Are you ready to start your new online venture or creative endeavor?

Make it happen with Squarespace, the all-in-one platform to build an online presence and follow your dream.

But more on that at the end of the video.

By the summer of 375, Grimm portents hung over the Black Sea.

For more than a hundred years, the Gretaungi Goths, one half of a sprawling confederation,

stretching from the Danube to the Caucasus, had called the northern shore home.

Archaeological evidence suggests that these people were farmers at heart, ruled over by

Germanic warlords with private armies. Like most of the tribes of Europe at the time, they'd had their

wandering days. For centuries in fact, they'd searched for their place in the world.

And sometime during the second century AD, on the abundant shores of the Black Sea.

Home to Greek colonies for close to a thousand years, they'd finally found it.

For a time, the Goths waged wars and campaigns of conquest against their neighbours,

and against the rich and powerful Roman Empire to their south.

But now, for the most part, they were content to drink Roman wine and sing tales of old.

Little did they know it, but their world was about to come crashing down around them.

Just like it had done so many times before, and would do so many times in the future,

death came riding in on a horse.

Bands of opportunistic riders had come into the area before. For years in fact, ambitious Atlantic horsemen had come in off the steps to the north and the east to try their luck against the Gothic armies, with varying degrees of success.

Before them, the Salmation hordes and Iranian-speaking people had been an ever-present fixture in Eastern Europe. But now, in that fortuitous

summer of 375, a very different foe began to appear out of the plains to the north of the Black Sea.

A foe that over the century to come would sweep away all in its path, remaking all of the

tribes and cultures of Eastern Europe and absorbing what was left into their ever-growing

...