Dan Snow's History Hit - Why Did The Roman Empire Collapse?

Episode Date: June 18, 2026

How does an empire spanning three continents and half a millennium fall apart?In the final episode of our series on the Roman Empire, we're joined by Professor Peter Heather to unravel Rome's collapse - from the chaos of the third-century crisis to the deposition of the last Western emperor. Why did an empire at its economic peak unravel so quickly? And why did the East survive when the West did not?Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.We need your help! Let us know what you want from Dan Snow's History Hit by filling in our anonymous survey here: https://forms.gle/PvgayWLkWGjYT4St6Dan Snow's History Hit is now available on YouTube! Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcastSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit history hit.com slash subscribe. For centuries, the unshakable titan of the ancient world. Its territory spanning three continents. Its soldiers gazed out on the frontier from massive defensive fortifications. Its engineers built cities, moved rivers and turned the desert green. Roads stitched its provinces together from the sands of the Sahara

to the great rivers of the east to the misty crags beneath heaven. Hadrian's war. Its legions conquered and campaigned to the edges of the known world. Its emperors claimed dominion over millions of human beings. Yet, by the late 5th century, that empire, which had believed itself immortal, was gone across much of Western Europe and North Africa. The last emperor deposed. The imperial court dissolved. The map redrawn new king. kingdoms now claimed Rome's lands as their own. So what on earth happen? It's one of the greatest questions of all, folks, and right now, here, we on Dan Snow's history

are going to answer that question. Today we are delving into the internal and the external forces that unstitched the Western Roman Empire, while acknowledging that the eastern half of the empire endured and evolved into something new and long-lasting. We're going to explore how regional loyalties replaced imperial unity. We're going to look at Rome's relationship with frontier peoples, how it broke down, how it became corrupted, how the empire's vast size really was one of the roots of its vulnerability, and how changes on the distant Asian step, not for the last time in history,

would plunge Europe into an epoch of fire and violence. This isn't just a story about collapse, it's a story about change, about one world ending, another beginning, about transformation, as much as finality. This is the last of our episodes on our little series about the Roman Empire. Over the last two weeks, we've heard about how the Empire rose,

what it was like at its height, and there are links to those episodes in the show notes, so be sure to go and check those out before listening to this final episode, all about the Empire's demise. I'm so happy to say that I'm joined by Peter Heather, professor of medieval history at King's College London, an expert in the later Roman Empire in its success estate,

He's the author of The Fall of the Roman Empire, a new history of Rome and the Barbarians. He's the co-author, you'll have heard him on this podcast before. He's written a book called Why Empire's Fall, Rome, America and the Future of the West. I used to read his books when I was a kid, when I was a student. It is a great honor to have him on the podcast. Always meet your heroes, folks. They're brilliant.

He really is the guy to tell this story. Enjoy. Peter, thank you so much coming on this podcast. It's an absolute pleasure. We've set ourselves a great task. You've spent your entire career stewing. And why do people think this is the great question of history? Why does Rome fall and does it fall?

And it just seems that people are obsessed with it. They are. I think it's got a lot to do with Gibbon. Got a lot to do with the American founding fathers, understanding themselves as Rome. And it's got a lot to do with surviving material. So there's a lot of information that you can play with. And there's that great sort of list that someone's made.

Various scholars have come up with how many different theories? Oh, it's well over 100. Well over 100. Yes. It was 120 and counting, I think. Peter, I'm very upset if we don't get every single of this theory into the next hour. Right, first of all, though, should we have a look at the Roman Empire? So let's start in the northwest of Europe, the outlying section.

England and Wales, Britain, Britannia, the Rome province. What are we talking about the height of the empire? The early second century, Trajan, or Hadrian, those emperors that follow. Yeah, about 150. Well, no, actually, probably more like 200 is the absolute physical maximum. Because they add a bit more in Mesopotamia. How much of Holland? I don't want to get this wrong.

How much of Holland shall I want to say it was on? Western Holland. West, okay, Western Holland, right. Yeah. Down through northern Italy, obviously. Rome itself. Bavaria. Austrian Bavaria.

Okay, a bit of Bavaria there. Okay, interesting. North Africa. Yes. A sort of strip along the coast. How far inland is Roman? Well, the power stretches as far as the decent agricultural land does. So up into the Atlas Mountains.

I mean, it's a very ill-defined frontier because it's basically about protecting agricultural production. Right. And there's no formed enemy there. Come to Egypt. And of course, it's equivalent, down the Nile. Because there's good fun. So we'll go down the Nile there.

That's right. Not Sudan. But not Sudan. Well into Iraq. Once in Iraq. Antoine, Turkey. Yeah. The bit that I'm interested in, what's going on in Crimea,

even parts of Russia and modern Ukraine? The empire is stretching up the western coast of the Black Sea. Okay. But not as far as Crimea. There are independent cities there, which have very close relationships with the empire, and there are lots of ambassadors there. So almost client king sort of stuff.

Greece, of course. And then is it the Danube front? I know Trajan conquers beyond the Danube. The line of the Danube is the place to start, but then you do have to add Transylvania beyond at this point. So there's a big arc up into the Carpathian system. Is that empire, geographically, it looks different to China, doesn't it? It looks different to sort of the Aztec Empire.

