Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe by Peter Heather (PDF)

Description

Empires and Barbarians presents a fresh, provocative look at how a recognizable Europe came into being in the first millennium AD. With sharp analytic insight, Peter Heather explores the dynamics of migration and social and economic interaction that changed two vastly different worlds–the undeveloped barbarian world and the sophisticated Roman Empire–into remarkably similar societies and states. The book’s vivid narrative begins at the time of Christ, when the Mediterranean circle, newly united under the Romans, hosted a politically sophisticated, economically advanced, and culturally developed civilization–one with philosophy, banking, professional armies, literature, stunning architecture, even garbage collection. The rest of Europe, meanwhile, was home to subsistence farmers living in small groups, dominated largely by Germanic speakers. Although having some iron tools and weapons, these mostly illiterate peoples worked mainly in wood and never built in stone. The farther east one went, the simpler it became: fewer iron tools and ever less productive economies. And yet ten centuries later, from the Atlantic to the Urals, the European world had turned. Slavic speakers had largely superseded Germanic speakers in central and Eastern Europe, literacy was growing, Christianity had spread, and most fundamentally, Mediterranean supremacy was broken.Bringing the whole of first millennium European history together, and challenging current arguments that migration played but a tiny role in this unfolding narrative, Empires and Barbarians views the destruction of the ancient world order in light of modern migration and globalization patterns.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “An amiable and learned companion through the centuries of migrations.”-Library Journal “An awesomely ambitious work: an attempt, in the heroic tradition of Pirenne, to make sense of nothing less than the reshaping of antiquity, and the origins of modern Europe…. Heather is a wonderfully fluent writer, with a consistent ability to grab hold of his reader’s attention…. The result is a book which richly merits reading by those interested in the future of Europe as well as its past.”–Tom Holland, BBC History Magazine “Most immediately impressive is Heather’s easy command of detail. A jaunty, man of the people prose style masks a sure and scholarly grip on the history and archaeology of the first millenniem A.D. One of Heather’s most attractive strengths is his eye for comparision. He neatly sets his thinking about first-millennium migration against modern experiences of the lure of the New World or the desperate flight of Kosovar or Rwandan refugees.”–Christopher Kelly, Literary Review “Peter Heather’s book is an important contribution to the field–the first up-to-date book that compares the Germanic and the Slav migrations of the early middle ages. It is lucid and it has a complex argument, but it is grippingly written.”–Chris Wickham, author of The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000 “This is a major work on the political and ethnic shaping of Europe during the first millennium A.D., embracing not just the Germanic and sub-Roman peoples, but also the Slavs and the Vikings. No one interested in the formation of European states and identities will be able to ignore this book.”–Bryan Ward-Perkins, author of The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization “Impressive in its ambition and its scope.”-The New Yorker “Heather manages to robustly balance the need for both breadth and depth. A superior piece of scholarship.”-DiscoverMagazine.com “While ambitious in scope, one of the delightful aspects of this hefty volume is its eminent readability. Heather’s writing is often playful in style. This conversational and sometimes humorous tone, combined with a knack for explaining complex ideas clearly, belies the complexity of his argument and the sheer amount of information conveyed.” -Laura Wangerin, World History Bulletin “In addition to offering a new way of looking at the broad trends of European history, Heather also makes a major contribution to a long-standing debate about the role of migration in the first millenniumEL[Empire and Barbarians’] range, its highly important themes, and the boldness and clarity of its writing should stimulate argument and advance debate for years to come.” -Edward James, American Historical Review “Empires and Barbarians is a significant accomplishment and a welcome gateway for the curious as well as the deeply informed.” –HNN.com About the Author Peter Heather is Professor of Medieval History at King’s College London. He is the author of The Fall of the Roman Empire, Goths and Romans, 332-489, The Goths, and The Visigoths in the Migration Period.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This is one of those scholarly books that can forever change your perception of a crucial period in history, re-framing it so to speak. It is fascinating and essential, but so rigorously argued that it is very difficult to read and chock full of deadly dull scholarly proofs and arguments. Most importantly, rather than a narrative, it is strictly analytic, far closer to multi-disciplinary social science than history. I would estimate that half of the book is a great joy to read and the other half a dry slog for the determined. The prose is, to put it mildly, dense.Heather begins with an extremely terse discussion of the sociology of migration. In the past, he argues, scholars (often backed by iffy primary sources) promoted a “billiard ball approach”, in which migrating groups knocked others out of the way, perhaps