<Please support this with references. I don't think it's true. Imho, the Church began to burn witches because they saw their powers as a threat to their own, and no wonder. The church men didn't have any power, whereas the witches had the spirits. Of course they had to eradicated.>
Gibbon for one. He calculated the population of the Roman empire in the era of Augustus, IIRC, at 100 million. But he sees the decline, which was already known, and suggests that this is why Augustus became what we now call a "family values" guy with a number of incentives to inicrease the birth rate.
Gibbon also reports that when the Romans took Britain, the population was 12 million, but when the Romans left, it was 4. "Silphium" was commonly thot to be a primary reason. Reports are that it was a member of the carrot & fennel famiily. Well, if you look up fennel and fenugreek, you find out that they contain phytoestrogen and diosgenin. Which are the active ingredients in the birth control pill.
http://www.sisterzeus.com/qaluse.htm tells us that Queen Anne's lace is a member of the carrot family. I grew quite a bit of it this year. But its also noteworthy to consider that the Latin word for 'witch' meant "poisoner". To be sure, the witches were another power base the Bishops and government wanted to eradicate, but they were also the midwives, so they were shooting themselves in the foot.
All that marvelous marble work should have been used to improve agricultural production and better nutrition. But the male ego being what it is... the bishops blamed the witches for the decline in the population. Gibbon makes clear that the legions became slave raiders going across the Danube and Rhine so much that that region was depopulated but for the most violent barbarian groups, most notably the "Allmani" or 'all men' united by one idea, from all other tribes, of seeking vengeance.
Modern archeology supports Gibbon in this, finding a vibrant barbarian culture with cities that was 200 or more miles from the Roman frontier. But all built in timber frame, so it was only the utilization of magnetometers locating the burnt stubs of the posts to reveal the cities.
I read another posted report saying that the condition of the slave skeletons in the graveyards deteriorated after Christianity took over. They said the women were so malnourished they would have been infertile.
Course, from the standpoint of the slavemasters, if Jesus was going to reward the slaves in heaven, there was no reason to do so on earth. But whether from malnutrition or merely women not wanting to bother with babies who would only grow up to suffer slavery, Gibbon reports that large estates were increasingly abandoned because of the slave shortage.
He also reports that to cover the decline in production, the Dinari, which was originally pure silver, was corrupted with ever more lead, until it was down to just 5% silver, and that they even produced a sandwich coin that had a copper core faced with silver.
It all fits a problem Diamond outlines in "Collapse". What we see is that as the resource base shrinks, the power elites, rather than cutting back to buy time to look for solutions, actually increases exploitation of all lower classes until nobody but the power elite has any investment in the system and there is collapse, anarchy, and/or revolution.
I cant evaluate how effective the witch's family planning services were, but its a no brainer to see the bishops scapegoat the witches saying they were the cause in the low birth rates.
I dont think moderns appreciate how much forest was in ancient Europe, and there is still quite a bit of it. But with primitive farming tools, it was only possible to work the most fertile alleuvial floodplains, and the upland forests were left alone.
Soil cores pulled in Greece show how the early 7th century BC pioneered the river valleys, but then subsequent generations began moving up onto the benches of the valley walls. These thin soils (which I see in the Ozarks) play out after only a couple generations, and the soil cores show the eroded soil washing down into the river bottoms.
If you look at 19th century National Geos, you can see how the land in the Levant, Greece, and the Roman mediterranean was nothing but rocks with goats and brush. That didnt change until the introduction of modern chemical fertilizers and the efforts to plant and maintain trees.
Most of the Roman empire was played out ground by the time Christianity rose to power, and people thot it was due to apostasy. Again, witches were even blamed for the infertility of the land.
There still exist some medieval letters to the bishop explaining how brother stud muffin had been 'bewitched' and kept by the witches during the whole of the growing season. Then, when they didnt need his ass anymore, sent him back to the monastery. Do we have to go into how the witches motivated him with sexual services, or do you have some other idea in mind? The witches didnt have gold. The Church did.
Look at the misogynistic myth about witches and see all the sexual acts that were associated with them. That was not something that was invented during the rise of Christianity, but rather a distortion of what had gone on for millennia.
The Latin word "pagan" after all, meant 'rural'. Since I was born on a farm, I have a different sensibility than those raised in cities that many regard as crude, but which the pagans I know use deliberately as part of their own cultural identity. I still live in the same kind of rural & forested world the ancient witches did, I saw sex, birth, life, and death, sometimes killing the animal myself, and then cutting a carcass up. It is all, from sex to meat, of one continuous universe that is not mediated by clerics.
Fluff bunnies dont do well out here, and I doubt real ancient witches would have had much time for them either.