It's based around the Mediterranean. Is it unwieldy geographically, or does this actually make it quite coherent? Is it easy to move troops and supplies around? Well, you've got two things going on. First of all, it is the biggest state that Western Europe has ever seen. It's much bigger than Charlemagne's empire. It's much bigger than the Holy Roman Empire. It is colossal.

It goes from Scotland to Iraq. I mean, that tells you it's huge. And, of course, it's bigger than it looks because land transports, moves, you can do a kind of rough calculation and come up with a round number about 20 times more slowly than today. So it's actually measured in, because the real distance is how long it takes you and me to get from one place to another. That's the real measure of distance, not miles or kilometres or anything like that.

So it's actually 20 times bigger than it looks. It's like running all of Eurasia now. That's the scale you're talking about. So it is colossal. Transport is slow. On the other hand, it's also the longest lived. state the Western Europe has ever known. At its fullest extent, apart from that Dacian hump, it's lasting for 500 years, half a millennium. So time from us to Henry the 8th.

Nothing has lasted that long. Makes the British Empire look like a complete joke. Flash in the pan. Yeah, absolutely, nothing. Complete nothing. So it's doing something right. Although it's colossal and unwieldy, it works in an amazing way. Part of that I learned from your books is some of that is luck. I mean, they get quite lucky in that there's no massive empires, for example, pushing in through what is now Northern Europe. That's right. I mean, there's a pattern of underdevelopment still. What's different from China is that the Roman system doesn't take in all the kind of arable farmers of Western Europe. Some are left outside, whereas the Chinese system incorporates basically all the sort of arable

farmers of the eastern end of Eurasia. But that farming area is still very underdend. developed, population densities aren't high and you don't have any large structured states. So if you look at the expansion pattern of the Roman Empire, it basically takes over all the bits of Europe that were worth taking over in about the first century BC. Right. Tough hit on the Scots there, but they did argue that actually Britain was not worth taking. No, exactly. It was a vanity project.

Yes. You always go a bit further than the cost benefit. So if we're going to look at the, well, whether it's the collapse, the fall of this Western Empire, the dissolution, the change of this Western Empire and something different, is it important to start with actually not the 5th century when it all gets very dramatic? Is it important to start with the so-called crisis of the 3rd century? I believe it is. I think you need some backstory.

I think you need to understand how the imperial system is working in the 4th century at the verge of the outbreak, of the process of unraveling or whatever you want to call it. Because I think if you don't understand, well, the process of unraveling is dictated, the precise nature of it, by the way that the empire works. And if you don't understand how the empire works, you're not going to understand the process of unraveling. Okay, taught me through it. How does the empire sort of deal with these great crises at face and then reconstitute itself? The third century crisis is really interesting because in part it's caused by the Roman's own success story. What they've done is turn the provincial populations everywhere from Britain into Iraq, into Romans.

So, you know, the Brits have stopped painting themselves blue. They're learning Latin. They're living in villas. They're wearing togas. They're in the imperial system, and they want more from it. So the success of Romanization policies, self-Romanization in the first 200 years, creates a lot of political voices who want a share in the system. And the third century crisis is very substantially, the internal side of it,

is about these provincial voices wanting a share in the system. It's also caused by the rise of a Persian superpower next door. Right, so they've got a peer competitor for the first time in a while. Absolutely first time. And that's in, what, roughly modern Iran? Iraq and Iran. So southern Iraq and Iran. So it's the two combined.

So if you think about that, it's a pretty hefty competitor. Third century crisis takes form of various emperors being defeated by the Persians and then various provincial subgroups breaking away from the centre in response to the fracturing of imperial authority. So the Persians challenge imperial authority on the battlefield, and then these provincial communities

start setting up their own branches of the Roman Empire. So we get a Gallic Empire that lasts for two generations in the second and third quarter of the third century. Why this is important is the way that the empire actually overcomes the crisis, then shapes the nature of where we are in the fourth century. And in particular, I suppose two things stand out.

One is we refashion the military. So gone are the legions. Early Roman Empire, you have legions, big units, they're 5,000 men, there are a small expeditionary army in themselves, each one dotted around the edges of the empire. It's a usurpation in waiting, basically. In response to the breakaway units of the third century, we create a hierarchy. So there are still units on the frontier, but they're small, they're not very well equipped.

There are some regional armies intermediate, but the real striking power of the imperial army is concentrated in elite formations around the empire. So he sort of maintains a monopoly of force. Absolutely. No political dissidents after the year 300 takes the form of a front. or a regional commander challenging Central Imperial Authority. Because they don't have the muslin. They don't have a chance.

You will be dead in no time at all. So we get lots of coups at the centre for control of that potent military force, but you don't see anyone challenging it, trying to fragment it. Okay, but then the problem is the emperor has to get that field army to wherever there's trouble on the borders. Yes, he does. And that's a huge space. It is a huge space.

And this, I think, is the great downside of the third century crisis, is that it becomes clear that if you've got enough force to counter the Persian threat, and Persia doesn't go away, it's countered, but it's not destroyed, then you've got to have an emperor in the east close to that concentration of military force. And if you've got an emperor in the east, he's too far away from the West to control political developments there. So it's often talked about as a system. It's not really a system.

