Dan Snow's History Hit - Did Immigration Really Cause the Fall of Rome?

Episode Date: November 10, 2021

Boris Johnson recently stated that the fall of Rome was caused by 'uncontrolled migration' and the image of a mighty empire bought to its knees by hordes of barbarians from the east is certainly a powerful one. It is, however, not true and for many historians, even the idea of the "fall" of the empire is considered dubious. In the west, the empire dissolved into successor states that continued many elements of Roman bureaucracy and societal order. In the east, the empire became the Byzantine Empire and continued to rule up until 1453. The empire certainly did change but for a variety of reasons including the changing nature of power, new groups settling within its borders, environmental changes and conflicts both external and internal. Joining Dan to discuss this mighty subject and shed some light on the reality of the fall of Rome is Mark Humphries, Professor of Classics, Ancient History & Egyptology at Swansea University. 

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. Now buckle up folks, buckle up, because we're taking on the big one. We're going there. Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister, made some fairly odd remarks. It seemed to be standing in the Coliseum for some reason as well, I don't quite know what's going on. He made some fairly odd remarks about how climate change might create a gigantic flood of immigrants, which would be bad because as we land in the 5th century AD, immigrants streaming across the Roman frontier caused the fall of Rome. Now, this was obviously very provoking. So we decided to get into it. We went to a professor of classics in ancient history, Mark Humphreys at Swansea University, and we went there. We asked all about it. And we said, what was the nature of the Roman Empire in the West

by the late 4th, early 5th century? Can't Rome really be said to have fallen? What does that even mean? Who made it fall if it did? I mean, it's big stuff. Get your intellectual running shoes on because Mark provides a tour de force here. We had 45 minutes to deal with one of the most far-reaching, oft-quoted, oft-misattributed epics of European and world history. The fall of Rome,

or rather the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. It was a big one. It's fascinating stuff. If you want to watch documentaries about the changing nature of the Roman Empire, you can do so at History Hit TV. You go over there, tens of thousands of people are watching shows every week. It is very, very exciting. I can't quite believe it, but it's true. You go over there, you can watch documentaries about the Roman revolt in Britain, Boudicca's revolt. You can go and watch documentaries about Hannibal and how he almost nipped this Roman experiment in the bud during the second Punic war. You can watch documentaries about late antiquity or the early middle ages, what some fools call the dark ages but obviously i don't because i value my twitter feed replies too much we've actually got a project we're filming with

sutton who at the moment so very early medieval post-roman ship discovered famously everyone see the netflix show now in the east of england and we've got evidence for those saxons those germanic settlers who came across from northwest europe and settled in the Isles, British Isles. So please go and check all that out. It's all very exciting stuff. And you get to do so for a very, very small amount of money each month, like a cost of a cappuccino, a pint of beer. You just subscribe and then it's all yours.

History Hit TV. You get a historyhit.tv. Historyhit.tv is brilliant. Nominated for best specialist channel of the year here in the UK, taking over the world. And you can also go to that History Hit website and gift it for Christmas. No supply chain worries here, folks. The supply chain is intact from your screen to your friend's device. Boom. Happiness, no supply chain. So historyhit.tv go and check it out but in the meantime folks here's mark humphries and i getting into it the fall of rome

mark thanks very much for coming on the podcast pleasure to be here i am aware that i've just asked you on a friday afternoon when you'd like to be going home and getting settled into the weekend to talk about one of the greatest and most historiographically contested things in human history which is why the Roman Empire fell oh where to start how should we think about the fifth century in the western empire does it collapse in a kind of dramatic way that we think of like when Gibbon was writing about it does it transition does it disappear does it come does it go and it already collapsed tell me how should we think of, like when Gibbon was writing about it, does it transition? Does it disappear? Does it come? Does it go?

