13. Trade and Economic Collapse
Once-thriving Italian estates lay in ruins, and agricultural productivity shrank as the rural population was reduced to minor peasantry. Trade networks that had once allowed the urbanized culture of the Roman world to thrive, collapsed. That in turn led to a collapse of the economy, which led to a population collapse in turn. Cities emptied, as their inhabitants were either massacred by marauding armies, or had to feed themselves by becoming peasants and turning to subsistence farming in the surrounding countryside. Rome’s population had once exceeded a million people, and the city still had a few hundred thousand people when the Western Empire fell. It was reduced to a small town of a few thousand souls, who scavenged the decaying ruins for building materials. The Dark Ages had arrived in the Italian Peninsula, and it was against that background that the Cadaver Synod took place.