It's a series of improvisations in each political generation, but we usually end up with more than one emperor. Because of that, you've got to have one in the east, and if you've got one in the east, the west is too far away. And so is there a formal divide between what becomes this of eastern west empire? It is broadly, if you started at the northern end of Greece and went straight up.

It's more or less there. Albania. Yeah. Okay. Albania is part of the east, but Serbia would be part of the west. Okay. And Libya, somewhere in Libya? Libya is East, Tripolitania, so Tripoli, that's west.

And initially that wasn't hard on fires. It wasn't designed to become two different states. No. And they don't operate completely as two different states. This is a myth that some of my colleagues put around. Emperors pass laws for both halves of the empire. That's telling you they're operating. And occasionally we'll take over the other half and put a son on the throne.

Absolutely. It's not easy. There's lots of conflict. So one form of internal conflict is replacing your emperor in East or West. The other form of conflict is occasional head-on civil wars between East and West. But that, roughly speaking, keeps the Empire going for another hundred or so years. Yes, it does. It makes it impossible for an unraveling of the system in terms of geographical fragments emerging to independence.

Right. You can't do it. Now you've got a Western Emperor who's sort of really usually in, France, northern Italy. Yes. So nowhere's too far away. Yeah, okay. Exactly so. But as we come to the end of that fourth century, get into the fifth century, the 400s AD, what starts to happen?

Well, we get a new element into the equation. And that is round the edge of Rome's European frontiers between the first and the fourth century. We have seen a kind of social and economic. and therefore political transformation of largely Germanic-speaking neighbors. They're becoming a bit more coherent. Their economic systems are becoming more productive. So their populations are growing.

They are still client states. Okay, so they're outside the empire. Yes. But their leaders are sort of, they're trading with Rome. Absolutely. Rome might be sending ambassadors and giving them some military assistance and things occasionally. Rome turns up once a generation beats the crap out of them, make a diplomatic agreement.

A lot of formal submissions rather than necessarily head-on conflict, but a little bit of bloodletting just to make the point that the empire's in charge. But they start to, what, becomes more coherent, more threatening? They are becoming more coherent. You can see that and by the 4th century,

the one change we'd make to the map is to remove that Dacian hump. So, Transylvania and Romania. It's part of the third century crisis, the response to it. The empire decides to shorten its defensive lines. Okay.

And so on this northern front here, we're starting to see it, well, almost a peer threat like we do in Persia, are we something that can actually beat the Romans? They're too small to beat the Romans. If the wind is in their favour and conditions are right, they can extract better terms. So, for instance, the Goths, who are on the lower Danube, opposite Romania and Bulgaria now, they can get better terms out of the Emperor Valens. in the late 360s, because the Persians are getting upity in the east. He needs to go and fight them.

So he's in the middle of a Gothic war, but the Persians are much more important. So he'll do a deal that gives the goth something of what they want in order to extract his armies and fight Persia. So they need that kind of a thing to go in their favour. And is there anything within the Roman people talk about disease or economic change, climate change? Is there anything going on within this Roman world that is somehow weakly? Of course, Gibbon, the 18th century.

story. Well, they all became Christian and started loving their neighbors and all became often. And people often still, don't they talk about how they became luxury-loving and they all got a bit to, they forgot their martial traditions. Is there anything going on in this Roman world that is sort of weakening it? There is nothing that we can see. Really? Yeah. And this is, in fact, the colossal new data set that's become available since the 1980s. Rural surveying, you can date Roman pottery to within a decade, its progressions. and we know from careful sampling how dense a concentration of surface pottery

means a settlement underneath. So rural surveying, very boring. You go move forward a metre, collect everything, put it in a plastic bag. You don't have to dig anything. It's on the surface. Yeah, tractors mean that modern playing techniques pull it all up.

So you just go forward, collect it all, look at it, and what's emerged from that is not only where there are settlements in the Roman period, but when they're there, because you can date them to within a decade. And the staggering, it would have been to my older colleagues fact,

we're sort of getting used to it but still thinking about it now, that has emerged from all of that, is that across the vast majority of this imperial landscape, the period of maximum rural population and rural productivity is the fourth century. Not earlier. This is, you know, it's the total game changer, actually. Amazing. I think we're all still kind of wrestling with the significance of that.

and what that does to your understanding of Roman collapse because it basically takes out all the old explanations about social and economic collapse. There might be other internal reasons, but it's not going to be straightforward social economic. So things are going pretty... So we're approaching 400 AD, things are going pretty well. Yeah, yes, you wouldn't be looking at it

and thinking crisis and actually the sort of material and non-material cultural remains of the 4th century suggest creativity, they're plentiful, there's a lot of people doing a lot of interesting things, the amount of writing, once you realize, which a lot of classicists didn't, that Christian fourth century people aren't still Romans. So you do look at what Christians are writing as well as in the traditional genres, but you add it all in the amount of creative writing generated the fourth century is colossal. Okay, so things are fine. You would think so. Well, you know, apart from that, you've had to develop.

the empire. Yes. There are issues, and no human state that we've ever seen is without its problems. Well, indeed. Indeed. Who are we to point the finger? Indeed. Right, so let's get into those years beyond 400.

