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* 538 – Witiges, king of the Ostrogoths ends his siege of Rome and retreats to Ravenna, leaving the city in the hands of the victorious Roman general, Belisarius.

This siege marked the end of Rome as a great city. The Ostrogoths cut all the aqueducts supplying Rome with water. After that, Rome was without aqueducts for more than a thousand years. Without her aqueducts, Rome, which had supported a population of over a million, could no longer exist on the scale it had before, and in the Middle Ages sank to a town with a population in the tens of thousands.

The wars of the Ostrogoths and the Eastern Romans see-sawed back-and-forth for many years, and though the Eastern Romans were finally victorious, it was an empty triumph. By that time, Italy had become almost a desert, with a scant, scattered rural population.

Little is recorded of what happened to the large population of the city of Rome, but it must have been horrific. Without water, starving, cut off from other supplies, the people died there or scattered into the countryside in desperate search for food. There, tens of thousands must have died of starvation or exposure, or been butchered by marauding armies and bandits.

Last edited by numan; 03/12/10 11:30 PM.