The Fall of the Roman Empire

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.

Part of Fall of Civilizations

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.

Part of SandRhomanHistory

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.

Part of The Ancients

With David Gwynn

Where to start on the fall if you want one episode: what was already wrong before anything visibly went wrong.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The History of Byzantium

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

With Kyle Harper

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

With Dominic Perring

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

With Peter Heather

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.

Part of The Rest Is History

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Rest Is History

The last of three: the reconquest of Italy, the plague that arrived in 541, and the ledger afterwards. Fifty-three minutes.

Part of The Rest Is History

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.

Part of The Ancients

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 of The Rest Is History

Part one, fifty-one minutes on the Frankish warlords who inherited the western provinces and built something else on top of them.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

With Andy Merrills

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 of The Rest Is History

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.

Part of The Ancients

With Peter Heather

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of Tides of History

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.

Part of The Rest Is History

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 of The History of Byzantium

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of The Ancients

With David Gwynn

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.

Part of The Ancients

With Hyun Jin Kim

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of Tides of History

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.

Part of The Ancients

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.

Part of HistoryHit

What happened in Britain once Rome left: rival kingdoms fighting over what remained. The episode gives the century after 410 its own hour.

Part of The Ancients

With Hyun Jin Kim

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.

Part of The Ancients

With Hyun Jin Kim

Hyun Jin Kim on Attila consolidating the Hunnic tribes and turning them on the Balkans. Forty-four minutes, the first of two.

Part of The Ancients

With Hyun Jin Kim

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.

Part of The History of Byzantium

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.

Part of The Ancients

With Gordon Noble

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.

Part of Tides of History

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.

Part of Tides of History

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 of The History of Byzantium

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.

Part of The History of Byzantium

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.

Part of The History of Byzantium

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.

Part of The History of Byzantium

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 of The Rest Is History

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.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of The History of Byzantium

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.

Part of The History of Byzantium

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.

Part of The History of Byzantium

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.

Part of Echoes of Empires

Twenty-seven minutes on what came after that six-month conquest: fifteen years of holding North Africa. The occupation cost more than the war.

Part of Echoes of Empires

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.

Part of The History of Byzantium

Listener questions on the Secret History, eunuchs, the Crown of Thorns and where the Doukas name came from. Twenty-six minutes.

Part of The History of Byzantium

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.

Part of Tides of History

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.

Part of Echoes of Empires

Twenty-five minutes on Belisarius back in Italy in 544 with almost no troops, in the campaign that ended his career.

Part of Echoes of Empires

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.

Part of Echoes of Empires

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.

Part of Echoes of Empires

Twenty-five minutes on the eastern half after 410, which did not collapse. Comparing the two halves is the useful part.

Part of The History of Byzantium

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.

Part of Echoes of Empires

Twenty-four minutes on May 540, Ravenna taken and the Gothic king a prisoner, and on why that did not end the war.

Part of Echoes of Empires

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.

Part of Echoes of Empires

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.

Part of Echoes of Empires

Twenty-three minutes on 622, with Avars to the west and Persians to the east, when Heraclius left his capital surrounded and attacked instead.

Part of Echoes of Empires

Twenty-three minutes on what the reconquest cost elsewhere: a west stripped of troops and the frontiers behind it left open.

Part of Echoes of Empires

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.

Part of Echoes of Empires

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.

Part of Byzantium And The Crusades

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.

Part of The History of Byzantium

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.

Part of Echoes of Empires

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.

Part of Echoes of Empires

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.

Part of Echoes of Empires

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.

Part of Byzantium And The Crusades

Twenty-two minutes on the First Crusade told from the Byzantine side, where the armies arriving were a problem as much as an answer.

Part of Echoes of Empires

Twenty-one minutes returning east after several episodes away, to an empire that lost half its territory and kept going for another eight centuries.

Part of Echoes of Empires

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.

Part of Byzantium And The Crusades

Twenty-one minutes on 1396 and the crusade that was supposed to stop the Ottomans in the Balkans. After it, Constantinople was alone.

Part of Echoes of Empires

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.

Part of The History of Byzantium

Twenty minutes ranking the worst, by someone who has covered every one of them in order and can say what the competition was.

Part of Echoes of Empires

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.

Part of Byzantium And The Crusades

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.

Part of Byzantium And The Crusades

Nineteen minutes on the siege that nearly destroyed the crusade and produced the quarrel over Antioch that poisoned relations with Constantinople for a century.

Part of Byzantium And The Crusades

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.

Part of Echoes of Empires

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.

Part of Byzantium And The Crusades

Sixteen minutes closing the Manzikert run on what the empire had left afterwards, and on the appeal west that brought the crusaders.

Part of Byzantium And The Crusades

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.

Part of Byzantium And The Crusades

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.

Part of Byzantium And The Crusades

Twelve minutes on the Byzantine counter-offensive in the 1060s, the last time the empire moved east under its own steam.

Part of Ancient Warfare Podcast

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.

Part of Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of Ithaca Bound · Andrew Schiestel on the Mediterranean, 2021 to 2022; only the Roman episodes are indexed

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 Dan Snow's History Hit · Dan Snow on history's defining moments; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of Kings and Generals · Military history in campaigns and battles; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of Kings and Generals · Military history in campaigns and battles; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of Kings and Generals · Military history in campaigns and battles; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of Kings and Generals · Military history in campaigns and battles; only the Roman episodes are indexed

Part of Kings and Generals · Military history in campaigns and battles; only the Roman episodes are indexed