Century 12 of 13 · AD 395 – 565
Goths, Vandals, Huns, the last emperors, and what grew back.
124 entries · 313 hours · 110 with a written verdict
Nobody living through the fall of the Roman Empire thought it was happening. There is no year in which Romans wake up and find themselves medieval. Everything argued since Gibbon concerns a process that the people living inside it experienced as a run of bad decades.
Hold on to that and the rest reads differently.
The events are clear enough. Alaric's Goths sack Rome in 410, which had not happened in eight hundred years, and Augustine began The City of God because of it. The Vandals cross to Africa and take Carthage in 439, cutting the grain and the tax base of the west. Attila is stopped in Gaul in 451 and dies of a nosebleed two years later. The Vandals sack Rome again in 455, more thoroughly and with less drama. In 476 a Germanic officer called Odoacer deposes a teenage emperor named Romulus Augustulus and appoints nobody in his place, which is why that date is in the textbooks. Nobody at the time treated it as an ending.
The argument is about why, and the shows below take sides. Peter Heather says it was the barbarians. Bryan Ward-Perkins points at pottery, roof tiles and cattle bones and says the standard of living in the west fell off a cliff within two generations. Guy Halsall and the transformation school say the west decentralised, and that fall is the wrong word for what the evidence shows. Kyle Harper makes it climate and disease. Meanwhile the east carries on: Justinian reconquers Italy and Africa between 533 and 554, at a cost that arguably broke both halves, and the plague of 541 removes any chance of holding it. Where a show takes a side, the entry says so.
I feel like…
Cogitare, how it was thought and ordered
Sentire, what was lived and endured
Facere, what hands made and did
how it is made
who is talking
how much time you have
With a written verdict
Thirty-three episodes, finished, by a historian whose doctorate is on this exact period. Wyman's argument is that the machinery of the western state came apart slowly and locally, province by province, and he builds it out of tax records, coin finds and the archaeology of abandoned villas. Twenty-three hours, complete since 2018.
Part of Fall of Civilizations
Three and a half hours on the Eastern empire from Constantine to the walls falling in 1453. If you have ever wanted the argument that Rome did not fall in 476 laid out properly, this is it.
Part of The History of Byzantium
With Anthony Kaldellis
Kaldellis has spent a career arguing that the Byzantines were Romans, called themselves Romans, and were renamed by later scholars for reasons that had nothing to do with evidence. Two hours of him making that case will change how you read everything after 476.
The episode that started the series: an hour and a quarter on what it felt like when the empire stopped coming, built out of the archaeology of villas going quiet and coins running out. Alexey Sibikin's sound design carries the last ten minutes almost alone.
Picks up the exact week Mike Duncan put the microphone down and keeps going for another thousand years. If you have ever told someone at a party that the Byzantines called themselves Romans, this is the show that armed you.
Nick Holmes writes books about the end of the Roman world and this is the argument from them in his own voice, held across 47 episodes. Ran as The Fall of the Roman Empire until 2026, so that name now finds a different show by somebody else.
The History Channel's four parts told from the other side, from Hannibal to Alaric. Uneven, and the only mainstream television that treats the barbarians as people with aims.
Six hours from Nick Holmes on the two centuries in which Byzantium asked the West for soldiers and received the Fourth Crusade. 1204 is the hinge, and the case made here is that 1453 was settled then.
Part of SandRhomanHistory
Ninety-six minutes touring what was standing in 476 across the former western provinces, kingdom by kingdom. Animated throughout, and the map does the arguing.
The argument that the fall took a thousand years and that 476 is an arbitrary line in it.
Part of The Ancients
With Rob Collins
Britain is the clearest case study in the whole collapse, because the coins stop, the pottery stops, and the archaeology shows a material standard of living falling off a cliff within a generation.
With David Gwynn
Where to start on the fall if you want one episode: what was already wrong before anything visibly went wrong.
With Peter Heather
410 and 455, the two sacks, and the difference between them. The first shocked the Mediterranean world; the second did more damage and less to the reputation.
With Adrian Goldsworthy
The men nobody remembers between 455 and 476, and the case that 476 is a date historians chose, and that nobody alive that year noticed.
Robin Pierson treats the death of the last emperor as an open case: what the sources claim, where they cannot have been standing, and what became of the body. Sixty-six minutes on 29 May 1453.
Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast
With Joanne Ball
Joanne Ball of Liverpool on the Netflix series and on what sits behind it: a Roman officer of Germanic birth choosing a side. Sixty-five minutes.
With Kyle Harper
Kyle Harper on the volcanic dust veil of the 530s followed by bubonic plague in 541, and on the argument that climate and disease set the limits everything else happened inside. Sixty-four minutes.
