Empires and Barbarians

Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe by Peter Heather, 618 pages

 

The period from roughly the fourth century to the ninth is traditionally regarded as the age of the Volkerwanderung, the mass migration of entire peoples which reshaped the ethnic, cultural, and linguistic maps of Europe and set the stage for the second millennium.  This narrative has been attacked by many scholars in the last half century, who have utilized anthropological insights and archeological discoveries to support a theory that the number of people actually migrating were limited to small warbands that became the new elites in the areas where they settled, overlaying without substantially replacing the native population.  Heather's book is meant as a corrective to both views, proposing that while large scale population transfers did take place, the former conception tended to exaggerate the size and homogeneity of these migrations.

 

Heather demonstrates the strength of his thesis in extended detail, drawing upon a combination of textual, archeological, and anthropological evidence.  No doubt debate over the nature and extent of first millenium migrations will continue, but this is a solid analysis of the evidence currently available.