And it already collapsed. Tell me, how should we think about this question, first of all? It's a tricky question to answer because in part it begins with what your starting point is. What do you think of as being the Roman Empire? Do you think of it as, I don't know, some Hollywood vision of glistening marble and the stronghold of civilization? Or do you think of it as a more sort of organic, evolving political and cultural structure that is always undergoing some element of change, some element of transition?

And I suspect that when people think of the fall of the Roman Empire, whether they're thinking of it in the sort of terms that Edward Gibbon talks about, or whether they think of it as, you know, like Anthony Mann's film, The Fall of the Roman Empire, they think of it as falling from a point where culturally it's reached a great height, and then they see it as collapsing into something where culture apparently goes into retreat, we get into a sort of dark age. And I think part of the problem with that view is that it doesn't account for the fact that the empire, by the time you reach the beginning of the fifth century, is already very different from even the empire at the beginning of the fourth century, which is very different from what people often think of as the

golden age of the Roman peace in the first and second centuries. So one of the challenges is thinking, you know, what sort of empire you're talking about and what sort of empire was confronting these challenges in the fifth century, if that makes sense. Right. Yeah. Well, that's the problem. Britain is an interesting case, isn't it? Because Britain, unlike most of the Western Empire, there's a pretty obvious transition, isn't there, from being part of an imperial entity, despite one that kept hiving off and doing its own things and having little mini Caesars emerge. But the early 5th century transition from Britain from being within the empire to outside it, does that feel significant? Again, I suppose it depends on your

perspective. If we think about the retreat of the Roman administration, if we think about the withdrawal of the troops to fight in various civil wars on the continent, that might look significant from whoever is invested in the operation of the state in Britain, whether they're involved in tax collection or whatever. If you're a local landowner, the operation of the state in Britain, whether they're involved in tax collection or whatever. If you're a local landowner, the disappearance of the apparatus of the Roman state might not make an awful lot of difference to how you go about your business on a day-to-day basis. So far as we can make out in terms of what happens in Britain in the 5th century is the Romans leave, and then you have this period when Britain is effectively self-governing

in the way that many parts of the Roman Empire effectively ran their own affairs. And as long as they paid their taxes, that was fine. If you don't pay your taxes, then that becomes problematic. But most communities run their own affairs. They run their own political structures. They run their own local economies. They run their own local culture. And that seems to continue once the apparatus of the state has departed. You just don't have administrators, you don't have the troops. But parts of Britain remain closely connected with the continental world of the Roman Empire. So, for example, when there's a major problem with heresy associated with the teachings of an individual called Pelagius. You get a bishop from Gaul, a man called Germanus of Augsair, comes to Britain to investigate what's going on.

And then when after a generation and a half, a couple of generations, you begin to get the advent of these barbarians from the continent, the Angles and the Saxons and whoever, one of the first responses of the people in Britain, so far as we can make out, is to appeal for help to the continent. So Britain stops being part of the Roman Empire in terms of military presence, in terms of the apparatus of the state, but it's not cut off from the Roman Empire. It's not as if by ceasing to be part of the empire, it immediately becomes isolated from the empire. And that's the same in many other places. When they cease being part of the empire,

they maintain strong contacts with the empire in various ways. Also, I guess you're right. The empire isn't just like Pax Romana and bathhouses stretching from Kuwait to Bath, right, to Exeter. Because, I mean, look at London's fortifications. That's a weird thing to have to happen in the middle of this so-called superpower empire, is that you're heavily fortifying London, presumably because you're worried about hostile attack.