Sixty-four minutes on 4 September AD 476, a date with no battle behind it: a boy emperor pensioned off and a German general deciding the title was surplus.
Part of The Rest Is History
Christmas Day 800, and a Frankish king is acclaimed Augustus more than three centuries after the west stopped having emperors. Sixty-three minutes on what that title was meant to mean.
Part of HistoryMarche
Narses in Italy, the eunuch general who finished what Belisarius started. He was past seventy when he took the command and he won every battle he fought.
The Goths and the Vandals, both pushed west by the Huns, both of whom sacked Rome. Sixty-two minutes on how confederations arriving as refugees ended up as the successor kingdoms.
With Dominic Perring
Dominic Perring on Londinium from a timber drain of AD 47, the earliest dated structure on the site, to the empty walls of the fifth century. Sixty-one minutes on a river crossing nobody had thought worth a town.
Kyle Harper on disease as a cause and not a backdrop: the Antonine plague, the Cyprianic, and the bubonic outbreak of 541. Sixty minutes, third of the Fall of Rome run.
With Tom Moore
Tom Moore on pre-Roman Britain as the archaeology has it: roundhouses, hillforts, chariots, feasting debris, metalwork sunk in rivers for the gods. Fifty-nine minutes on the society Caesar filed under barbarian.
Dominic Perring on how a city of tens of thousands became empty ground inside a century, read out of the dark earth layer that sits over the Roman levels. Fifty- eight minutes.
Part of HistoryHit
Fifty-eight minutes taking the whole collapse in one run, to camera. Useful as the frame to hang the detailed episodes on, because it moves fast enough to keep the fourth and fifth centuries as one story.
Part of Tides of History
Fifty-seven minutes on 1453, after sixty years of Ottoman attempts, and on what the capture meant for everyone else around that sea.
Fifty-four minutes on the question that has no single date: 410, 476, 1453 and 1806 all have a case, and which one you pick says what you think Rome was.
Miles Russell argues that Arthur is five earlier figures welded into one by later writers. Fifty-three minutes on how a legend gets assembled out of real people.
Miles Russell again, fifty-three minutes, working through the candidates including Magnus Maximus and asking what a fifth-century war leader would have looked like.
With Hyun Jin Kim
Hyun Jin Kim on the Hephthalites, who built the larger Hunnic empire in Central Asia and held the Silk Roads for a century while Attila got the reputation. Fifty-three minutes.
The last of three: the reconquest of Italy, the plague that arrived in 541, and the ledger afterwards. Fifty-three minutes.
Fifty-three minutes on Theophanu, sent from Constantinople in 972 to marry the heir of the western emperor, and ruling the west as regent when he died.
Smallpox, plague, volcanic winters and a cooling climate, put beside the invasions that usually get the whole blame. Fifty-three minutes of the case that the empire was ill before it was overrun.
Fifty-two minutes on Ravenna, capital of the west from 402 because marshes defended it better than walls, and the place the last western emperors actually lived.
Part one, fifty-one minutes on the Frankish warlords who inherited the western provinces and built something else on top of them.
With Ian Wood
Ian Wood on the Franks, who started as one group among many on the Rhine and ended up with the whole of Gaul. Fifty minutes on how that happened.
With Andy Merrills
Andy Merrills again, fifty minutes, on the people whose name became a word for destruction and who ran Carthage as a functioning state for a hundred years.
Andy Merrills on the Vandals, who crossed Gaul and Spain, took Carthage in 439 and ran North Africa as a kingdom for a century. Forty-nine minutes.
Part one of three, forty-nine minutes on Theodora before the throne, whose early life comes to us through Procopius writing in private and with a grudge.
Peter Heather on the Saxon migrations: mercenaries invited in, a Roman order that stopped paying, and how much of the population actually moved. Forty-eight minutes.
With Laura Spinney
Laura Spinney on ancient DNA that pushes Yersinia pestis back more than five thousand years, long before the outbreak of 541 that was thought to be the first. Forty-eight minutes.
Forty-eight minutes on Mehmed after Constantinople, when taking the city turned out to be the start of the expansion and not the end of it.
Forty-eight minutes on the far western province: Roman Lusitania, then Visigoths, then the long reconquest, with the Roman layer at the bottom of all of it.
Part two, forty-seven minutes on Trebizond from 1297 to 1453 under the Grand Komnenoi, the last Roman state to fall and the one nobody remembers.
With Miles Russell
Miles Russell on Ambrosius Aurelianus, the one named Briton in Gildas who fought the Saxons and is the nearest the record comes to a documented Arthur. Forty-six minutes.
