1 gen 800 anni - ***Population of Rome 30,000

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But historians and archaeologists looking at things like food supply, public welfare payments, water delivery figures, for aqueducts, and the abandonment of houses and of building sites. Probably in 5 BC, the Roman population was 800,000. That would be a fairly conservative estimate. Maybe as much as a million, but definitely 800,000. 5 BC. Yeah?
Student: This is just the city of Rome?
Professor Paul Freedman: Just the city of Rome. Yes, just the city of Rome. At the time of Constantine, sort of where we begin the course, more or less, in the early fourth century, the population had declined probably to 600,000. After the sack of Rome in 419, probably 300,000 to 500,000. Obviously, these are very rough figures.
But after the sack of Rome, more than half of the population that had existed in 5 BC is gone. With the end of grain shipments from North Africa, we don't really know immediately. We can estimate that by 590, there could not have been more than 150,000 people in Rome. This is after not only the Vandals, but after a catastrophic war in Italy launched by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian, who we'll be talking about next week.
In 800, on Christmas Day, Charlemagne was crowned in Saint Peter's in Rome as Roman Emperor by the pope, an act whose implications we will be exploring towards the end of the class. On that day, Rome must've had maximum, maximum, most optimistic estimate, 30,000 people. This does not necessarily mean that they were primitive, but they were living in the Coliseum, for example. People built houses in there. They used the walls of the Coliseum as a fort. There is a certain Planet of the Apes quality, in fact. Rome, still to this day, is filled with picturesque ruins, even though it is a city of two and a half, three million people.
As I said, people were not necessarily aware of this change. For example, lots of churches were built at this time, and some of them have mosaic pavements that have mottos about the grandeur of the Roman name, and the usual classical kind of mottos. But then again, people often aren't aware of what's happening to them. I mean, what if somebody in the future points to the fact that New Haven, in 1920, had far more people living in it than it does now? New Haven lost a third of its population between 1950 and 1980.
What if some future historian is scandalized at the fact that in order to get into Yale a hundred years ago you had to know Greek and Latin. If you look at what those gentlemen C students had to study, or were responsible for, in say, 1925, it's extraordinary. It's not very impressive in the sciences, but the decline of the humanities, if by decline we mean things like knowledge of classical literature, is stunning.
Somebody may decide in a few hundred years that the Dark Ages began in about 1950.

Yale Middle Ages pg. 72

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