Contours of Environmental Change and Human Response in Late Antiquity

In his magisterial book, The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World, Bruce Campbell traces in remarkable detail the progress of an environmental crisis that unfolded from the ca. AD 1270s to the 1350s across western Eurasia.1 From the AD 1270s, the favourable climate regime known as the Medieval Climate Anomaly sputtered to an end, and a colder, more variable climate arrived. Subsistence crises became more common. Animal panzootics devastated livestock herds on a continental scale. And then, upon a fragile society fell the worst biological disaster in recorded history, the Black Death. Detailed, critical work has tended only to confirm or even revise upwards the worst mortality estimates. The first wave of the pandemic might have killed ca. 50% of the entire population of Europe.2 The environmental crisis established a new economic, demographic, and geopolitical equilibrium across the old world. Given that Late Antiquity was also a period of major change in the global climate, and suffered from the introduction of the same biological agent that caused the Black Death, Campbell’s study is provocative for those of us who labour in the fields of the 1st millennium.3 We can only envy the much thicker documentary record of the Late Middle Ages, but what lessons might be drawn from the parallels and differences between these dynamic periods of environmental history? I would highlight just three points here. First, Campbell’s account is enriched because it takes a long perspective, launching centuries before the crisis. During the ‘efflorescence’ of the High Middle Ages, from ca. AD 1000–1270, the environment was an ‘enabling’ force, enhancing agrarian productivity and facilitating demographic increase. So, too, the period of Late Antiquity followed a long phase of intensification, against the background of a favourable climate in the early Roman empire. Below, I will suggest that the middle of the 2nd c. AD marked a point of inflection; not the onset of an irreversible crisis quite as dramatic