eliminating them by ethnic cleansing or forced absorption as slaves or serfs. Archaeological findings, however, belay this view, indicating instead that groups were far more amorphous, like coalitions with a charismatic leader at their center that grew like a snowball as it gained politico-military momentum. Language and ethnicity were more fluid than assumed, Heather argues, adopting that of the military/economic elite or later perhaps that of the occupied territory. This paragraph cannot do justice to the subtlety and cogency of Heather’s arguments, which are assessed against primary sources, archaelogical evidence, and socio-historic examples such as the experience of the Boars as they migrated North to avoid British colonial rule. (From a motley crew, the boars united into highly organized military force and quickly beat the Zulus into submission.)At the fall of the western Roman empire to germanic tribes (i.e. Goths) in the 5th C CE, migration patterns were changing. From disorganized bands that were seeking to exploit Roman wealth – via border raids, trade, mercenary wages, and diplomatic subsidies as part of Roman foreign policy – they had become very large political entities that included women and children (increasing their numbers vis-a-via warriors by 4x). The earlier groups had been living at subsistence levels as itinerant farmers perpetually in search of fertile ground, beginning their movements with trickle of early explorers (in 2C CE) that became a torrent by 5C. But they were also fleeing the Huns, and later the Turkic Avars, who established powerful military empires in central Europe that were based in pillage and charismatic leaders such as Attila. The new entities were far more organized in their command structures, were learning superior agricultural techniques (to replenish soil nitrogen via turning over rotten plants and crop rotation), and adopting cutting-edge military technologies and tactics.Similar tribes (i.e. Angles and Saxons) invaded Britain in large enough groups that they displaced the local elites and destroyed their economic systems; eventually, they instilled their language into the local populace, as women could teach the children their original languages, they replaced local languages, including Latin and Celtic. This was a pattern that was often repeated in Europe until 1000 CE, when the principal language patterns that survive with few exceptions (Turkish in Anatolia being a rather big one) to this day.As western Roman economic structures declined, new power centers arose in northern Europe for the first time, in 7 C CE. Though the level of socio-economic and political sophistication were far below those of the Romans, the new entities were proto-modern states nonetheless. They learned to create military organizational structures, monopolizing the means of force in order to maintain the elites that eventually became entrenched in land ownership and hence became the grand royal and aristocratic families that ruled for the next 1500 years. Heather also covers the Vikings and Slavs; the origins of the latter remain murky and unknowable from the archaeological record. The Slavs, interestingly, conquered much of central Europe because elite Germans seem to have migrated West, leaving poorly armed and disorganized Germanic peasants, who were then absorbed into the newly dominant Slavic elites and tended to adopt their languages. Due to their lack of ability to tax and build viable cities, these semi-nomadic groups faced inherent limits: once they expanded to large size based on pillage and forced tribute, they could no longer pay their forces enough to keep them together and so these mini-empires disintegrated; so the Carolingians, Merovingians, Ottonians, and scores of others succeeded each other a few generations after the charismatic founder disappeared.It was only later, around 1000 CE, when the empires became more sedentary with larger surpluses of wealth (due to their adoption of more productive agricultural techniques), which paid for the construction of the massive fortified castles that still dot the European landscape; standing armies that could better protect subjects; and more diversified economies, that empires were able to grow more stable. It was also at that time that the various linguistic groups had come to occupy the places that they occupy today – thus, the basis of what became European nation states was more or less set. Invaders later only rarely dislodged these language groups, but rather were absorbed in their turn. There were also extremely sophisticated trading networks that sprung up, bringing northern goods such as furs to the most sophisticated civilizations of the time, the Islamic states, whose silver financed a great deal of the economic expansions in the North.If this sounds rather abstract, so is the book. It is often not fun to read. However, there is absolutely no question that this is a masterpiece of scholarship that will define the field for a generation. Heather is brilliant, writes beautifully, and often with wonderfully playful humor. (He refers with frustration, for example, to the fact that his students no longer know what he means when referring to black and white television. It got me to laugh.)I recommend this book for those with the personal interest to persevere through very difficult scholarly arguments. It is the natural follow-on to Heather’s equally brilliant (and far more fun) Fall of the Roman Empire. If you wish to understand what made up the extraordinarily diverse language in all of their modalities from 400 to 1000 bce, this is a book for you. I am glad I read it, but it was, well, very challenging and often failed to keep my attention.

