The Day of the Barbarians: The Battle That Led to the Fall of the Roman Empire by Alessandro Barbero deals with th battle of Adrianople in 378 CE.
In his Prologue, the author writes:
The subject of this book is a battle that changed the course of world history It was not a famous fight like Waterloo or Stalingrad; in fact, most people have never heard of it. And yet some believe that it signified nothing less than the end of the ancient world and the beginning of the Middle Ages, because this battle set in motion the chain of events that would lead, nearly a century later, to the fall of the Western Roman Empire. That event is linked to a wellknown date that forms part of our common fund of knowledge: AD 476, the year when Romulus Augustulus, the last Roman emperor of the West, was deposed. But in fact the removal of Romulus was only the final, inevitable step in a process that had begun long before.
This introductory sentence puts the author firmly in the camp of early dating of the fall of Rome, and he sets out to prove it to his own satisfaction in this concise history of the events leading up to the battle of Adrianople, the battle itself, and the aftermath. His arguments are not wholly convincing as to the timing and he himself waffles at times. Readers my judge for themselves.
The story itself is compellingly told and a good read!
Alessandro Barbero is a professor of medieval studies at the University of Piemonte Orientale in Vercelli, Italy. A previous winner of the Strega Prize, Italy's most distinguished literary reward, he is the author of The Battle: A New History of Waterloo and Charlemagne, Father of a Continent.
