Did Immigration Really Cause the Fall of Rome?

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 10 November 2021

⏱️ 40 minutes

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Summary

Boris Johnson recently stated that the fall of Rome was caused by 'uncontrolled migration' and the image of a mighty empire bought to its knees by hordes of barbarians from the east is certainly a powerful one. It is, however, not true and for many historians, even the idea of the "fall" of the empire is considered dubious. In the west, the empire dissolved into successor states that continued many elements of Roman bureaucracy and societal order. In the east, the empire became the Byzantine Empire and continued to rule up until 1453. The empire certainly did change but for a variety of reasons including the changing nature of power, new groups settling within its borders, environmental changes and conflicts both external and internal. Joining Dan to discuss this mighty subject and shed some light on the reality of the fall of Rome is Mark Humphries, Professor of Classics, Ancient History & Egyptology at Swansea University.

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0:00.0	Hello everyone, Malcolm Downstone's history in our buckle up folks, buckle up, because we're
0:04.5	taking on the big one. We're going there. Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister, made some fairly
0:09.5	odd remarks. It seemed to be standing in the Coliseum for some reasons, right? I don't know, quite
0:12.7	what it was going on. Made some fairly odd remarks about how climate change might create
0:16.7	a gigantic flood of immigrants, which should be bad because as we land in the fifth century AD,
0:22.0	immigrants streaming across the Roman frontier calls the fall of Rome. Now this was obviously very
0:28.8	provoking. So we decided to get into it. We went to a professor of classics in history in Mark
0:35.1	Humphries at Swansea University and we went there. We asked all about it and we said,
0:40.8	now what was the nature of the Roman Empire and the West by the late fourth, early fifth century?
0:45.6	Can Rome really be said to her fallen? What does that even mean? Who made it fall? If it did,
0:50.9	I mean it's big stuff. Get your intellectual running shoes on because Mark provides a
0:55.6	total force here. We had 45 minutes to deal with one of the most far reaching, oft quoted,
1:02.2	oft misattributed epics of European and world history, the fall of Rome or other, the fall of
1:10.2	the Roman Empire in the West. It was a big one. It's fascinating stuff. If you want to watch
1:15.1	documentaries about the changing nature of the Roman Empire, you can do so at History at TV.
1:19.4	You go over there. Tens of thousands of people are watching shows every week. It is very,
1:23.7	very exciting. I can't quite believe it, but it's true. You go over there. You can watch documentaries
1:29.0	about the Roman Revolt in Britain. It's a good idea. You can watch documentaries about Hannibal
1:34.0	and how he almost knitted this Roman experiment in the mud during the Second Punic War. You can
1:38.9	watch documentaries about late antiquity or the early Middle Ages. What some fools call the Dark Ages,
1:45.2	but obviously I don't because I value my Twitter feed replies too much. We've actually got a project
1:51.3	we're filming with Sutton Who at the moment. It's a very early medieval post-Roman ship discovered,
	...

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