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Review Essay The Barbarian Hordes That Never Were Empires and Barbarians: Migration, Development and the Birth of Europe. By Peter Heather. London: Pan Macmillan, 2009. ISBN 978-0-333-98975-3. Maps. Photographs. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp.xvii, 734. £25.00.
Until World War II, it was widely believed, both by scholars and the educated public, that the Roman empire in the West was destroyed by hordes of Germanspeaking barbarian invaders. Since the war, a vast quantity of archaeological evidence has been uncovered, which, in sum, makes clear that there were no barbarian hordes, German-speaking or otherwise, that were capable of destroying the Roman empire. The Völkerwanderung, as traditionally understood, has been shown to have been a myth, which often served modern German nationalist aspirations. In addition, it is now widely held that both the material infrastructure and local administrative institutions of the later Roman world survived for centuries in Gaul, Italy, and Spain, following the dissolution of the empire's political control in the West.
In light of this new evidence, scholars began to reevaluate the Greek and Latin written sources, which, it now has been shown, had been misused by nationalist historians, especially in Germany and England, to argue that the barbarians had destroyed the Western Roman empire, and replaced Romania with Germania. These sources, however, not only were suffused with a severe "migration" topos, the malignant effects of which had been scrupulously ignored, but, in addition, they were dominated by a tendency to blame the misfortunes of the empire on barbarians. Finally, and no less importandy, Christian writers of the late antique era, seeking to convince their audiences that the "end of days" was near, massively exaggerated the negative impact of barbarians on the Roman empire in order to help set the stage for the Apocalypse.
During the past two decades, Peter Heather, Worcester College, Oxford, has published numerous articles and books, of which Empires and Barbarians seems to be the latest. Like his earlier work, Empires is aimed not only at rehabilitating hordes of migrating and invading barbarians as the key element in the decline and fall of the Roman empire but he is intent on making migration the essential factor in the history of Europe's first millennium. However, in his many lengthy efforts to find the...