Examples like aquaducts, sewage, advanced architecture, etcetera
In: 121
What you’re talking about isn’t technological ability as much as economic power.
The Roman economy functioned by concentrating wealth from vast agricultural areas into a handful of highly centralized cities. Living in a rural part of the Roman Empire was not a particularly fun thing to do – the vast majority of people in those areas were serfs that lived a lifestyle that was similar to what we would refer to today as a slave.
The fact that the Romans were able to divert so much economic productivity from the rural areas of the Empire into the cities was what allowed them to construct massive public works. The technology to create those works wasn’t lost following the Roman collapse. Rather, what happened was that the economic machinery necessary to fund those projects disappeared.
One of the things that Christianity brought to the Empire was a basic concept of human rights – having the vast majority of the population enslaved into abject poverty began to be viewed as a moral wrong. While the lifestyle of a medieval serf certainly wasn’t one of wild excess, it was *significantly* better than the lifestyle they would have had under the Roman Empire.
What enabled medieval serfs to live that better lifestyle was that they were able to retain more of the wealth that they produced. Following the fall of the Empire, rural areas became wealthier while urban wealth plummeted. As a result, the people living in cities couldn’t afford to fund the same types of massive publics works projects that they had during Imperial times.
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