What starts to happen? Well, we get a very interesting effect. There's some kind of problem on the Great Eurasian step in the world of the nomads. So east of the river Volga. Not exactly sure what causes it. there is some ice core evidence that it was getting a bit hot and dry. It may be therefore that the nomad world is facing a problem about grazing and animals, but that's certainly a plausible candidate.

The other would be that actually it's empire building going on and on step, because they do that as well. And when they do that, the rest of the world is going to find out about it. But what we find out is in the mid-370s, previously unknown in the West group of nomads called the Huns start to impact upon Rome's frontier clients in the Danubian region. First off, Goths north of the Black Sea. So the Goths are now finding themselves squished between these Huns that are arriving and the hammer of the Huns and the anvil of the Roman Empire.

Yes. Which is going to give way. Yes. They're faced with a dilemma as to what to do. There are several different Gothic groups. They don't all do the same thing. but in the autumn of 376, two separate large groups of Goths, one called Tivengi, one called Grutungi, ask for asylum inside the Roman Empire. And the Romans are minded to let them in or not? Well, Valens is in the middle of another war with Persia.

So all his army is in Syria and Iraq. What he decides to do is to let one group in and keep the other group out. no Roman emperor who claims to be chosen to be emperor by the supreme creator of the cosmos can ever admit that he's forced to do anything by a barbarian. This is an admission that he's not actually divinely supported because he shouldn't be being forced to do things if he were. So Valenz's propaganda says, yeah, great, we love to see the Goths. But actually what he does is only let in one and try to keep the other one out. And he also takes measures to control all the food supplies in the Balkans where the Goths are intruding.

I think Valens is stuck. He can't disengage from Persia quickly enough. He's going for the least worst scenario that he can see, which is let him one group of girls keep the other one out. And I take it that doesn't work. It doesn't work, and I don't think Valens' heart was in that agreement ever. I do think the control of the food supplies is a real indicator that he's thinking, I've got to do this in the short term, but in the long term I'm going to restore normal service.

and he negotiates peace with Persia, gets his army groups free, negotiates with his nephew, who's the Western Emperor, for a joint campaign. In the meantime, I think the Goths are equally unconvinced that the first agreement is going to hold.

So the Goths who are admitted, form an alliance with the Goths who weren't admitted, they all end up inside the empire, and this is where we are in 378. And they end up in... Adrian Ople. So we get this accursed place for the Romans, Adrian Ople.

Valens rushes to fight the goth before his nephew turns up. Yes. He's got some intelligence. I think that only one of the two Gothic groups are there. So he thinks he can win a fast one. Valens has been a bit short of military victories for a God-chosen emperor. So he's looking for one. Nice to get one of the belt.

And his nephew has been quite slow in turning up. So I guess his advisors said, yeah, okay, we've got an opportunity. And the result is one of the great military catastrophes in Roman history. Both Gothic groups were there, not the one, and the Romans are ambushed from the side when they haven't fully deployed, and Valenz and two-thirds of his army are killed. And that's what's always interesting about this story,

is that it's this catastrophic defeat in the East that actually proves rather disastrous in the West, doesn't it? And is that because we've got Constantinople, this is the capital of the East, so you think, gosh, they must have been under threat, but they're very well-defender. The Goths can't capture that city, can they? They can't.

Even more... Amazing walls. And even more important, they can't get across. The key revenue producing areas of the Eastern Empire are coastal Turkey, Asia Minor, Syria, Syria, Middle East, and Egypt. Right. And they are insulated from the threat to the Eastern Empire's European territories. Okay.

So you can't get at the Eastern heartlands. It means that there is the constant flow of revenues which keeps the Army in existence keeps on coming. So none of the threats to the empire challenge the key revenue zones of the Eastern Empire. The tax base remains intact. So the Westerners thought, well, thanks very much. That's great.

Yes, after a while. So you've now got the Goths sort of running wild in the Balkans. Well, the end result of this conflict is that I think East and West agree that they can't at the moment terminate the Goths in dependent existence. So we get a treaty in 382, I think, dragged, kicking and screaming out of the empire, which recognises Gothic autonomy on Roman soil. Within the Balkans. Within the Balkans. Okay. Not a great sign? No. And we've got the speeches that the then-Eastern emperor's spokesman gave while trying to sell the agreement to the Senate of Constantinople,

which is a gathering of Eastern land-owning opinion. And he pretty much admits, which is astonishingly rare, that the empire has been forced into it. But he also looks forward to Gothic autonomy disappearing in the medium term. Yeah. He projects that as a likely outcome. Yeah, sure. Of course, like our public sector debt issue, it will just sort of disappear.

Growth will make it disappear. Right. Let's get back to the future. the West. What is the problem here in Western Europe? The problem in Western Europe is that we haven't really seen the Huns yet. All we've seen is the kind of knock-on effects of the Hunnic advance guard. There is no evidence for large-scale Hunnic intrusion into the fringes of Europe itself before the year 400. When we first get Hans in large numbers in what's now Hungary, that's about 410.

