The battle of Adrianople and the sack of Rome

Abstract

Much of eastern and central Europe had been the scene of almost continuous movement and jostling of peoples, settling, migrating, fighting, forming and reforming ethnic identities from long before the inception of the Roman Empire. This period of instability could be said to have begun by the middle of the first millennium bc and was to continue until at least the very end of the first millennium ad. In this context Rome’s wars against its ‘barbarian’ neighbours form only a part of a longer and more complex whole. Mutually interactive as they were, the chronologies of the great civilisations of the Mediterranean basin and of this ‘Age of Migrations’ further to the north are by no means synchronous.