Whatever problems the Roman Empire had, as what would become the calamitous 5th century

dawned, and boy did it have some issues, it was still a coherent state.

A powerful central government based in Ravenna in the West and Constantinople in the East

worked directly with a defined hierarchy of provincial administration and local elites

in the innumerable cities of the Empire to assess and collect taxes, supply the army,

service, infrastructure, and delivered justice in accordance with the complex and highly

developed legal norms the Romans had spent centuries developing.

A century later, that unity had been broken.

North African grain, assessed and collected as taxed by a powerful central government,

no longer supplied the city of Rome.

Regular army troops no longer manned frontier forts along the Rhine and the Danube.

There were no more provincial governors and administrative staffs handling the provinces.

There was no more emperor in the West for that matter or an imperial court around him.

In place of this centrally directed political infrastructure, each region of the Roman

Empire in the West had gone its own separate way.

We call these new regions the barbarian or successor kingdoms.

A patchwork of Anglo-Saxon policies ruled eastern Britain, while native British aristocrats

ruled the West.

The Franks had taken over huge stretches of northern Gaul.

The Burgundians ruled around Lyon and Geneva.

The Visigoths controlled Aquitaine in the southwest.

The Suebs, Visigoths, and native aristocrats had divided up Spain, and the Vandals controlled

...