David Gwynn on the Goths from the Danube crossing of 376 to the sack of 410 and the kingdoms after it. Forty-six minutes on refugees who became successors.
Forty-six minutes on 453 and after: Attila dies on his wedding night and the empire he assembled comes apart among his sons inside a generation.
Forty-six minutes of argument with Matt Lewis of Gone Medieval about where the ancient world stops and the medieval one starts, which is a boundary nobody can draw.
Peter Sarris on his own biography of Justinian, with Patrick Wyman pressing on the balance sheet: the reconquest, the Code, Hagia Sophia, and the plague that arrived in the middle of all three. Forty-six minutes.
With Gordon Noble
Recorded at East Lomond hill fort with Gordon Noble, forty-five minutes on the people Rome never took, known mostly from their carved stones and their forts.
What happened in Britain once Rome left: rival kingdoms fighting over what remained. The episode gives the century after 410 its own hour.
Hyun Jin Kim on the Huns as a state with a court, diplomacy and a tax base. Forty- four minutes correcting a picture written by their victims.
Hyun Jin Kim on Attila consolidating the Hunnic tribes and turning them on the Balkans. Forty-four minutes, the first of two.
Part two, forty-four minutes on Attila after the Balkans: Gaul in 451, Italy in 452, and the meeting with Pope Leo that everyone painted afterwards.
With Mark Masterson
Mark Masterson on why the emperor who ruled for half a century never married, and on what the sources will and will not say about it. Forty-four minutes, a thousand years after his death.
Gordon Noble on the Picts, who appear in the third century as Rome's northern problem and left carved stones where other peoples left documents. Forty-three minutes.
Forty-three minutes from 2017 on Justinian's reign running into volcanic cooling and then plague, reposted in 2020 for reasons the host states plainly.
With Douglas Boin
Douglas Boin on Alaric as a Roman insider: a commander who had served the empire and wanted a settlement from it, not a barbarian at the gates. Forty-three minutes.
Part one, forty-one minutes on Trebizond from 1204, when the Fourth Crusade broke the empire into pieces and this piece went its own way.
Listener questions: where the gold came from, how Romania ended up speaking a Romance language, whether the Byzantines played polo. Thirty-nine minutes of the loose ends a narrative show cannot stop for.
Thirty-nine minutes of counterfactuals from listeners, answered by someone who has spent fifteen years on the actual sequence and knows where it could have bent.
With Leonora Neville
The companion argument to Kaldellis, from a different angle: the word Byzantine is a seventeenth-century coinage doing quiet damage. Short, sharp, and it will change how you read every book on the shelf.
Part two, thirty-nine minutes on the Nika riots of 532, which burned the city centre and came close to ending the reign in its fifth year.
With Ian Huges
Ian Hughes, who wrote the biography, on Belisarius reconquering Africa and Italy on budgets that kept being cut out from under him. Thirty-eight minutes.
What happened to the Romans after 1453: enslavement, ransom, flight west, and the families who did well out of Ottoman rule. Twenty-eight minutes on an ending that kept going.
The legends that gathered around Constantine XI, including the one where an angel carries him under the Golden Gate to wait. Twenty-seven minutes on how a defeat turns into a prophecy.
John VIII asks the Pope for a council to reunite the churches and is told yes. Twenty-seven minutes on the delegation that sailed to Italy, covering 1425 to 1448.
Part of Echoes of Empires
Twenty-seven minutes on the early 550s, when Justinian launched another western campaign with an empire still recovering from plague. The title is the verdict.
Twenty-seven minutes on what came after that six-month conquest: fifteen years of holding North Africa. The occupation cost more than the war.
Twenty-seven minutes on Stilicho's fall in 408 and on Alaric taking his chance. Two years later Rome is sacked, and this is why.
Listener questions on the Secret History, eunuchs, the Crown of Thorns and where the Doukas name came from. Twenty-six minutes.
Twenty-six minutes on why Mehmed did not move his capital to the city he had just taken, and on the arguments that finally changed his mind.
Twenty-six minutes on Patrick, who was carried off from Roman Britain by raiders and wrote about it himself, which almost nobody enslaved in antiquity got to do.
Part of Byzantium And The Crusades
Twenty-six minutes on the civil wars that hollowed the empire out long before the Ottomans arrived. The decline was internal first.
Twenty-five minutes on Belisarius back in Italy in 544 with almost no troops, in the campaign that ended his career.
Twenty-five minutes on the Gothic war after Belisarius held Rome in 537, when a quick end looked possible and the command was split instead.