Yeah, you do get a lot of fortifications being developed within the empire from the late 3rd century onwards. And some of that has to do with external attack. I mean, things like those fortresses along the Saxon shore that you get from East Anglia all the way around to Southampton Harbour. You also get similar fortifications along the northern coast of France, as far as we can work out in terms of what the sources tell us. You get the fortification of cities within other parts of the Western Empire as well. I mean, many cities in Gaul, bits of northern Italy, also get fortifications around this time. Some of that may have to do with controlling resources and controlling the access to resources. And another

problem is that the Romans are spending an awful lot of time fighting each other rather than just waiting for wild barbarians to pour across the frontier and fight against them. So you have a real problem with civil war in the late empire, something that in some respects seems to be characteristic of the third century and then also of the fifth century, but it's often forgotten that this apparently stable period in between of the fourth century sees really significant incidents of civil war. I mean, barely a decade goes past without some major civil war that involves a huge investment of imperial resources to maintain the unity of the empire. So I suspect in some ways what you're dealing with

is an empire that is struggling to assert its legitimacy and to have its legitimacy accepted all the way across the empire. And different parts of the empire might have regarded the legitimacy of the empire in rather different ways. Yeah, I always wonder not why the empire, quote unquote, falls in the 5th century, but how extraordinary it managed to cling on for so long. The crisis of the 3rd century was bonkers. Is there anything useful? Can we rehearse some of the, again, I hate to mention Gibbon all the time, but let's come back to Gibbon, something that, is it worth rehearsing any of those things about the weakening of this Roman power, its changing form? For example, do we discount Christianity these days? I guess the idea that everyone became sort of peace-loving, meek shall inherit the earth,

monks that were worried about the afterlife more than defending the frontier, is that something that the scholars don't really adhere to anymore? Yeah, the view that you get in Edward Gibbon in his decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the idea that it's often characterized as the triumph of superstition and barbarism and that side by side, in terms of Gibbon's own perspective. I mean, Gibbon writing in the late 18th century is the product of the European Enlightenment. He likes to see himself as a rational figure raised against irrational forces. Superstition and barbarism seem to represent. superstition and barbarism seem to represent. So what you get in Gibbon is a very 18th century view of what's at stake and what people don't want to lose. They see themselves as having struggled to achieve the victory of rational values over superstition for many centuries, and they don't

want that to be undermined. So they tend to look at the period of the fall of the Roman Empire as representing the sorts of threats that a rational society can succumb to. Irrational ways of thinking represented by superstition, irrational ways of behavior and organization perhaps represented by the barbarians. So he always sees the threat as somehow external. Christianity can be seen as an alien creed, the barbarians as alien peoples. But it's interesting, he finished his history of the decline of all the Roman Empire in 1788. And just a year later in France, things began to kick off that made him think that maybe he'd underestimated the extent to which internal problems can seriously undermine the stability of what appears to be a rational regime. And there's some wonderful notes that he writes for a projected seventh volume of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which of course he never gets around to writing, in which he thinks, well, maybe I should have looked for internal problems, looking at various episodes of civil war earlier on in the empire's

history. And then he sort of throws up his arms in despair by saying that really, you know, this is just too much of a task for him. So even within a year of finishing his great project, he was rethinking some of the basic features of it. Let's go back and edit his blog. So what about the idea that Rome's emperors, and this is the one, man, I have been to so many goddamn events where some idiot gets up and says Rome fell because everyone got sort of too soft and corrupt and licentious

and started trying to shag their sister or whatever. What does modern scholarship have to say about the undoubted eccentricities of several Roman rulers rulers or even not just their personal failings but the instability of the imperial metropolitan the center is that something that we see now as a weakness what that reflects i think is and it's interesting that you use the words metropolitan and center when talking about the elites because in some ways, and this again is one of these major changes that happens in the empire between, say, the 1st and 2nd centuries and the 4th and 5th, is that the metropolitan centre is still there. I mean, you still have big cities like Rome. I mean,

from the beginning of the 4th century, you also have Constantinople. But in terms of where the centre of power is, they're actually quite remote from the centre of power, particularly Rome. I mean, Rome in central Italy. It's a long way from Aachen. It's a long way from Aachen. It's a long way from the frontiers. I mean, the emperors tend to be based in frontier regions along the Rhine, along the Danube. And of course, at this stage, you often have more than one emperor. So you might have a Western emperor based on the Rhine frontier. You might have an Eastern emperor based in Antioch, keeping an eye on the Eastern frontier with the Persians.