Coincidentally, I don't think it's a coincidence. other people think it's a coincidence. The years before the sudden appearance of the Huns in Hungary, we get a massive outflow of population from that central European region, the Great Hungarian Plain and its adjacent areas, one into Italy and one across the Rhine into Gaul. So two massive invasions,

one in 405 into Italy, and one at the end of 406 into Gaul. The Roman sources concentrate on the effects of these things, things. There was a source which told us what the causes were, but it survives only in fragments, and in a baudelarise, confused later version where someone had read it and copies a bit out. So it's entirely reasonable, as some of my colleagues would do, to argue that the invasions come first and the Huns move into a power vacuum. Myself, I think it's the other way around. And why can't the road, just let's do the basic thing first. Why can't the Rome Empire just

smash these barbarian invasions? Well, it does smash the first one. Okay. The invasion of Italy in 405, that is broken up. It's led by a king called Radhaegyzes, who might be a goth. The sources are messy, and that's why we can't be certain. But his coalition is broken up. A large number of his elite warriors are drafted into the Roman army of Italy.

Lower status warriors are sold off as slaves in such large numbers that the bottom falls out of the slave market in Italy. Radagos himself is executed outside Florence. Right. So normal, sir, that's what the Roman Empire. They've been dealing with problems coming from the North since the beginning. Yes. But you have left this thrust entering Gaul.

The thrust into Gaul is more problematic. The main military concentration is in northern Italy, not in Gaul. And the local military commanders with landowner support go into revolt, particularly in Britain. That's interesting. they revolt. Because of the lack of, I think, care and attention coming in their direction. The revolt, it proclaims itself and the actions of the emperors, particularly Constantine the third, the third of the usurpers, is to confront the invaders that have come in.

You're listening to Dan Snow's history, more Rome falling after this. Okay, so I should say that this Gaulish incursion, it's stretched across to Britain as well, has it? Well, the effects of it have. Just a bit of breakdown, there's people from elsewhere, seeing the opportunity jumping in. So Constantine III is a military commander in Britain. There are some moderately high-quality-quality troops in southeastern Britain. He unites those with the moderately high-quality troops on the Rhine to create his power base. And he says if Rome aren't going to defend us, we're going to try and do something ourselves.

Okay, so Britain sort of slightly, at a risk of sound like an idiot, they slightly brexit from the Roman Empire in this period. The end result is that they do. Absolutely. it's about another within a decade or so that's true so curiously Britain oddly takes itself out of the empire it does

well Compton is trying to take over the whole empire to start with and in fact it's partly Brexit I mean I call it the first Brexit in one book just as a joke but it's partly ejected in that in the aftermath of the fallout

from all these attacks the central empire says goodbye. Yeah, we're never coming back. Yeah, we're not coming back. So, yes, you tried to take security into your own hands. Well, this time, have you got now. We have other priorities. Right, we have other priorities.

And then Britain will see incursions from Ireland, from what is now Scotland, from northern Europe. Yes. We can discuss exactly the extent to which Romanus remains, but it's sort of gone from the empire at that point. It's gone from the official empire from about the second decade of the Fifth Senate. I mean, I think, and I'm not alone, most people do think this, there's a sub-Roman population, at least in southern Britain, that keeps its ties to the continent that keeps its Latinate culture for a generation or two. The Continental Chronicles say it's in about 440 that the manure really hits the air conditioning

in Britain. Oh, really? So, you know, 25 years after the separation is when things get really nasty. I think they're probably right. They think they know what they're talking about. Breakdown of agriculture, the barbarian hordes, all that. Large-scale intrusion. So I think there's a sort of funny 20-year period in Britain

where it's outside the Roman Empire, but still very Roman in character. So what's going on with this unchecked barbarian invasion through what is now France? They clear off in 409-10 into Spain. Wow, they're on the move. And they divide Spain up between themselves. everything except the very northeastern corner. So the vast majority of the Iberian Peninsula, they divide up amongst themselves.

So this is a remarkable and such. You can see why in the past they assume there must be some other factors at play. They assume there must be some terrible disease in the Roman world, because this is in the space of two years. These barbarian kings are just feasting on the corpse of what had been the Western Roman Empire. Yes, that's right. And the thing is made worse by the fact that the Goths who'd made the treaty in the Balkans, in 382,

also go into a revolt, and they move into Italy in 408. Right, so they decide to, again, leave the Eastern Empire alone. They now march up through... Yeah, they want a deal, they want a better deal, they've been frozen out

of the political establishment of the Eastern Empire. The West is obviously in trouble. They can see they can get a better deal from that, and this is Alarik who moves into Italy. He marches up through what is now, places like Croatia and Slovenia, into Italy.

And then he gets lots of reinforcement, from the leftovers of Radigysus's attack. So... Oh, they're still hanging out. They're still there. A few of them around, yeah. And they substantially increase Alarix force. So we end up with two big new barbarian coalitions that have been created,

Allericks in Italy, and then this emerging Vandal Allen coalition in Spain. Just a complete omnischambles. Yes. Right. And Alaric, once he's an... Italy, the unthinkable happens, and Rome itself is sacked. It's sacked, yes. For the first time in centuries?

Yes, the last time with some Celts in 300 BC, 200 BC, something like that. I'm a medievalist. I don't know. It's not a test. Okay, but hundreds, hundreds and hundreds of years, there are foreign enemies rampaging around the streets of Rome. And things get worse? They get worse, but they get worse.

but they get better first. Okay. They get better in the sense that Alaric was trying to sack Rome to get a deal. He's sitting outside Rome for 18 months. Oh, well. He could have sacked at any point, but he's trying to use it as a bargaining counter to get a deal out of the Western Empire. They won't do a deal with him.