⭐With “Empires & Barbarians”, London historian Peter Heather has written a complex but very worthwhile book on European political and demographic changes in the period between 300AD and 1000AD, extending the thinking presented in his outstanding “The Fall of the Roman Empire”. While I have some criticisms, as explained below, this is a very important synthesis of research and a must read for anyone interested in the topic.In “The Fall of the Roman Empire,” Heather presented what was to me a new and original explanation for the dissolution of the empire, one of history’s great questions. Heather believes that technological developments and wealth leached out from the Roman borders to allow the Germanic tribes living in northern and eastern Europe to develop a greater level of material and political sophistication and more efficient agricultural methods. This increase in sophistication led to a population rise among the Germanic tribes, and in turn an increase in political and military heft, which allowed the tribes to encroach on an overextended Roman empire, teetering from civil war and war on its Persian front. In a fascinating passage in “Empires & Barbarians,” Heather speculates that the Hunnic invasion form the steppes led by Attila was a crucial precipitating cause in the collapse of the empire, as the increasingly powerful Germanic tribes would probably have done no more than annex certain Roman provinces, letting the Empire continue on. Heather supports his theory principally through a review of recent archaeological research from Germany and eastern Europe with less emphasis placed on Roman historical writings.”Empires & Barbarians” advances Heather’s case by describing current thinking of human migrations, examines issues and controversies currently preoccupying ancient & medieval scholars, making in-depth analysis of events such as the Anglo-Saxon takeover of Britain and the expansion of the Frankish empire in the 5th & 6th centuries, and careful reviews of the archaeological digs undertaken by Warsaw Pact scientists to unravel the mysteries of the Slavic ascendance. The analysis is penetrating, subtle and not pedantic.A measure of the excellence of this book can be seen in the account of middle medieval Byzantium. I have read quite a few books about Byzantine history yet nothing has clarified for me the shape and crucial developments in Byzantium’s empire after the fall of the west like the few pages Heather devotes to it. Heather summarizes the brutal wars Byzantium successfully engaged in during the earlier part of the 7th century, with a dramatic and draining success on both the European and Persian fronts “turning to ashes” as the Islamic wave swept across the world, expropriating several of the eastern empire’s most important provinces, which rendered Byzantium into an appendage of the Islamic empire after about 650. Such clarifying overviews are frequently found in “Empires & Barbarians”.I mentioned some flaws: The chief among them is a stilted, academic style. There is a reliance on jargon and euphemism that detracts from Heather’s message and analysis. Phrases like “political identity” and “variegated patterns of participation” abound. Heather would have been better served by writing crisply and clearly. Writing of the Frankish takeover of Roman territories in northern Gaul, he writes: “the process was stressful for the indigenous population, who found themselves invaded by an intrusive new elite and incorporated into a new kingdom that was imposing on them new duties based on the alternative conception of a triple-tier social order.” I’m translating that to mean that the Franks slaughtered the remaining Roman landowners, stole everything they could and reduced their new subjects to quaking fear.Another criticism is more conceptual. Many theories of Rome’s fall have emphasized internal weaknesses leading to its dissolution. Heather takes the original tack of stressing the growing strength of Rome’s enemies as the key determinant. I would have appreciated more description and analysis of Rome’s internal issues, which of course also played a role in the Empire’s fall.I also think Heather ignores salient issues that highlight the catastrophic nature of the fall of the Roman empire. One of the many things I learned from “Empires & Barbarians” is that the estimated population of England in the late empire (late 4th century) was 3-7 million and that this population probably dropped to 1 million by the early 6th century. Obviously that is a disaster, but Heather doesn’t spend any time pondering such a tragic devolution. Heather also ignores the plunge in literacy at all levels. He perhaps would answer that he couldn’t cover all topics, and had to emphasize other subjects such as migration and material culture finds at archeological digs, but I think the book would have benefited from admitting that the overall cultural and economic impact of the middle ages was very, very negative. (See “The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization” by Ward Perkins, which Heather singles out for praise.) These criticisms don’t eliminate the book’s strengths or its value, though.Heather in his foreword writes that he spent sixteen years working on this book. The richness of research, careful and deep thought and intellectual sophistication of “Empires and Barbarians” makes it obvious he spent this time well.