And in terms of licentiousness and people going soft, the evidence that we have for the frontiers, we suggest that these are very militarized parts of the empire. A big presence of imperial troops, of imperial civil servants, of all the economic apparatus that you need to serve the mobile court. I think the idea that licentiousness and softness and that immorality creep in, it's a story which in some ways is quite attractive to individuals at the time. some of them are aware that things are changing. Some of them are aware that they are facing various threats. And in various ways, they tend

to present the reason for this in starkly moral terms. They often say that the reason for the difficulties confronting the empire have to do with the immorality of some of the chief political actors. Now, you get that a lot from the Christian side. So, for example, there's a writer in the 5th century in Gaul called Salvian. He comes from Marseille, and he sees the arrival of the barbarians as a punishment from God for the licentiousness and sinfulness of humankind. So there's a Christian way of looking at things that sees sort of immorality as playing a role. But it's not just Christians who see it this way. You also get pagan writers seeing it in this way as well. There's an author writing around 500 called Zosimas who writes this thing called The New History, which is basically a pagan's

explanation of why the Roman Empire is in such a terrible state. And it's based on earlier pagan polemics against Christian emperors. And it presents, for example, Constantine as the source of all the evils that afflict the Roman Empire in their own day. They see Constantine, because of his abandonment of the gods, as creating all sorts of problems. And they present him not just as somebody who is irreligious, but somebody who is immoral as well. And they emphasize stories like the fact that Constantine was responsible for the death of his wife and the death of his son, and that there is an idea that the son was having

some sort of relationship with Constantine's wife, who I should point out was not the son's mother, it would have been the son's stepmother. And you get these stories which are told that Constantine was so wracked with guilt about this that he was looking for anyone to forgive him, and nobody would forgive him until he encountered the Christians. And then the Christians said, all right, if you come to us, we'll forgive your sin. And then the Christians said, all right, if you come to us, we'll forgive your sin. And you get this very anti-Christian view that problems afflicting the empire also have to do with immorality. But the immorality that they identify with the Christians abandoning Rome's traditions. So from both the pagan perspective and the Christian perspective, thinking about the problems affecting the empire can be seen as a reflection of immorality. But that really emphasizes that a lot depends on your perspective, who's telling the story, and what particular polemical agenda they wish to further, you know,

whether they want to push a pro-Christian one, an anti-Christian one, or whatever. Yeah, I remember when I was sitting around in Las Vegas a few years ago on a nice fun trip there, I remember looking around thinking, you know, I don't think I buy the Roman Empire softness thing. I see a lot of soft Americans around me having a good time, quite rightly. But you know, they've got Ohio class submarines all over the point and F-35 lightnings. You can walk and chew gum. You can enjoy your private life and have an awesome military arsenal at your disposal. arsenal at your disposal. So let's come off Gibbon for a second and talk about some of the things that we now are more interested in, probably as a result of our experience in the world. Things like climate change and pandemic disease. Are these things important in the weakening, the transition of Rome, both parts of the Roman Empire from the end of the first all the way through to Arab conquest and beyond? These areas of climate change and pandemic disease are topics that over the last 15 to 20 years have begun to command a great deal more attention from scholars and they are areas which are currently the focus of really vigorous debate.

So, for instance, there was a book published a few years ago by an American scholar, Kyle Harper, called The Fate of Rome, which looked at things like climate change, looked at things like pandemic disease, as providing an explanation for the problems that overcome the Mediterranean world in the period that scholars talk about as late antiquity between the third and the seventh centuries. That there were problems of this order happening seems to be demonstrated from various types of evidence. So, for example, there's a wonderful graph about the rise and fall of the Roman cow, which shows that from the late pre-Roman Iron Age through the Roman Empire,

cattle on average get bigger. And then as you move from the Roman Empire through into the early Middle Ages, cattle get smaller. And is that a reflection of a different climate, which means that animals can't grow in the way that they did? We do have evidence which suggests cooler temperatures. We also hear in the mid-530s about some sort of event, perhaps the reflection of a volcanic eruption. We have a reference to years without summer, and we have quite vivid descriptions of how something had been thrown up into the atmosphere, was obscuring the sunlight, and was causing crops to fail. So we hear a lot about this in the 6th century. Also in the 6th century, you have the outbreak of pandemic disease in the form of the Plague of Justinian.

