Why This Book?

• 1600th anniversary of sack of Rome by Alaric• Already c.200 theories about why the Roman

Empire fell• Since Gibbon barely anyone has told the story

of how it fell• Academic fixation on why has meant much of

the story has been overlooked or misunderstood

Barbarian Raids across Europe in the 260s AD

AD 276 – 376Barbarians in the Empire

• First barbarians settled in Gaul by the emperor Probus (276-282)

• Treaty with the Goths c. 340

• Soldiers, slaves and farm-hands

Happy Days Are Here Again!

• Roman soldier spearing falling barbarian

• AD 355-61

• Felicium Tempus Reparatio

But barbarians become Roman generals

Stilicho, generalissimo of the West during the reign of Honorius (395-408)

Half Vandal, half Roman

Enter Diocletian AD 284

Tetrarchs in Venice

Class fixing Piercebridge Ploughman

Rich getting richer

Hoxne Treasure, Suffolk

Enter Constantine and Christianity

The barbarian invasions 376-407

Across the Danube

Crisis at Hadrianople, 378

Division of Empire, AD 395

Order Restored?

Suppliant Goths under Theodosius’ family at Constantinople

Battle of the River Frigidus, AD 394

Eugenius

Theodosius I The Roman army; citizens and increasingly barbarians

Alaric unleashed - 395…

Ludwig Thiersch

Alaric moves West – 401-3

Honorius flees to Ravenna

Usurpers and barbarians in Gaul

Constantine III 407-11

Alaric besieges Rome 408

Fruitless negotiations

Priscus Attalus 409-10

St Apollinaire, Ravenna

Alaric sacks Rome 8/24Johan Winckelmann, etching, 1782

Kenneth Setton, 1962

Meanwhile in Ravenna…

John W. Waterhouse, 1883

How should we view the barbarians?

What did they want?

Esquiline Treasure, Rome (British Museum)

Who were they? Refugees?

Economic Migrants?

Controlling access

A threat to authority?

Clash with authority

Migrant Workers

Swelling the ranks

The old order of Rome

Symmachus, the Senate and Honorius

The old order in the West?

Does the world need new leaders to face these changes?

The Road to Africa

The fields of Dougga

Appian Way

Burial of Alaric, 410/11

Lithograph, 1895

Galla Placidia c.388-450

Wedding of Galla Placidia

Galla Placidia ‘sold back’ to Rome for 600,000 modii of grain

Roman Modius on a coin of Nerva, AD 96-8

Vandals take Africa, AD 439

The barbarian dream?

Aesop

‘I’d rather have one

grain of corn than all the

jewels in the world.’

What of Rome? Last emperor of the West, Romulus Augustulus, deposed in AD 476

Ostrogothic Rome, AD 49

Cannon: 14 feet; 15 tons; 500lb stone ball; Walls of Theodosius

Mehmet II; Hagia Sophia as a Mosque

What will the challenges of the next 100 years be?

• Environmental: water, sea-levels, temperature, desertification....food shortage

• Economic – shortage of scarce resources• Population increase• Migration, warfare and renegotiating the world order• The emergence of a new kind of leader able to cope in

a different world• How will archaeologists detect many of these changes

in coming millennia?