The great leveler, p.36
The Great Leveler, page 36
The ability to amass and profitably maintain supraregional wealth was critical in creating a top echelon of the propertied class that towered over lesser notables. So was privileged access to high political office in an empire of tens of millions of subjects where graft and corruption were routine elements of governance and the richest and most privileged officials were in the best position to shield their assets from state demands. Their preeminence and the extreme disparities it generated thus depended in their entirety on the solidity of imperial power. Internal conflicts and external challenges mounted as the fifth century progressed. Between the 430s and 470s CE, the Roman state lost control first over North Africa and then over Gaul, Spain, Sicily, and finally even Italy itself as Germanic kings took over. The eastern Roman Empire’s attempt to regain Italy in the second quarter of the sixth century caused major turmoil and soon failed due to renewed Germanic incursions. This dramatic breakdown of Mediterranean unity dismantled the extensive networks of estates owned by a Rome-based top elite that was no longer capable of holding on to possessions outside Italy and eventually in large parts of Italy itself.
Intensifying political decentralization effectively wiped out the uppermost tier of western Roman high society. A process that had begun in the hinterlands of the Mediterranean basin in the fifth century reached the Italian peninsula in the sixth and seventh. Holdings of landlords residing in the city of Rome largely came to be confined to the surrounding region of Latium, and even the popes were deprived of Church estates in southern Italy and Sicily. This meltdown helps us understand why, according to the “Dialogues” composed by Pope Gregory in 593 CE, an elite Roman such as the bishop Redemptus would believe that “the end of all flesh was come” as men joined monasteries to find refuge from a world “fraught with so many miseries and diverse afflictions.” Aristocracies became much more localized in scope and far less wealthy than they had once been. Decline manifested itself in various ways, from the downgrading or abandonment of fancy country villas to the unceremonious disappearance of the venerable senate from the record and the fact that no senatorial families can be traced beyond the early seventh century. The writings of Pope Gregory offer what is perhaps the most striking illustration of the depths to which formerly wealthy families had fallen. The Church’s leader repeatedly mentions destitute aristocrats whom he helped keep afloat with small acts of charity. A former governor of Samnium, an Italian region, was given four gold coins and some wine; widows and orphans of noble houses whose members had in previous generations held the highest ranks of office likewise received modest donations.10
The demise of Rome’s super-rich could hardly have been more spectacular, and it foreshadowed the fall of the Tang aristocracy: the main difference was that murderous endings, albeit not unknown, appear to have been far less common in the Roman case. Violence had nonetheless been central to this process, generously applied in the carving up of the empire. The eradication of the top sliver of western Roman society was bound to have dampened inequality. Moreover, and crucially, devolution extended far into the lower tiers of the propertied class as “even regional and sub-regional elites disappeared” in most parts of the former western Roman Empire. And although new military elites rose through these upheavals, in the absence of large-scale imperial reunification anything even remotely resembling late Roman levels of wealth concentration remained far beyond their reach. Increased peasant autonomy at least in some areas further impeded resource extraction at even the local level.11
This last development raises the question whether leveling was driven not merely by attrition at the top but also by gains at the bottom. One type of evidence that might be considered a proxy of material welfare, human skeletal remains, is compatible with this notion but is too ambiguous to firmly substantiate it. Indicators of physical well-being such as body height and the incidence of dental and bone lesions did indeed improve with the fall of the western Roman Empire. This suggests that ordinary people were in better shape than they had been under imperial rule. Unfortunately, we cannot safely identify the principal cause of these changes: although population loss and deurbanization in the wake of political disintegration may well have reduced parasitic loads, increased real incomes, and improved diets, a concurrent but causally unrelated pandemic of bubonic plague (discussed in the next chapter) was likely to produce similar effects.12
A different category of archaeological material holds considerably greater promise because it allows us to measure resource inequality in a more straightforward manner. In a recent Stanford dissertation, Robert Stephan studied changes in house sizes in different parts of the Roman world before, during, and after Roman rule. House size represents an acceptable proxy for per capita economic well-being: household income and residential house size are strongly correlated across cultures, and housing generally serves as a marker of status. Measurements from ancient and early medieval Britain are particularly useful for our purposes. The relevant data are broadly distributed in space and time, the quality of modern scholarship is high, and, perhaps most important, Roman state collapse was exceptionally severe in this region. Once Roman rule had ceased in the early fifth century CE, no centralized state claimed Britain for several centuries, and small polities predominated. Socioeconomic complexity was greatly reduced as villas were abandoned, urban economies faded, and all ceramic production ceased except for its most basic variety: manual fashioning unaided even by the potter’s wheel. Settlement remains reflect no real signs of hierarchy in terms of spatial differentiation or the nature of small finds, and burials with rich grave goods are rarely documented in most parts of Britain. In short, local elites, insofar as they existed, failed to leave much of a mark on the historical record of the late fifth and sixth centuries CE. Roman-era structures were more thoroughly erased than in most other parts of the former empire: the island experienced pervasive systems collapse rather than mere state failure.13
This process profoundly affected the median size of residential structures as well as the degree to which houses varied in size, both of which decreased dramatically compared to the imperial period. This compression reversed the preceding increase in both metrics associated with the Roman conquest in the first century CE, which had raised economic output and stratification (Figs. 9.1–3).14
Figure 9.1Median house sizes in Britain from the Iron Age to the Early Middle Ages
Figure 9.2House size quartiles in Britain from the Iron Age to the Early Middle Ages
These findings make it all the more unfortunate that data samples from other parts of the Roman world that have been studied in the same way suffer from various shortcomings, such as reliance on a small number of sites or the lack of representative data for particular periods, and thus do not properly support further assessments of changes in housing inequality. Even so, archaeology offers us a glimpse of the correlations between imperial rule on the one hand and economic growth and inequality on the other.