They first heard about it in coastal cities in Egypt, what you have is some evidence for climate change together with evidence for pandemic disease, and that these factors together cause problems. Part of the difficulty with this is that the evidence that we have largely concentrates in the 6th century. So in terms of explaining what happens in the 5th, it's not a huge amount of help. Also, initially, when scholars started looking at this material, there was a great deal of enthusiasm. Here was some sort of non-human agency that can help us to understand these processes. What's happening now, both in respect of climate change and in respect of pandemic disease, is that scholarship, it has great enthusiasms, which mean that the pendulum swings one way,

then people go, ah, yes, but we need to be a bit more critical. So at the moment, I think the pendulum is swinging back in a slightly different direction. And people are being a bit more critical about just how widespread was plague, how widespread were these various environmental changes. It seems to be the case that there are big changes happening in environmental terms. It seems to be the case that there are big changes happening in environmental terms. Scholars think that there may be links to the wider societal changes that we associate with the end of the Roman Empire. But I think scholarship still has quite a distance to go before it reaches any sort of consensus on what those effects may have been. You're listening to Dan Smith's History. We're talking about the fall of Rome. More coming up. If you love ancient history, then don't worry, we've got you covered. I'm Tristan

Hughes, host of the Ancients podcast, the podcast for all things ancient history. And these are the only surviving boxing gloves from the Roman Empire these are the only surviving boxing gloves from the Roman Empire and the earliest surviving boxing gloves for over 1,600 years. So through this material, we're actually looking at this entangled sum of hundreds and thousands, in fact,

of stories of life across ancient Eurasia. Baths of Cleopatra. I had never come across any such thing before. Subscribe to The Ancients on History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed.

We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. now to misquote uh gene hackman in arnhem let's talk about the germans you know we haven't talked about the germans like every other empire eventually someone works out to beat them right how should we think about i mean obviously it's incredibly complicated because, as you say, the empire changed. There were groups of people living on either side of this so-called border.

But in the 5th century, an army of people from outwith the empire sack Rome, okay, in the early 5th century. Is that because, like any historical process, they just develop better weapons, learn how to fight? Or is this a sign of terrible Roman, if that's even right to call it by that stage, weakness? I mean, how much agency should we give people living outside the traditional limits of this empire? Right. The sack of Rome in 410, often seen as a sort of cataclysmic event, with an external enemy ransacking the city over the course of three days in August of 410, and often presented in terms that evoke earlier attacks on the city of

Rome. For example, the sack of Rome by the Gauls in 390 BC, or maybe 386 BC. But whatever date you go for, it gives the impression that the heart of the empire hadn't been sacked by an external foe in about eight centuries. Part of the problem with that view is that the Goths under Alaric who sacked Rome weren't really an external force. They hadn't suddenly emerged from across the frontier. external force. They hadn't suddenly emerged from across the frontier. The Goths and various other people that Alaric led in the lead-up to the events of 410 had been inside the empire for about 30 years by this stage. There had been an incursion into the empire in the late 370s. The empire hadn't been able to defeat it. So maybe Rome was a bad example, but say the Battle of Adrianople, for example. If you take that as an event which appears to be a catastrophic

