History of the Mongols | Podcast
Oct 4, 2026 · 35 min · 9 segments
The fall of the Roman Empire was not one dramatic event in 476 AD. It was a long process of migration, political fragmentation, war, economic breakdown and regional change that unfolded over…
We're going to start by defining our terms.
What do we mean when we say fall of the Roman Empire? We'll need to be as specific as possible, both geographically and temporarily.
We'll begin with time.
You could make an argument that we should begin in the third century AD, when the peace and prosperity of the Roman Empire, the Pax Romana, was shattered by a whole series of disasters ranging from the economic to the political to foreign invasions.
You could also make the argument that we should begin in the middle of the fifth century, when the various barbarian groups that had established themselves inside the Roman Empire became effectively autonomous.
For our purposes, though, Ammianus Marcellinus' description of the arrival of the Goths provides the perfect starting point.
That marked the first time when a mass migration, and that's what Ammianus Marcellinus describes, entered the borders of the Roman Empire without the express invitation of the authorities, and what happened afterwards shows just how quickly the Romans lost control of proceedings.
Our starting point, then, will be 376 AD.
But what about the end? Should we just roll with 476 and the abdication of Romulus Augustulus like any high school history textbook worth its salt? That question is a bit more complicated and a bit more divisive.
I'll say no, and here's why.
In 476, very few people really thought the Roman Empire had fallen.
Nobody even had any concept of what that would mean, and nobody conceived of things in those terms, really.
The empire was all people had known for 500 years.
It was the basic political framework through which they understood the world, and for another generation after 476, people continued to think in those terms.
Barbarian kings were forced, like square pegs into round holes, into the well-worn roles emperors had occupied for centuries beforehand.
political discourse and ideas remained fundamentally the same.
The economy, in most places, more or less kept working as it had before, and society changed only a bit.
It's only in hindsight, and a couple of observers at the time, that 476 appears to be an important date.
In some places, things had already changed dramatically by then, but in others, the changes that we associate with the fall of the Roman Empire had only begun to take hold.
Settling on that date means that we miss some of the truly seismic shifts and focus overmuch on others.
To focus too much on Romulus Augustulus, a weak and inconsequential figure by any reasonable metric, is to engage in something called teleology.
We're picking an event and reading a great deal more meaning back into it than really anybody at the time did.
It was only around 550 that the true magnitude of these changes had become clear, that all across what had once been the empire, things had fundamentally changed.
The old categories and structures and ideas that people had used to understand their world didn't apply anymore.
No amount of pretending could make them work, and Roman aristocrats, the kinds of people who have left us written records, were very, very good at pretending.
We're going to start by defining our terms.
What do we mean when we say fall of the Roman Empire? We'll need to be as specific as possible, both geographically and temporarily.
We'll begin with time.
You could make an argument that we should begin in the third century AD, when the peace and prosperity of the Roman Empire, the Pax Romana, was shattered by a whole series of disasters ranging from the economic to the political to foreign invasions.
You could also make the argument that we should begin in the middle of the fifth century, when the various barbarian groups that had established themselves inside the Roman Empire became effectively autonomous.
For our purposes, though, Ammianus Marcellinus' description of the arrival of the Goths provides the perfect starting point.
That marked the first time when a mass migration, and that's what Ammianus Marcellinus describes, entered the borders of the Roman Empire without the express invitation of the authorities, and what happened afterwards shows just how quickly the Romans lost control of proceedings.
Our starting point, then, will be 376 AD.
But what about the end? Should we just roll with 476 and the abdication of Romulus Augustulus like any high school history textbook worth its salt? That question is a bit more complicated and a bit more divisive.
I'll say no, and here's why.
In 476, very few people really thought the Roman Empire had fallen.
Nobody even had any concept of what that would mean, and nobody conceived of things in those terms, really.
The empire was all people had known for 500 years.
It was the basic political framework through which they understood the world, and for another generation after 476, people continued to think in those terms.
Barbarian kings were forced, like square pegs into round holes, into the well-worn roles emperors had occupied for centuries beforehand.
political discourse and ideas remained fundamentally the same.
The economy, in most places, more or less kept working as it had before, and society changed only a bit.
It's only in hindsight, and a couple of observers at the time, that 476 appears to be an important date.
In some places, things had already changed dramatically by then, but in others, the changes that we associate with the fall of the Roman Empire had only begun to take hold.
Settling on that date means that we miss some of the truly seismic shifts and focus overmuch on others.
To focus too much on Romulus Augustulus, a weak and inconsequential figure by any reasonable metric, is to engage in something called teleology.
We're picking an event and reading a great deal more meaning back into it than really anybody at the time did.
It was only around 550 that the true magnitude of these changes had become clear, that all across what had once been the empire, things had fundamentally changed.
The old categories and structures and ideas that people had used to understand their world didn't apply anymore.
No amount of pretending could make them work, and Roman aristocrats, the kinds of people who have left us written records, were very, very good at pretending.
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