By the way, where is the Western Empire at the moment? Just a few blokes living on Sardinia. The Western Empire is the Army groups of Northern Italy. The Army is still there. or the main central striking force is still there, and the flow of revenues that keeps it in being, at least some of it, is still there. Yeah, and they're still getting some revenue from North Africa.

We're getting lots of revenue from North Africa. Sicily is good. The Western Balkans, so Croatia is very nice. Lots of money come from there. Yeah. Okay, so the organs are still functioning. Yes, they are. And when we get a powerful leader emerging in the West.

empire. He's not the emperor, but he's the Generalissimo who acts as the frontman. Then he suppresses the usurpas, unites the Roman military, forces the Goths who've retreated by this time into southern France. They've retreated out of Italy because they've kind of been starved out of Italy and no deal has been offered them. He does a deal with them that restricts them to a small area around Bordeaux, and he mobilizes the Goths in alliance with his forces to attack the people in Spain. And the groups in Spain were two separate groups of vandals, Hastings and Silings, and a number of separate groups of Allans, each under their own kings. And it's quite clear that the Allens were originally the most numerous group. This leader, called Flavus Constantius,

destroys the siling vandals, destroys the independence of the Allens, wins a whole series of victories, and he inadvertently creates a new, more concentrated vandal, Alan Confederation around the surviving, Hazding vandals. But, you know,

he wins a whole series of major victories in Spain and restores most of it to imperial control. Okay, so we're going to have a last hurrah here for the Romans in Spain. Yeah, absolutely. and most of Gaul is brought back under control as well. And most of Gaul as well? So we're left with a couple of barbarian enclaves.

Around Bordeaux? Yeah, Goths in Bordeaux and probably in Portugal, the surviving Vandals and Allens at this point. As it had many times before, the Roman Empire, looks like it might sort of bounce back, it might recover its vitality. It does, it absolutely does. No interest yet in Britain, because this crisis is still too immediate.

Okay, what happens next? the next crucial move is really that and this is the problem with I mean you asked about weaknesses in the imperial system the weakness in the imperial system is the lack of any clear succession plan policy in fact pre-modern empires don't tend to have clear succession things when it's really important who runs the empire you can't have primogeniture because you get an idiot you do yes one hates to tell you that to kings and things, but it's only when they're not important that you can have primogeniture. So, periodically, the Roman Empire, the course of politics in the Roman Empire had always been emergence of a strong man. It's a one-party state. You think of those images of Putin with those

people around the table. His power is preeminent. When he dies, you get chaos. You know, it's like when Stalin died. You had half a dozen people at each other's throat. Arresting each other. Yeah, exactly. until the next one emerges. And that can take a while. And in that interregnum, it offers opportunities once you've got these barbarian confederations on Roman soil, they can start taking independent action.

So in the middle of the succession crisis that follows the unlooked-for early death of Flavius Constantius, the vandals move into North Africa. Yes, this is the bit. They hop across. And again, people might be thinking, well, North Africa, at the time, North Africa, enormously valuable agricultural land, farming, breadbasket of the Roman Empire.

You've got to think, Algeria, Tunisia, where all the millionaires had their summer houses, indeed their winter houses in the interwar period. It's gorgeous countries. I mean, if people have not been there, we're not talking the Sahara Desert here. We are talking fields of wheat as far as I can see. Yes, and beautiful gardens and lovely temperatures. The Atlas Mountains mean there's plenty of rainfall, enough rainfall, to generate really prosperous agriculture. And it's a beautiful place to live. And more than that, it is the jewel in the crown because there are no enemies there. You know, Berbers raid from the desert occasionally, but they're not a major enemy.

You've never had to have a large military establishment there. It doesn't cost the empire a lot. and it contributes a huge amount. Not anymore, it doesn't. No, it does not. Falls over like a pack of cards? Yes. The best bit is really Tunisia and Western Algeria,

and the vandal sees that in 439. And that is another real moment of crisis because a great flow of revenues is cut off. And the Central Army, which is what keeps the Empire and being, relies on that flow of revenues. So the process, at least as I understand it, that brings about the imperial unraveling, is the loss of tax base, which then leads to the weakening of the military forces at the centre until the centre is no longer the centre. It doesn't have that preponderance of force anymore. How long does this stagger on?

It staggers on for about two political generations after... So about 15 minutes. Well, yes. In Roman terms. Yes. Because they do realize that the way to fight back is actually to retake North Africa. And the Eastern Empire is still willing to play. It never writes the West a blank check.

But again, the idea that the East leaves the West to its face is just not supported in the evidence. So there are three projected and actual expeditions to recapture North Africa from the vandals, two of which the East are. substantially involved in. The first one we got, it's immediately afterwards in 442. We're gathering huge armies in Sicily from the East and West for a major expedition. But then, Blomey, Attila sees the opportunity, and he invades across the Danube. And that's what stops the 442 expedition from going. Because the East Roman contingents have come from the Danube front.

Attila is threatening eastern territories. So the East withdraws its armies to fight him instead. Rome falls after this, don't go away. So the East has the misfortune to be facing Attila the hunt. So again, timing. Just as the Roman Empire benefited in some ways from time and space over the previous centuries, it's now absolutely other gate. It's got one of the great nomadic cavalry commanders of all time banging on the front door.