Roman military defeat in a conventional battle that they traditionally, we might expect Rome to win against these northern groups. Adrianople's a good example because the reasons for the Roman failure there are many and varied. As you say, it's the sort of battle that the Romans would expect to win. I think that one of the factors is probably that the armies that face each other at Adrianople are perhaps more similar than we imagine them to be. We have this image of what the Roman military machine looks like, which is often based on sort of first and second century ideas of what the Roman army looks like. By the time you reach the late fourth century, the Roman army looks different. Its armor is different, its equipment is different, and the makeup of the army is different in terms of who

the troops are. Similarly, I suspect that the Goths are not militarily unsophisticated. They probably are quite sophisticated by this stage. I mean, many of them have been serving in the Roman army for generations. So in terms of the armies that faced each other, perhaps a bit more similar than we might want to wish. And so we shouldn't think of the army that's defeated at Hadrianople as being like the sort of army that we see represented on Trajan's Column, for example. There's also the problem that there was in 378 at Hadrianople a catastrophic failure of leadership by the Emperor Valens. The Emperor Valens, having seen how Roman authority over the Balkans

and the Danube frontier zone had been eroded by the influx of a number of Goths and others, had abandoned any plans he might have had for war in the east against the Persians. He returned from Antioch to Constantinople, then into Thrace to Hadrianople, where they fought the battle. Initially, he was waiting for assistance from his nephew, Gratian, who was emperor in the west. So in 378, you have both the eastern emperor coming from Antioch and the western emperor coming from Gaul, aiming to gather their forces in the Balkans and defeat the Goths. Along the way, Gratian is delayed. There is an incursion across the Rhine frontier, so he takes time to defeat that. And he wins, so far as we can make out, a relatively significant victory against these invaders somewhere in the vicinity of what is now Alsace. And then the story that we're told is that Valens,

who'd never really won a significant victory, was rather put out that his nephew, this much younger member of the family, had been militarily successful. So he thought, well, here's an opportunity for him to score an even greater victory. So instead of waiting for his nephew, which might have made victory easier to guarantee, he decided to go it alone against the Goths. He broke with the plan that it seems that he and his nephew and fellow emperor in the West had been hatching, which was to join forces against the Goths. He went it alone, and it went disastrously wrong for him as you know yeah horrific description he paid for it with his life so contingency of course is important this but is it more difficult by the late fifth century to defeat an army of people from central and eastern Europe than it was for Caesar when he crosses the Rhine

at the end of the first century BCE? Is there less of a technological, tactical, operational gap because of their interactions and the liminal space, because of their movement across the frontier? People have served in the Roman army. Is there something going on here? I think you're probably right that there is a significant difference in terms of the forces that are facing each other in the 5th century than those that are facing each other in the 1st century BC, for example, in that the Roman army has changed significantly. And in fact, many of the forces that are engaged against what we think of as the barbarian invasions in the 5th century

are forces which are made up of Roman contingents, but also non-Roman contingents. So, for example, when Attila invades Gaul in the 450s and is defeated at the Catalanian Plains, it's a combined force of Romans and Visigoths that drives him off, that defeats him. Comparing the military success in the early empire with what appears to be military failure in the late empire needs to take account of just how radically different the late empire and the late imperial army is from the early empire. There is a tendency to think of them as exactly the same when they're not exactly the same. They're organized differently, they're deployed differently, their armor is different. And it may simply be the case that, as you suggest, there is so much interaction between what's going on on the Roman side of the frontier and what goes

on beyond the Roman side of the frontier that we're dealing with more equally matched forces, which I think is going to make it more difficult for Roman forces to defeat their opponents. Which is not to say that the Romans don't enjoy successes at this time or can't contemplate large-scale campaigns i mean you have invasions of persia for example which show that the romans are thinking in those terms and then later on to justinian you have sort of major expeditions again though you know contingency can play a part i mean when leo the first sends an expedition to the west to try and assist the west against the vandals it shipwrecked it's such a costly loss. Yeah, that's a big storm.