⭐This is the second book of Peter Heather’s that I’ve read. I read his book on the fall of the Roman Empire a few years ago. As other reviewers have pointed out, this book is more analysis than narrative. In effect it is a review and a critique of earlier histories of Europe in the first millennium CE, histories inspired by nationalisms and ideologies of right and left. It is detailed and fully referenced. Heavy going if you were hoping to skim through a thousand years of complex history; fascinating if you want to understand how Europe as a political concept came into being.The book focuses on four main groups of migrants: Germanic (Goths, Saxons, Vandals et al.), nomads (Huns, Avars, Magyars), Scandinavians (Vikings) and Slavs. It ends with an analysis of how the Slavs came to occupy large swathes of what are now Eastern Europe and Russia.This book was originally published in 2009, at a time when a new wave of Slav/East European immigration, this time into Britain, was beginning to be seen as problematic. Stoked by UKIP and right-wing Tories, the fear of Slavicisation eventually contributed to Brexit. Heather shows why migration is such a politically sensitive issue and how much ignorance there is about it, particularly in the UK where the fact that we are a nation of European immigrants is usually brushed carefully under the carpet. Heather reminds us that in the first millennium CE we were colonised by Romans, Saxons/Angles/Jutes, Vikings and Normans. And of course, we’ve still not thrown off the Norman yoke. As Heather shows, population movements from over a thousand years ago are still impacting politics today.I like Heather’s style: erudite but certainly not pompous, and punctuated with wry humour, but not too much of it to distract attention from the seriousness of the subject.I have also bought the same author’s “The Restoration of Rome” which I will read shortly. Although that was published more recently, perhaps I should have read it first. Peter Heather is chronologically out of sync. He has another book out which I will also buy.Just to add: this book meshes with Peter H Wilson’s “The Holy Roman Empire”, which covers some of the same ground for a couple of hundred years anyway, such as the formation and disintegration of a Frankish empire and the HRE’s relationship with the peoples on its eastern borders.

⭐It was a great pleasure to get to know this book. It is a high-quality, comprehensive synthesis of the history of migrations in the first millennium AD, discussing how the movements of people were influenced by and in turn shaped the geography of development in the late Roman and early medieval Europe. I very much like the Author’s take against the ‘responsible history’ of Guy Halsall’s as I prefer the traditional school of historiography that sticks more to the sources and less to conjecture. I do not like the notion of challenging the content of the sources without very good reasons, and the idea that it should be done in order to fight political demons goes, in my opinion, against the very core of the historian’s craft. The fact that far-right extremists fuel their ideas on the myths associated with the Migration Period cannot justify a complete rewriting of history. Peter Heather’s writing is responsible in the way that it sticks to the proper historical method. He may be sometimes mistaken (not too often though, I think); he has his own bias (don’t we all?); but he’s not trying to write the past to suit the present, his work is thorough, and he’s sensitive to nuances and complexities of human behaviours.