Exactly. And what Attila has done is it's only, I don't know, maybe a third of Rome's frontier clients had run over the border in the 370s and 400s, and he's pulled a lot of the rest into a nomadic empire, which contains a lot of the Germanic-speaking frontier clients of the Roman Empire. And those guys know how to fight the Roman Empire.

Absolutely. Okay, so that's very potent. So North Africa, not... Did I remember from your book that was a gale destroyed one of the few? Yes, they have two more goes. 461. The vandal see that coming and burn the show.

shipping, which had been gathered in Spain. And then 468 is the big one. And the Eastern Empire really burns the money on that. Huge expedition. But they're caught against the Lee Shore in a storm, and the vandals throw in fire ships. Wow. So it's like the Spanish Armada in Spain.

But it is a bit like Spanish Armada in that it really feels like one of those moments. I remember reading that in your book years ago and think, God, that feels like one of those moments where history, at the course of history. It could have worked. It really could have worked because only, what, 60 years after that,

an East Roman expedition does manage to land and does conquer Vandal, North Africa. It's not an impossibility. It could have happened in the 460s. And if it happened in the 460s,

while Italy, Sicily, Southern Gaul, and the Adriatic coast are all still part of a functioning rump Western Empire, then, yeah. Could have led something. It would have led to something.

Instead, it doesn't. Instead, it doesn't. and that Rump Empire, when do you think, if we can, that we should put a date on the end of that Western Empire? It is the defeat of that expedition in 468, which clearly changes perceptions. That's what makes it clear that the Western Centre, imperial centre, is not going to be revivified in any major way.

So immediately in 469, the Goths break out of their Gallic reservation, start conquering Spain for themselves. If you can't trust these Goths, who can you trust? Okay, so tough few years to be Spanish. Yes. To be living in Spain. It really is.

And Burgundians who have also fled Huns there in sort of Geneva and the Rhone Valley, they break out, start making an independent empire. This is what happens. Groups duck out of participation in an imperial project. They realize that the centre does not have enough money and enough military force to force them into a political relationship, and they start creating their own structures. And Roman landowners,

we have lovely letter collection from a man living in central southern France at the time. They're caught between a rock and a hard place. Their lands are where they are. Their land is the total source of their wealth and elite status. You can't move it.

It's not movable wealth. Not stock and shares. It's where it is. You're faced with a quandary. what is the best path to secure your future? Do you try and stay part of a Roman empire for as long as you think there's going to be one? Do you start cozing up to the nearest barbarian king,

goth or Burgundian? And you can see what's very nice about this letter collection, I think. It's a man called Sidonius Apollinaris, and you see his friends, and they make different choices. It's one of those moments where you don't know what's going to happen,

and people are guessing, they're making their best guess and acting on it. some marry off that unmarried sister to the local barbarian chief and hope that they can keep the party going. Yes, absolutely. So we've got the Burgundians, we've got the Goths invading Spain, come on, finish off Italy for me. Yes, we've had renegades from, because Attila's empire has been and gone by the state. Atila dies. He dies in 453 and his empire breaks up, well, in a succession dispute between his sons, which gives everybody the chance to clear off because they don't want to be part of the Hanuk Empire. Quite a few of them have ended up in

Italy, including a man called Odoaka, who is a senior general, but the tax revenues are not there to support that army anymore, and it revolts. And it revolts over a lack of pay, which is not surprising. Because we've got to find a different way of paying it. There's no more money in the Roman treasury. No, there is not. And he topples the last Caesar? He does, yes. And crowns himself? He calls himself king, but doesn't say what he's king of. Okay. And what's brilliant about him is he sends a senatorial embassy to Constantinople sending back the imperial regalia, whatever they were, and saying there's no need for more than one Roman emperor anymore. So he doesn't define what the new situation is. How odd? Yeah. Well, I think it's a bit like

the breakup of the Soviet Union with the emergence of those republics. What is this political system? But it's interesting, he doesn't get there and think, oh, Rome, quite like this, I might crown myself emperor. It's interesting that he brings the curtain down on it. I think he was concerned that Constantinople might intervene.

Okay. So actually you say, look, I'm not a pretender to your throat. Exactly. But there is now a new situation here. Yeah, because actually the person who takes over from him, Theodric, the Ostrogoth, he does the same kind of thing. He projects himself as an emperor.

He allows his subjects to respond to him as though he's an emperor, but he never calls himself an emperor. Okay. Just as he talks about with that amazing study of pottery, it seems to me that historians have been backward and fallen and what that means for the people of this space that used to be the Western Empire. Do you think in some places it would have felt like not much had changed?

As you say, these landowners or make an accommodation, you put the local German in the palace, and then you keep running the show and keep the water running on the aqueducts and things like that? Certainly in the first instance, yeah, in the first generation or so, it would have seemed that way in some places. The end of the empire takes different forms in different places. So in North Africa, for instance,

the vandals settle themselves in the richest provinces. But those were estates owned by absentee Roman senator. To move into the empty stately homes. So there's no sign of massive economic dislocation within the North African provinces. that archaeology is quite well known. And the local sort of officials are still collecting their tax, but now they're giving it to the guy in the big house who's a landlord.

