I was recently reading a book that suggested it was possible that large roman plantations and estates survived into the medieval and even later world. The book suggested particularly in areas such as southern Italy and southern Spain. Are there examples of this?
Quote:
"It is not impossible that in Sicily and Andalusia several of these [estates] were the lineal descendants of Roman latifundia, whose slaves and coloni had turned into the characteristic landless day-labourers of these regions." - Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution.
Hi there! Although I don't know if there's any specific research done on the continued existence of large estates through the centuries, I answered a similar question about the origins of a number of Italian dynasties here which you might be interested in (although I incorrectly use the phrase "Law of large numbers," I had meant to say "The law of truly large numbers.").
You might also be interested in this answer about people living in Italy who were optimistic about the emergence of the Regnum Italiae and the end of the Imperium.
You'll see in the answers I linked that there is no reason why some people wouldn't have been able to maintain a certain degree of wealth and relevance through the post-roman transformation, but finding specific examples can difficult.
I'm happy to answer any additional questions.
For Sicily at least, that is very, very unlikely. In Roman times, Sicily was a major producer of wheat, which was exported to the city of Rome and other cities of the Italian peninsula. Large cities have never been self-sufficient, and the city of Rome and its large population needed a lot of grain coming from Sicily and north Africa to be sustainable in the days of the empire. Sicily becomes once again a major wheat producer and exporter to Florence and the other cities of the increasingly urbanized northern Italy in the central and late middle ages. But in between the two periods of Sicily as a region of large scale wheat monocolture, there were several changes of power. The Ostrogoths, then the Byzantine, then the Arabs, then the Normans, French and Spanish. Land ownership and use changed a lot during those centuries, especially under the Arabs. Several new crops were introduced to Sicily dueing the Arab domination, and gradually the ownership of the land changed hands from the Greek population to the Arab population. The likelyhood of Sicilian latifundus surviving in use or ownership over centuries of dramatic change is nil. Same thing with the Iberian peninsula, which changed hands multiple times in the middle ages, from the Visigoths, to the Arabs, to the Reconquesta.
If you are looking for examples of Roman land that continued in use or ownership through the middle ages, the most likely place to look would be the Eastern Roman Empire, aka the Byzantine Empire, which kept a lot of the structure of land ownership and taxation from the early days of the empire. When it came to land based taxation, for example, Byzantium was the exception in Europe, and was able to keep a fairly steady funding structure for - among other things - the military, which in turn allowed it to continue to be a significant power in the Mediterranean until the middle of the 11th century.
If I was to look for a Roman estate surviving into the medieval times, I would look in the Balkans or in Asia Minor.