That's a really big storm, that one. Yeah. It's a big one. And then you get military geniuses like Belisarius. They kind of help as well. And also there are like failures against quote-unquote barbarian Germanic peoples, infamous failures in the first and second centuries, right? But okay, let's get to the bit now that people can find difficult talking about because it's been co-opted as fascist talking points.

This idea that was a migratory pressure on a kind of frontier zone and the famous crossing the ice on the Rhine, which is used at the beginning of many books and films, almost like a people on the move, a sense in which there is a demographic game of dominoes going on and from central asia pushing into eastern europe who in turn place pressure on what we might call the roman frontier is there something going on demographically do we think in this but is there a pressure on do people want to move into the kind of imperial space the answer to that is very complicated for a variety of reasons. One is that when people think of this unvariegated mass outside the frontier wanting to crash in, for that picture we're often relying on imperial sources that depict it in that way for rhetorical reasons.

In terms of what we know about the peoples living beyond the frontiers, we don't have written sources that tell us a lot about their identities, about their wishes, about their aspirations. We can't really understand from their perspective what they want to do. It's also very difficult to work out just how many of them there may have been, because the numbers that we get in ancient sources are notoriously unreliable. That said, though, there are clearly major changes going on beyond the frontier. The appearance of the Huns in the late 370s seems to be a major catalyst for changes, particularly amongst the Goths. Then you have the period when there's a huge swathe of territory from the Rhine in the west all the way across central and eastern

Europe across the north of the Black Sea into the Caucasus, which is under the control of the Huns under Attila. And that lends a certain degree of stability to the area beyond the frontier. But once Attila dies and his empire collapses, that creates instability, in the course of which some of those groups are attracted by the prospect of crossing into the empire so we hear about the Ostrogoths for example crossing the Danube into the Balkans in the decades that follow Attila's death and then it's those same Ostrogoths under the leadership of Theodoric who then eventually move into Italy so you are getting people moving around but in terms of just how many people we're talking about, it's very hard to know.

The other thing is that as these groups move around territories outside the empire, as they move around territories within the empire, their composition changes. So we hear, for example, in the lead-up to the sack of Rome in 410, that Alaric begins to require all sorts of people, which might include things like slaves, for example, joining his group because they just see a whole set of opportunities for them there. There do seem to be population changes of some description going on, but seeing it as a sort of uncontrolled immigration and mass immigration, seeing it as analog to some of the things that we're experiencing at the moment, is problematic, not least because it starts to evoke all sorts of emotional responses,

that you see the Roman Empire as some sort of emotionally aspirational ideal, and see anything that undermines that as uniquely threatening and as something to be rejected, repudiated, and driven back. And so far as we can make out in terms of the way that when these people do come into the empire in many places. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History,

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with the business of government, they get on with the local ruling elites quite fine. I mean, you can see that in Gaul, where you get old members of the Gallo-Roman aristocracy now serving Frankish kings or Burgundian kings or whatever. You see it in Italy, where you have members of the Roman senatorial aristocracy working as part of the government of Ostrogothic Italy. The sort of caricature of the fall of the Roman Empire that it's that you have something pristine and unchanging violently overthrown and then after that you just have people sort of eking out a very meagre existence among sort of smoking ruins that is a caricature and it doesn't reflect what is going on in many of these territories, where in many cases, the new barbarian rulers in the West, in places like Africa, Italy, Gaul, and Spain, when they establish themselves as rulers in some

places more successfully than others, I mean, in Africa, it's a catastrophe, they are able to cooperate with local populations and local elites. And when they represent themselves as rulers, they represent themselves as rulers in Roman style. I mean, the Clovis of the Franks, the Oderic of the Ostrogoths make a great play of presenting themselves as rulers whose trappings are the trappings of Roman rule. They're looking to Constantinople as the images that they wish to emulate. Well, it strikes me that as interesting as talking about this alleged fall in the 5th century, the word is probably incorrect, this transition of the 5th century is an equally important transition from your kind of Marcus Aurelius Pertinax period, late 2nd century, to what was to come later. I mean, that's probably an almost equally important disruption, disjunction into the third century, is it there? As you mentioned, there was quite a lot of debate about just how catastrophic the third century was. And I suppose from the perspective of many local communities across

