I'm Patrick Weiman and this is the Fall of Rome.

Sorry for the delay in posting this third episode of The Fall of Rome.

My wife and I had a baby last week, so I've been a little bit busy, but we'll now resume our regular schedule.

This week we'll examine what happened when the Goths first entered the Roman Empire in 376 AD,

a chain of events that led directly to the greatest Roman military disaster in more than 350 years

at the Battle of Adrianople.

An emperor died on the battlefield, and an entire field army, the cream of the Roman military,

found themselves in early graves.

How did this happen?

How did a group of rag-tag refugees bring a superpower to such a crushing defeat?

We'll explore all of that and more.

In last week's episode, we explored the world beyond the frontiers of the Roman Empire,

the barbarian world, from the beginning of the third century to around 375 AD.

We focused on the Goths, one particular group of barbarians who occupied the area that stretched

some 800 miles from central Romania to the easternmost tip of the Ukraine,

from the Carpathian Mountains to the open grass of the Eurasian step.

This was a diverse and complex world, which the Romans called Barbarian, the land of the barbarians.

It was densely populated, with villages consisting of neat rows of round, sunken-flored huts,

and square timber houses surrounded by fields of wheat, barley, and millet.

On the open plains, semi-nomadic groups moved cattle from grazing area to grazing area and raised horses.

Germanic-speaking Goths lived alongside Latin and Iranian speakers and other groups besides.

Followers of the traditional Goths lived alongside a growing number of converted Christians,

...