Twenty-five minutes on January 532, when a riot at the hippodrome nearly ended Justinian's reign in its fifth year. Theodora's line about purple making a fine shroud comes from here.
Twenty-five minutes on the eastern half after 410, which did not collapse. Comparing the two halves is the useful part.
The last episode of the show, twenty-four minutes making the case for the show itself: the answer you give relatives who ask why Byzantium.
Twenty-four minutes on May 540, Ravenna taken and the Gothic king a prisoner, and on why that did not end the war.
Twenty-four minutes returning to Attila before the Justinian story starts, asking what the Huns actually changed. A hinge episode between two halves of the series.
Twenty-four minutes on 9 August 378, when an eastern emperor rode out to fight the Goths and did not come back. Ammianus called it the worst defeat since Cannae.
Twenty-three minutes on 622, with Avars to the west and Persians to the east, when Heraclius left his capital surrounded and attacked instead.
Twenty-three minutes on what the reconquest cost elsewhere: a west stripped of troops and the frontiers behind it left open.
Twenty-three minutes on December 406 and the Rhine crossing, after which the western provinces were never fully recovered. The title is Jerome's line.
Twenty-three minutes on the summer of 376, when perhaps two hundred thousand Goths appeared on the Danube asking to be let in. What Rome did next is the subject of the following episode.
Twenty-three minutes on Reynald of Antioch invading Byzantine Cyprus, and on the emperor who came to collect. A crusader state attacking a Christian ally.
Twenty-two minutes on how Venice, Rome and Moscow each reacted to 1453, and on the people who later claimed descent from the last emperor.
Twenty-two minutes on the emperor whose daughter wrote the Alexiad about him, which is both the reason we know him and the reason to be careful.
Twenty-two minutes on 1068 to 1071 and Romanus Diogenes trying to stop the Turkish raids into Anatolia. The battle at the end of it cost the empire its heartland.
Twenty-two minutes on 20 June 451, when Aetius stopped Attila in Gaul with an army of Romans and Goths together. The last great western Roman victory.
Twenty-two minutes on the First Crusade told from the Byzantine side, where the armies arriving were a problem as much as an answer.
Twenty-one minutes returning east after several episodes away, to an empire that lost half its territory and kept going for another eight centuries.
Twenty-one minutes on the plague that struck in 541 and killed on the scale of the Black Death. Everything Justinian planned after this is shaped by it.
Twenty-one minutes on 1396 and the crusade that was supposed to stop the Ottomans in the Balkans. After it, Constantinople was alone.
Twenty-one minutes on Attila turning south into Italy after Gaul, and on the embassy that met him there. The pope in that story is the reason it is remembered.
Twenty minutes ranking the worst, by someone who has covered every one of them in order and can say what the competition was.
Twenty minutes on 433 and Aetius taking control of the west with Hunnic help, while the Vandals took the African grain supply. Rome lost its breadbasket here.
Twenty minutes on the battle itself in August 1071, where an emperor was captured and the defeat mattered less than the civil war it started.
Nineteen minutes on the siege that nearly destroyed the crusade and produced the quarrel over Antioch that poisoned relations with Constantinople for a century.
Eighteen minutes on the two pressures at once, Normans in Italy and Turks in Anatolia, which is how the empire lost both ends in one decade.
Seventeen minutes introducing the people who shape Roman history from the third century to the sixth. Useful before the Adrianople and Gothic war episodes, because it explains who is arriving and why.
Sixteen minutes closing the Manzikert run on what the empire had left afterwards, and on the appeal west that brought the crusaders.
Sixteen minutes on who the Seljuks were and how they reached Anatolia, before the battle that decided it. Part of the Manzikert run.
Part of Ancient Rome Live
Fifteen minutes on August 410, when a Gothic army that had served Rome for years opened the Salarian Gate. The city had not fallen to an enemy in eight hundred years.
Fifteen minutes on what the First Crusade did to Byzantium and to the medieval world, which is the frame for the rest of the series.
Twelve minutes on the Byzantine counter-offensive in the 1060s, the last time the empire moved east under its own steam.
Ten minutes on four related questions: whether federate troops replaced the legions by the seventh century, and what the word legion still meant by then.
Part of toldinstone
A Byzantine fortress walked through on camera, the kind of site that never makes a narrative history.
Everything else, in order
Part of Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Dan Snow's History Hit · Dan Snow on history's defining moments; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Podcast episodes – The Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast (SHWEP) · The forgotten story of Western thought; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Greeced Lightning · Myths and movies with a doctor of classics; only the Roman episodes are indexed
Part of Kings and Generals · Military history in campaigns and battles; only the Roman episodes are indexed
