Barbarian invasion

Late Roman decadence and plundering Vandals: these are the clichés about the so-called Migration Period. But how did a new cultural unity called Europe emerge in the first millennium from the highly developed Roman South and the barbaric North? Around the birth of Christ, Europe was divided into the advanced South of Mediterranean cultures and the underdeveloped North of Germanic and Slavic tribal cultures. These cultures knew neither writing nor stone architecture, a standing army, nor a monetary economy, let alone cities with fire departments and waste disposal. How could the onslaught of the barbarians deliver the fatal blow to the Roman Empire? Peter Heather reexamines this old question in light of insights into ethnogenesis and modern migration research. From the Huns to the Vikings, he investigates the dynamics of European migration movements. The social and economic interactions between these two cultural spheres fundamentally transformed them and allowed them to evolve into a new cultural unity: the Europe we still recognize today in a more developed form.