The Countryside and the City

This chapter analyses the ownership and settlement patterrns of the countryside around Rome, the source of its wealth. It argues that Rome was exceptionally rich in the early Middle Ages because it controlled the whole of its immediate hinterland via direct property-owning by the city’s churches, leased to the city’s elites. Much of Roman hinterland was exploited for large-scale profit, particularly the vineyards of the city’s suburbs and the salt flats by the coastal countryside.