Figure 9.3Gini coefficients of house sizes in Britain from the Iron Age to the Early Middle Ages
Despite their geographical limitations, these data show that postimperial wealth deconcentration was a fairly comprehensive process that was not narrowly confined to those at the very top. Although we are unable to measure the overall degree of post-Roman leveling, the impact of state failure in an environment where the rich had ruled for centuries must have been very considerable indeed. The consequences of collapse differed greatly from those of conquest that preserved the scale and characteristics of earlier state structures: whereas the Norman conquest of England preserved or even briefly increased wealth inequality, the fragmentation of a previously very large sphere that had been exploited by a small central ruling class had very much the opposite effect.15
”MANY OF THE TOWNS OF THAT PERIOD DO NOT SEEM TO US TODAY TO BE PARTICULARLY IMPOSING”: SYSTEMS COLLAPSE IN THE LATE BRONZE AGE MEDITERRANEAN AND THE PRE-COLUMBIAN AMERICAS
By the thirteenth century BCE, the eastern Mediterranean had turned into a system of powerful states interconnected by diplomacy, war, and trade: Ramesside Egypt and the Hittite empire in Anatolia were vying for supremacy, the Middle Assyrian empire expanded in Mesopotamia, city-states flourished in the Levant, and the Aegean was dominated by large palaces that managed economic production and distribution. Nobody would have predicted the rapid collapse of this state system in the decades after 1200 BCE. All over the region cities suffered damage or wholesale destruction—in Greece, Anatolia, Syria, and Palestine. Just after 1200 BCE, the Hittite empire failed, and its capital city Hattuša was partly destroyed and abandoned. The important city of Ugarit on the Syrian coast was wiped out a few years later, as were other sites farther inland. Cities such as Megiddo (in the plain of the biblical “Armageddon”) followed suit. In Greece, the mighty palaces were destroyed one by one. What rebuilding took place in some of them was undone near the end of the century. Farther south, the Egyptian state lost control of Palestine and from about 1100 began to unravel, torn between the priestly elite of Thebes in the south and assorted dynasts in the Nile Delta. Assyria did not escape unscathed, either. To various degrees, institutions of rule and extraction fell apart, cities disappeared or survived much diminished, the use of writing retreated, and empires splintered into statelets and city-states. Output and exchange declined, and social complexity was diminished.16
The reasons for this great unraveling are still much debated, and many factors appear to have had a hand in it. The so-called “Sea Peoples,” groups of raiders who “live on ships” and appear in records from Egypt, Syria, and Anatolia, have traditionally borne at least some of the blame. After their attack on Egypt was thwarted in 1207 BCE, thirty years later they renewed their efforts as a coalition. As Ramses III claimed,
all at once the lands were removed and scattered in the fray. No land could stand before their arms . . . . They laid their hands upon the lands as far as the circuit of the earth.
