Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West — Guy Halsall

Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376-568
Guy Halsall
591 pages including index
published in 2007

I spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve with my parents in Middelburg and took advantage of this visit to check out the town’s library, which used to supply most of my reading back before I moved to Amsterdam. It turned out to be an wise decision as less than an hour browsing found half a dozen excellent history books to read, including this one. Guy Halsall is an author I had just seen slagged off by Peter Heather in his book Empires and Barbarians for being Completely Wrong about the impact of barbarian migrations on the late Roman Empire. This piqued my interest to see how exactly Halsall’s interpretation of the end of the Roman Empire differed from Heather’s views and if Halsall’s explanations make any sense on their own.

To my not inconsiderable surprise, it turned out that the story Halsall puts forward in Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376-568 does not differ quite so much as Heather made it seem. They don’t so much disagree on what happened as on why it happened and on where the emphasis should be placed. To keep it simple, Heather believes barbarian invasions are the cause the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west, while Halsall argues they are an effect of the collapse. It was the weakness of the western empire that made possible the barbarian takeover of various provinces. Another major point of disagreement is on the composition of the “barbarian hordes”: Heather has argued that the more classical image of entire population groups invading the empire is largely correct, with caveats, while Halsall sees them more as proper armies rather than tribes. Ultimately these differences in intepretation however for me were less important than the sheer quality of Halsall’s history.

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