This chapter surveys the engagement with material culture of three popes in the second quarter of the ninth century – Eugenius II, Gregory IV and Sergius II – spanning the years 824 through to 847. Although not as prolific as Paschal I in terms of patronage, all have left at least one significant project to have survived to the present day. Eugenius II’s marble clerical enclosure at Santa Sabina initiates a discussion of stone furnishings in Rome’s early medieval churches; Gregory IV’s apse mosaic in San Marco provides interesting insights into his participation in contemporary ecclesiastic politics in northern Italy, and other initiatives testify to continuing preoccupations with urban infrastructure and the cult of relics; and Sergius II’s newly reconstructed church of San Martino ai Monti attests to the continuing presence in Rome of significant teams of builders and decorators.

Our survey revealed very few sites belonging to the Early Medieval period (AD 700-1000) apart from Tuscania, indicating a combination of population decline and abandonment of the countryside for the security of the town. There was significant demographic growth in the High Medieval period (AD 1000-1200): 38 sites, together with 30 sites with ‘generic Medieval’ material likely to belong to this phase. The new foundations, distributed throughout the survey area, comprised nucleated but unfortified settlements, a habitation form about which the documentary record is largely silent. In the Late Medieval period (AD 1200-1500: 16 sites), new foundations were established within a few kilometres of Tuscania with little evidence for settlement in the countryside beyond. Most farmers preferred to live in defensible castelli, or within the vicinity of Tuscania. As elsewhere in Italy, the second half of the 2nd millennium has witnessed the increasing abandonment of many small farms by peasant (contadini) families in the face of urban growth and industrialization, with globalization in recent decades accelerating their replacement and absorption by agribusinesses, and the flight to the countryside by middle class commuters from Rome.

This brief ‘afterword’ draws together the various themes set out in the book, concluding that over the course of the ninth century the Roman Church goes from one of its highest points to what is arguably its medieval nadir. Some analysis is provided of the various factors which contributed to this dramatic decline.

No attempt to evaluate the longue durée of human settlement can ignore the environment as both a formative influence and as a cultural artefact. The environmental programme of the project collected data to complement the regional geomorphological and palynological record on patterns of landscape change in response to climate change and the influence of human activities. The geomorphological fieldwork focused on the catchment of the Marta river that flows from Lake Bolsena past Tuscania to the Tyrrhenian sea near Tarquinia. The Late Glacial environment c.15,000 years ago consisted of a steppe landscape.After a sedimentary hiatus in the Early and Mid Holocene, sediments started to be laid down again in the Later Etruscan period c.500-300 BC, reflecting the extensive nature of Etruscan agriculture.Significant human impacts began in the Roman Republican period. Then and during the Early/Mid Imperial periods the Marta and other rivers in the area were unstable braided and wandering gravel-bedded rivers quite unlike the modern rivers. Their dynamism largely reflected a colder wetter climate than today but also woodland clearance and increased arable cultivation.This combination pre-conditioned the landscape’s sensitivity to alluviation in the Late Medieval and Post Medieval periods.

This chapter is devoted entirely to the Roman church of Santa Prassede, the principal surviving architectural project of Pope Paschal I (817–824). Its function as a major urban repository for the relics of the city’s Early Christian saints and martyrs, more than 2000 of which were brought here from the extramural catacombs, determines both the architectural model (Saint Peter’s) and many aspects of the decoration in mosaic, mural painting and sculpture. Special attention is devoted to the San Zeno chapel, the burial site of Paschal’s mother, Theodora, whose mosaic programme, including her portrait, is completely preserved and reflects that function. Consideration is given to Richard Krautheimer’s suggestion that this church constitutes evidence for a ‘Carolingian renascence’ of architectural forms associated with the first Christian emperor, Constantine.

This chapter establishes the political and cultural context for what follows through an examination of the reign of Pope Leo III (795–816) and his alliance with the Franks, notably Charlemagne, whom he crowned as Roman emperor on 25 December 800. A primary focus is the political and other messages implicit or explicit in the construction and decoration of new reception spaces at the Lateran patriarchate and Saint Peter’s, aimed at reinforcing the new role of the papacy in temporal as well as spiritual matters, and the mosaic decorations for which Leo was responsible in the churches of Santa Susanna and Santi Nereo ed Achilleo. An analysis is provided of the exceptionally detailed list of papal gifts to Roman churches, known as the ‘Donation of 807’, and the chapter concludes with an analysis of the possible sources of papal wealth necessary to make such extravagant largesse possible.

We first summarise the principal findings of the Tuscania Archaeological Survey in terms of the diachronic settlement trends over the past 7500 years that are reconstructed in the previous chapters. The Tuscania story partly mirrors settlement models proposed by other authors for central Italy as a whole and partly diverges from them.In the second section we use a GIS analysis to compare the respective effectiveness of the three landscape sampling strategies we employed. This suggests that all three were equally effective in revealing settlement patterns in the Republican and Early Imperial phases characterized by dispersed and dense rural populations, whereas they revealed contrasting information about the less dense and more variably patterned Etruscan settlement pattern.We review the contribution of the project’s geomorphological studies to the Mediterranean alluviation debate, indicating complex interactions between climate and human actions in landscape formation. The project’s 7500–year ‘archaeological history’ chimes with Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s characterization of Mediterranean landscape history as “continuities of form or pattern, within which all is mutability” (The Corrupting Sea, p. 523).

Chapter 1 introduces the project and its methods before reflecting on the interconnected social world of elite readers and writers during the Theodosian dynasty, showing how they comprise a single intellectual culture expressed in different disciplinary domains.

Chapter 3 turns to Constantine and Athanasius, showing how each shaped a set of scholastic practices used on all sides of the Nicene controversy, and how this new way of making arguments became widespread throughout the Orthodox Christian movement during the fourth century.