city in in the fifth century we can tell that from the fact that there is the gradual rise of the papacy that the bishops of rome and they build some quite impressive buildings in the fifth century i mean the most obvious ones are santa maria maggiore which is a very large basilica and santo stefano rotonda which is of the 450s i mean those are impressive buildings in the 6th century there's probably another pretty serious crisis happens with the wars between the byzantines and the goths and rome is besieged on several occasions and probably the city drops it probably goes down in stages and by the end of the sixth century rome is i think nobody would disagree with the statement that by the end of the 6th century the population of rome has dropped dramatically from the high point in the empire i think people think you know i don't know maybe twenty thousand people even even that that small wow that's actually by medieval standards that's quite a large city oh right right uh it's just that you know some roman cities absolutely huge um and and rome is never unimportant and never completely depleted of wealth because they for instance can maintain the great basilicas that they've inherited uh some peters is the obvious one but the sao paulo foreign those are all kept standing throughout the middle ages and a host of other churches as well rome is the most important city of the west in the whole period it's just that in comparison to the roman period it's dramatically shrunk in scale and size and the things that have continuity are the churches only i mean the walls of rome are kept but then that's because uh they didn't really have the resources to build a more sensitive a lot of water a little smaller now i remember um my last time in rome i was there last year i was visiting um a santa prasa day right you know by sunday my shorty which of course dates to the early 9th century and you know it's a very nice church you know it has this wonderful mosaics now that that side chapel there but you know that was you know from what i've read um by the arabic in your in your own book by the arab standards a very impressive church and you compare that to santa maria maggiore and it's you know perhaps a quarter of the size you know it's tiny you know comparatively um i mean as you say by early 9th century standards that is a very impressive church sure right with mosaics to match it's only it's when you measure it against as you know as you know santa majori which is very very close by right you know that's that's when you start to realize that things have shrunk and i know you also say that uh in in britain for example you know a dark age or let's say seventh or eighth century britain um you know where when there is this project to build the first stone churches in several centuries and it was benedict bishop um who did this um it's a revolution a revelation to have these you know stone buildings again yeah what would a um you know incredible that something i guess to me that something like you know masonry could become you know uh an exciting technology but it did you know that had changed that much yes no no there is there is no there is no mortared brick or stone building uh in britain built between around 400 and wow that's you know 250 plus years it's a long time we're talking about a you know recession which is yes very long-lost very long-lasting yeah very deep i mean um and i don't know much about um early medieval british archaeology but i mean was there any urban occupation in this period that we know i know london itself was abandoned for centuries yes london's complex because uh when london is resettled they've moved west out of the city out of the roman city and they're building as it were there's a sort of port area outside but uh late 5th 6th century early 7th century i don't think there's anything in london wow the one city where some continuity of life is canterbury uh and it's and that's actually why uh when the christian missionaries arrive in 597 uh they actually establish the archbishopric in canterbury category oh i don't know anywhere else but uh when one says some continuity scattered small wooden houses that's what's been found so far i mean in britain effectively cities disappear well but then in britain i mean the other thing that disappears uh all over the empire uh most dramatically in britain is is um a low value denomination coinage all right which is hugely common in the roman period you can buy fourth century roman coins for very small sums of money today because there are so many millions of them around and i'm not exaggerating we're talking so many millions of these knocking around you can get a very nice little fourth century coin you can buy it for five pounds i mean it's not not difficult um so and in britain there is no coinage at all fifth sixth uh seventh century except for tiny bits of imported gold coinage which is super high prestige stuff a bit like the the swords right right on the continent copper coinage 2 effectively disappears there's a little bit of silver and some gold i mean the other thing which i could have mentioned earlier which i think is very interesting is the disappearance of iron it's it's hard to prove this because actually if you're digging a roman site with later uh deposits on it you will find iron in the later deposits but it might well be roman material that's been churned up in the soil and is therefore found work because whereas pots you can date because they change the types of pulp you can't date a nail if you find a nail there is no indication of how old it is but we do know for instance that in the late roman period in britain people were buried in coffins which were nailed together when you dig up these cemeteries and you find all these little nails and they're wearing shoes which have got little hobnails on them and you find that in hot nails i mean iron was just ubiquitous and nails are a very basic thing you know they're the easiest way of banging two things together digger an anglo-saxon site that doesn't sit on top of the roman side you don't find nails i mean ours has effectively disappeared i mean that's another indicator of a really basic thing that's gone there's a very interesting book written by robin fleming who's a u.s scholar on the collapse of rome and britain and she points out that this actually has dramatic changes in terms of lifestyle as well because the pots that the anglo-saxons sorry the people in the post-roman period were making are very friable they're not pots that you could put onto above a fire and boil water in so actually you have to completely change your cooking techniques as well i mean this is a change that isn't just a sort of economic shrinking it's a change in lifestyle that's enforced by the collapse in the economy so i suppose to ask you know the the big and perhaps the obvious question um you know why was the fall of the roman empire the roman political system in the west so catastrophic um for the economy of the various parts of the roman world according to the central argument of your book of course but uh it's an interesting question and a bit of a mystery because uh when people believed that the economy was entirely sustained by the state then it's reasonably easy to understand because the state does collapse nobody nobody disputes the end of the roman state that's that's something that everyone's in complete agreement with but if you believe that the roman economy was partly a market economy with as it were merchants doing things under their own steam uh benefiting from the state but not entirely depend on the state then it's much more difficult to understand why it disappears so totally and i don't think we really know i argue in my book that it must be because of the levels of disruption that come about uh i also argue and i point out the moral for us who live in a super developed economy where the headphones that you're wearing you know have material from god knows how many different countries put together by god knows how many different people and shipped in who knows how many different ways i mean the sophistication which far exceeds you know the roman economy um there is a possible argument that because it's so sophisticated if it's disrupted things go go bad uh in a peculiarly dramatic way because people don't know how to make pots they don't need to have to they buy them uh they don't you know they don't need to think about how to make a pot so in sense local industries collapse because they've actually been because there aren't any local industries they're dependent on on on on producers from very far away i mean that's a possibility but i mean it is it is interesting it's it's i don't think we'll ever fully know i think we can chart the scale of the change but actually knowing quite wise is always going to be problematic well well thank you for that and i remember you're saying in the book that britain you know did not regress to its pre-roman state it regressed beyond its pre-roman state you know it because again these local industries had atrophied essentially in the pre-room in britain there were local pottery industries producing wheel turned pottery which is glazed real turned pottery there's a limited use of coinage and there are some quite large settlements that big hill faults like danbury which are you um reasonably you could call it proto-tones i mean they're there before the romans arrive there's nothing like that in the immediate post roman so actually the roman empire had done britain a bad turn that had gotten more used to living in a sophisticated world so when that sophisticated world collapses they are actually thrown back to a sort of bronze age level i mean that you know people can probably question that but i think it's true yeah right almost wilted in the shadow of rome huh yeah but uh uh well anyway um uh uh thank you again professor ward perkins this is a wonderful explanation of what happened um and uh are the ways we can explore how it happened um through the ecological record if you haven't read it i highly encourage anyone to check out uh the fall of rome and of civilization uh it's a great read and again covers a lot of things that we just touched upon here today if you aren't familiar uh check out the totenstein youtube channel that's more stuff there in the ancient world but professor ward perkins uh thanks so much for your time thank you all for listening and to everyone thanks for tuning in you

Channel: toldinstone

Views: 149,678

Keywords:

Id: rt0uBzYf4N8

Length: 42min 35sec (2555 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 27 2022