The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples

This is an in depth look at the Empire of Rome & It's relations with the various Germanic peoples focused on the second through fifth centuries A.D. (100's-400's).The author, Hermann Wolfram, takes the view that the Roman Empire did not "fall" in 476, but instead, was transformed by the incoming Germanic peoples into a series of major and minor kingdoms that transformed into Medieval and then Modern Europe.The author's style is scholarly and at times quite dry but he makes his points clear before going into detail to explain his viewpoint. This is not a book for the novice. It helps to have a basic knowledge of the era and the subject before attempting to read this work. Even I found the chapters on the Goths to be a bit of a slog to read through, or at least to get started.That is the Bad News. Otherwise I found this book quite unique and informative. I especially found of interest the chapter on "The Hunnic Alternative". The last chapter, if I remember correctly, also had a short subsection noted as "The Slavic Alternative" which I found to be of note.This is a unique work of depth and detail that many may find mind numbing if you are not truly interested in this little known and so too often misunderstood or out rightly ignored but highly important time period.PS; The correct name of the author is Herwig Wolfram, I misidentified him as Hermann Wolfram above.

I found this book hard to read, compared to the two other books in my library which cover similar ground, namely  The Early Germans (The Peoples of Europe)  and  The Goths (The Peoples of Europe) .However, while the book is quite dry and unengaging, and while this does detract from the book to a significant extent (hence only four stars) the book presents a compelling picture of the decline of the Roman Empire and the rise of Germanic successor states which combines economic, military, and social elements, and which provides insights that no other book in my library does.For example, Wolfram makes a great deal of the differences in tax income, military expenditures, and economic disparity between the Eastern Roman Empire and the Western Roman Empire. He points out that the Eastern Empire spent more on their military than the Western Empire did on their entire budget, and he attributes this to problems with taxes caused by tremendous economic disparity in the West. Wolfram offers many other valuable insights in this work, so this is still a very valuable addition to the library of any history buff.Recommended.

Mr. Wolfram has definitely done his homework; this is a well-written and extremely informative, if a rather dry, look at the relationship between Roman and German for really the entire Roman Imperial Period, though naturally focusing mostly on the AD 300-600 area (not to sound petty, but I was hoping for more information on the Germans of the earlier centuries, other than the Cherusci in AD 9 and the Marcomannic Wars you don't hear much about them). Much of the book is about the various Germanic kings who carved out their own pieces of the Roman Empire in the 5th and 6th Centuries, like Gaiseric, Theodoric, Clovis, Odovacar, and others, and the movements and separate cultures and personalities of the major groups, the Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, and others are also profiled. I particularly appreciated the author's look at the events of AD 476 in Chapter Eight, the `Empire that Did Not End'. Also, he makes it clear that he sees the Barbarian `Invasions' as not invasions but immigration, from Italy to England. Also included are some useful genealogy charts and chronologies. Overall, a single great book on the early Germanic Kingdoms for those with a serious interest.

This is a very enjoyable book. If you are interested in why the Roman Empire had its downfall, this book will give you the details. I found it very readable. Not a book you can hurry through, but if you want to learn about events in that era, you will find this book informative. His other book on the Goths is also worth reading.

ok

A classic on this topic by Viennese historian.

Covers a long history with Germans from the area now called Germany plus German speakers from many other areas (much farther to the East).

This book, a survey of the histories of the various so-called Germanic tribes that eventually assumed control of Europe, spanning the years from roughly 250AD to somewhere around 800AD. One of Wolfram's main theses is that the actual barbarian "invasions" were events that were much more complicated than a simple onslaught of Germanic hordes. He does a relatively good job in describing how exactly the migrations took place. Along the way, he gives the reader some good ideas about how the Germanic tribes functioned as societies.This is an enormously complicated subject. I'm sure no two people agree on everything involved, but I must take issue to some of the criticisms that has been written here. First, this is no easy book to read. It's a history book written by and for specialists. So, it's not simply a narrative of events that happened; there's a great deal of analysis and moving back and forth in time in order to make comparisons. He does provide a time-line, though. Nevertheless, it's going to be rough-going for someone looking for a quick scan of the topic.As for Wolfram's sources, most of them are Roman texts or in German (the book itself is a translation from the German). There's nothing quoted here that's any more spurious than any other history book I've read. In fact, Wolfram spends a lot of time weeding out what's reliable in the Roman sources and what isn't.Lastly, it should be pointed out that another of Wolfram's big points is to distinguish the Germanic tribes as political units as opposed to ethnic units (and thus somehow "related" to modern Germans). He's very effective at convincing me at least that most of these tribes were ethnically polyglots that subsumed various "races" according to political and economic need.

a vitally important work that is little known even among historians

I'm delighted with my purchase