these centuries, perhaps they didn't notice very much change. There are villages in Egypt, for example, where we have very good evidence for life continuing with very little disruption throughout the third century. But in terms of high politics, and I think this is a sort of history which has fallen out of favour in recent decades, but certainly in terms of high politics, the third century is seeing significant changes. There is a period when the empire splits into three. You have emperors based in Gaul, you have emperors based in Italy and the Balkans, you have this regime also based in Palmyra in Syria. So even by the time you reach the fourth century, the empire looks very different by the time of Diocletian and Constantine than it had even a century earlier. The organisation of the empire changes, the organisation of its military

resources changes, the organisation of its tax base changes. And of course, famously, with the sorts of religious changes that you get happening in the late third and early fourth centuries, its sort of religious ideological basis shifts dramatically and initiates a process which gradually over the course of the fourth and fifth centuries leads to a very different view of what constitutes legitimate authority and divinely ordained legitimate authority in the Mediterranean world and surrounding territories. It's funny because we understand that instinctively about everything else. We know that Ming China changes. We know the British Empire changed beyond all recognition. And yet for some reason, we think Rome was like like Rome was Rome from Sulla to 410. It's just bizarre, isn't it?

It is. And I suppose one of the reasons why we think that is that the voices that we hear from this period, which are, of course, often voices drawn from the social elite, encourage us to think in those terms. Yeah, interesting. So, for example, we were talking earlier about the Battle of Hadrianople in 378, and there's a famous verdict passed on the Battle of Hadrianople, which is that it was the worst defeat that the Romans had suffered since Cannae, so against Hannibal, which encourages us to think

of what happens in the late 4th century AD as similar to what's happening in the late 3rd century BC. When you think about what happens in the aftermath of Cannae, saying that it's the worst thing that's happened to the Romans since that defeat against Hannibal actually has within it an expression of hope or an expectation of hope that just as the Romans were laid low by Hannibal at Cannae, so they've been laid low by the Goths at Hadrianople. But after Cannae, the Romans recovered. And to the main author that we have who expresses this view, the historian Ammianus Marcellinus, consistently throughout his narrative emphasises that if emperors devote themselves to the proper

business of imperial rule, which is basically beating up barbarians and not engaging in things like civil war, then they too can make the Roman Empire recover after Hadrianople. But in some ways, that's a rather anachronistic way of thinking about the empire. I mean, Ammianus is looking back to earlier centuries saying, oh, I wish the empire was a bit more like that. And in that respect, he's quite misleading about the realities of the empire at that time. It's like when contemporaries go, Brexit's the biggest setback for British policy since Yorktown, Chesapeake in 1781. Inherent within that statement,

there's a sort of, you're trying to mythologise the kind of longevity of the British imperial experience. It's a very weird thing to know, I agree. Fascinating. Listen, man, I've taken enough of your time. Mark, thank you very much. How can people stay in touch with your work and your books and things like that where can they follow you they can follow me on academia.edu and they can also because i've made them public see a set of videos i do for my students

which looks at miracles in the late antique and early medieval imagination and i do a thing for my students called miracle of the week i'll make sure i tweet one of those out that sounds great thank you very much i'll send you a link okay please do thanks very much come on the podcast right thank you thanks folks you've made it in the wrong episode our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks, you've made it in the long episode. Congratulations, well done you. I hope you're not fast asleep. If you did fancy supporting everything we do at History Hit, we'd love it if you would go and wherever you get these pods, give it a rating, five stars, or its equivalent. A review would be great great thank you very much indeed that really does

make a huge difference it's one of the funny things the algorithm loves to take into account so please don't ever do that can seem like a small thing but actually it's kind of a big deal for us so i really appreciate it see you next time you