⭐The received wisdom concerning the fragmentation of the Western Roman Empire has undergone a total volte-face over the last century. From Völkerwanderungen, movements of entire peoples wearing furs and horned helmets violently invading Roman territory and carrying out ethnic cleansing, we are now expected to believe in “Elite transfers”, small numbers of immigrants who came peacefully and amicably and took control with the full approval and cheerful willingness of the locals, and who apparently so impressed these indigenous populations that they all wanted to walk and talk like their new wonderful, kindly and not-at-all-oppressive rulers. This view is invariably accompanied by much sociological cant around concepts of “class”, “status” and “identity” – the latter, so we are supposed to accept, being something which whole communities of mid-first-millennium peasants could and did suddenly change at the drop of a hat.When there are two such opposed viewpoints, you can be sure that the truth is to be found midway between the two. Peter Heather, combining literary sources, archaeology and modern understanding of population movement and change, partially accepts some of the contemporary ideas, but persuasively argues for large scale migrations having often played a part in the changes across Europe in the period c. 400-1000. As Heather drily notes about the Slavs for example, but which equally applies to all the other invaders of the period, “Their military effectiveness makes it extremely improbable that [the changes] came about just because the indigenous populations thought it would be great to become a Slav.”It’s a huge book, often repetitive, and certainly fairly hard going, but it’s a well argued presentation and an extremely important contribution to the understanding of this period of European history.

⭐Being an amateur reader, I bought this book a while ago and it stayed on my shelf for a while.When I got decided to read it, I had a quick glance at some reviews and got a bit nervous before reading it.I would say that most of the previous reviews are from my point of view very accurate.Firstly, the book is quite large, app 650 pages and I would unfortunately say not easily readable for the layman.Mainly because the author spends quite a lot time describing the various debate on current theories and goes quite far into details.He repeats himself quite a lot and all of this makes the book arduous to read.So, I am not sure for who this book is intended to? So potential readers, be aware.Despite the above, I made an effort to carry on reading and in the end, I must say I was quite happy.I did learn a lot and understood new concepts about migrations, settlement, relation with Rome, etc. that did not really grasped before.Finally, the Third law of empire is a very intersting idea.In my views, what Peter Heather succeeds the most is to convey us these theories and concepts but a bit of editing would have been welcome by triming a good quarter of the book.I picked up a few mistakes such as the date of the Teutoberg Wald battle which from previous readings understood to be AD 9?Overall, It is a very decent and interesting book but be aware that it may not be easy to read although the effort is from my point of view worth it.

⭐This is a really long book. There are 734 pages which makes it over a hundred pages longer than his previous book

⭐The Fall of the Roman Empire

⭐. Before I go any further I want to strongly recommend that book. I think that it is one of the best books on the subject available. This one serves as sort of a companion to that one. While that book is pretty much exclusively from the Roman point of view, this book is told from the point of view of the Barbarians. Actually two sets of Barbarians. While his first book had a fairly limited timeframe (4th Century to 5th Century) this one deals with a much wider space of time (4th Century to 10th Century). This means that it goes through information much faster. The biggest problem with this book is something that the author can’t do anything about. There just aren’t many sources available on the barbarian tribes. There is a lot more guesswork and maybes in this book than his previous one. It’s also much harder to read. It’s main purpose isn’t just to relate the Fall of Rome from the Barbarian point of view or to narrate the end of Rome and the Dark Ages, it’s a bit of both and it isn’t satisfactory for either. The focus is on analyzing the migrations and formation of tribes during the Late Roman and early Middle Ages. This can be interesting but it is essentially a more specialized topic than either of the others would be. There is a lot of information here, and the book itself is well written like all of Heather’s work, but the whole thing is just too specific to maintain my interest for over 600 pages. Nonetheless, it remains an informative book and it is certainly worth a read if you have the patience.

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