That's right. Yeah. So the vanders are concentrated in what's now Tunisia. They don't pay taxes. The tax structures break down there, but Western Algeria and southern Tunisia, the two other provinces, they do pay taxes. Okay.

And that carries on as normal. Likewise, certainly in much of southern Gaul, the local landowners make their peace, with Gothic power. This is the Visigothic kingdom. We have a letter collection from the first generation of that kingdom and a lot of those landowners are still there.

And I suppose they're saying to Visgoth, look, mate, don't smash everything up. There's money here. We'll put you in the big house. We'll keep the systems of Roman government going and you can benefit. There's no point torching everything. That's right.

But there are land confiscations. I'm sure. This has been much debated in the last scholarly generation and there was one very popular line of argument when I was doing my finals back in 1981. Large book coming out two months before I did finals, thank you so much,

which has argued that they didn't get actual land, they got tax revenues, but actually the evidence for that is really ropey. And it's quite clear that you get land expropriations, particularly in the Burgundian kingdom, a little bit in the Visigotic kingdom and so on. These people have fought quite hard to be here. They've suffered from the Huns.

They've fought Roman armies. They expect to pay off, and they want landed capital. Can we finish on Britain when I read your book 20 years ago? Britain feels like a place at one extreme. Yes. And that does feel a little bit more collapse. Yes, absolutely. The unraveling of the imperial system

would have felt different in different places. And certainly in Northern Gaul and in Britain, the archaeology and actually the historical evidence, although it's not great from Britain, makes it very clear that you're looking at something much more apocalyptic. As we said, it looks like these Roman landowners survive exiting the system for a generation or two in the 5th century. But by the end of the 5th, middle of the 6th century,

they have completely gone. They're just nowhere to be found. No, they're not. The villas disappear, the towns disappear, Roman London is a sort of ghost town. Yeah, absolutely. Latin disappears. All the marks of Roman culture disappear,

and actually the latest DNA evidence, although it's only one site. It had been argued that they stopped being Roman, but they kind of make themselves into Anglo-Saxons. I never really bought that. You've got one very interesting cemetery now from Dover looking at Anglo-Saxon elite from the 5th into the 6th century,

and the vast majority of the family's in there, and you can see their related family. Their intrusive continental groupings, as you might expect. One, very interestingly, one family line is indigenous Romano-Briton. So a minority somehow navigate across that boundary. But basically, Roman culture and most of the patterns of Roman life disappear in Britain. The wonderful thing is there's great archaeologist in Canterbury, Ellen Swift, who's managed to show there is a market for secondhand broken glass in post-Roman Britain.

which I think tells you everything you need to know. Really exciting. High value goods. Yes. Gave you some broken glass. Bits of Northern Gold look like that. Elsewhere, the landowners survived. But I think one thing that's really important to know and notice is that although they keep

their latin and they keep their landed estates, the major pattern of their life changes in that they become liable for military service. So already in the great confrontation between the visit. Gophos and Clovis the Frank in 507, Roman aristocrats of Southern Gaul are having to turn up and fight. So we see a militarisation of the landed aristocracies in the post-Romanic. Looks a bit more medieval. Yes. It changes things in some very fundamental ways. And the last point, though, is the eastern half of the empire, it's still functioning. Yes. Going into the 500s, so Rome does not fall. Yeah, absolutely. The Roman

system is alive and kicking in the Eastern Empire. I mean, it's one of the things that makes it clear that there's nothing wrong with the kind of structural mechanisms of the Empire inherently in that the Eastern Empire has run on the same ones as the Western Empire. But the Eastern Empire is able to protect its tax base or its tax base is not threatened and it is the unraveling of the West's control of its tax base and hence its ability to fund its armies which undermines the West. The East would have its day in court. But not now. Yes. That's another story.

Yes. For the moment, they are in shock at having seen the Western Empire go. Yeah. Thank you so much, go on the podcast and telling me all about it. It's my pleasure. Absolutely. It's a long ambition of mind-fulfilled. Thank you. Thanks, listening to that, folks. It's very clear to me, after spending time for Peter, of course, that the Western Roman Empire didn't disappear and leave an empty space on the map.

Of course, it left those foundations, frankly. They're complete buildings. and it left roads and laws and languages and religions and cultures and people that successor kingdoms co-opted and built upon. In Gaul, a Frankish kingdom would one day become France and Hispania. Visigothic kings issued law codes in Latin. And in Italy, under the Austrogoths, Roman senators still sat round and debated and addressed each other with defunct imperial titles.

They still obviously carried some weight. And let's not forget, in the East, the Empire endured, not as a sort of relic, but as a thriving state centered on Constantinople that would last in some form or another for another thousand years. So in some places Rome's fall did look a little bit like Mad Max, but in other places it's striking to us what endured.

Even the mightiest systems change and evolved. As Shakespeare said, it's all just an insubstantial pageant when viewed from space. A long way in the future. Anyway, on that, sherry note, a huge thank you to our guests for guiding us through the story of Rome throughout the series. If you enjoyed it, please leave a review.

That makes a difference. Sorry to be a bore, but it does. And subscribe to the pod, obviously. And if there are any topics you want us to cover, you can send your ideas to the email in the show notes, and your dream episode might become a reality. See you next time. Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history?

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