The Fall of the Roman Empire by Peter Heather

* The Times of London *Ī rich and dramatic synthesis of the latest research on Gibbon's old story. Like a late Roman emperor, Heather is determined to impose order on a fabric that is always threatening to fragment and collapse into confusion unlike most late Roman emperors, he succeeds triumphantly.

What brought it to an end were the barbarians. Peter Heather convincingly argues that the Roman Empire was not on the brink of social or moral collapse. We then meet Attila the Hun, whose reign of terror swept from Constantinople to Paris, but whose death in 453 ironically precipitated a final desperate phase of Roman collapse, culminating in the Vandals' defeat of the massive Byzantine Armada: the west's last chance for survival. The Vandals spread devastation in Gaul and Spain, before conquering North Africa, the breadbasket of the Western Empire, in 439. The Goths first destroyed a Roman army at the battle of Hadrianople in 378, and went on to sack Rome in 410. This prompted two generations of struggle, during which new barbarian coalitions, formed in response to Roman hostility, brought the Roman west to its knees. He shows first how the Huns overturned the existing strategic balance of power on Rome's European frontiers, to force the Goths and others to seek refuge inside the Empire. A leading authority on the late Roman Empire and on the barbarians, Heather relates the extraordinary story of how Europe's barbarians, transformed by centuries of contact with Rome on every possible level, eventually pulled the empire apart. Now, in this groundbreaking book, Peter Heather proposes a stunning new solution: Centuries of imperialism turned the neighbors Rome called barbarians into an enemy capable of dismantling an Empire that had dominated their lives for so long. The death of the Roman Empire is one of the perennial mysteries of world history.

The Fall of the Roman Empire by Peter Heather