Although the pharaoh’s forces managed to defeat them, other societies were not as fortunate. The settlement of the Philistines in Palestine may have been a result of these movements, as was at least some of the destruction visible in archaeological remains. Several sites also show damage that is consistent with seismic activity, repeated tremors that may have serially struck the region as an “earthquake storm” in the late thirteenth and early twelfth centuries BCE. In addition there is evidence of drought around 1200 BCE and a general shift to greater aridity. Whatever the precise configuration of malign forces operating at the time, it appears that different factors coincided, probably not by chance but in an interrelated fashion: the net result was a multiplier effect that shattered the world-system of the late Bronze Age.17
This collapse was particularly severe in the Aegean. Around the middle of the second millennium BCE, settlements grew in southern mainland Greece as warrior elites accumulated wealth and set up fortified centers. Increasing stratification is visible in the appearance of monumental tombs and socially differentiated grave goods. Palace complexes were soon erected at those sites. Clay tablets written in what is called Linear B script and in an early form of Greek document a redistributive economy that was centered on these palaces, lorded over by kings and their senior officials. Superiors claimed goods and services from those beneath them. This system owed much to earlier palace economies that had grown up on the southern island of Crete (known as the Minoan culture) but shows more signs of violence and fortification and less diffusion of affluence. Sizeable kingdoms were established around the major palace centers on the mainland, creating a network of polities now known as the Mycenaean culture.18
Even though we know much less about the nature of political control and the distribution of income than we would like, the existence of elite-focused redistributive centers seems hard to reconcile with notions of egalitarianism. For all we can tell, Mycenaean palace societies were very hierarchical. Patronymics recorded on the Linear B tablets reflect intermarriage among a small number of elite families: specific personal names, social position, and wealth all appear to have been controlled by the same privileged families. The tablets offer little evidence that finished prestige goods were allocated to the working population. As two eminent experts of the period aptly put it, “much of what goes up, stays up.” Luxury items made of gold, silver, ivory, and amber are almost exclusively found in elite tombs. In at least one case, the archaeological material suggests that wealth circulation became more restricted over time, an observation consistent with rising inequality driven by the concentration of power and resources in the hands of a small ruling class. Circulation may have taken the form of gift exchange within palatial elites, supplemented by exports and imports meant to furnish them with foreign goods that signaled elevated status.19
The dismantling of Mycenaean civilization was a drawn-out process. Signs of destruction, possibly related to earthquakes, first appear at some major sites in the mid-thirteenth century BCE. Further damage is recorded later that century, followed by the construction of new fortifications—a telling indicator of military threats. A wave of destruction events followed around 1200 BCE, laying waste to the palaces of Mycenae, Tiryns, Thebes, and Orchomenos and, a little later, to all of Pylos. Here as elsewhere, the causes remain a matter of conjecture: seismic activity, droughts, and epidemics have been invoked alongside invasions, rebellions, and shifts in the pattern of trade and the movement of people. The final result was systems collapse, rooted in the palace system’s inability to respond to the disasters that had struck.20
At many sites, Mycenaean civilization continued into the early eleventh century BCE. Although destroyed palaces were never rebuilt, reuse and new construction did at times occur, and in some places, elites flourished for a while. Refuge sites that could more easily be defended came to play a greater role. However, a new series of destruction events around 1100 BCE finished off much of what remained. After the palaces had disappeared, only villages survived, except in those areas where the former had been so dominant that little survived their downfall and widespread abandonment ensued, as in Pylos. Most regions, less severely disrupted, “returned to small-scale, tribal existence.” High-quality building styles were gone, and writing disappeared entirely. The tenth century BCE was a nadir of overall development and complexity. The biggest settlements in Greece at the time may have housed 1,000 or 2,000 people, but most of the population resided in small villages and hamlets and adopted a more itinerant lifestyle. Many sites were given up for good. International trade ties had been severed, housing was for the most part very basic—featuring one-room dwellings—and graves were poor. Individual burials became the norm, a marked change from the previous Mycenaean emphasis on lineage.21
The elite of the palace period were gone. We have no information on what happened to them. Maybe some of them left for the East to join raiders active at the time—not unlike English thanes escaping from the Norman conquest 2,000 years later. At first some may have decamped to remote sites for protection, on islands or near the coast. This need not concern us here: what matters is that this group vanished as a whole. The extractive superstructure the palace system had placed on the rural population had been shorn and was not replaced. By the tenth century BCE, only the biggest—or rather least small—settlements may have maintained something like a recognizable elite stratum. The character of grave goods from this period suggests that only few individuals had access to imported goods. In fact, signs of stratification and elite wealth had become so sparse that modern archaeologists have lavished their attention on a single structure, a house in Lefkandi on the island of Euboea that dates from about 1000 BCE: 150 feet long and thirty feet wide, made of mud bricks and surrounded by wooden posts, it contained two burials with some gold jewelry. What would barely have merited notice a couple of centuries earlier counts as a standout and remains unique among the sites discovered in this period.22
The conspicuous scarcity of large structures, prestige goods, and other markers of wealth and status in Early Iron Age Greece stands in dramatic contrast to the conditions of the Mycenaean period. Not only had polities crumbled, but social and economic activity had also both declined, becoming much more fragmented. Under these circumstances, substantial extraction and concentration of surplus would have been a serious challenge even if sufficiently powerful institutions had still existed. Although the general population undoubtedly suffered great hardship, the rich and powerful faced a much steeper fall. Systems collapse on this scale could not fail to massively reduce earlier disparities in income and wealth. What is more, even as new elites began to form from the tenth century onward and economic growth took off in the eighth, the miserable equality of near-universal impoverishment of the postpalatial period may arguably have prepared the ground for the resilient egalitarianism of later centuries of Greek history, a rare constraint on inequality that I discussed in chapter 6.
