I saw a brief bit about German archaeologists, finding evidence of a Roman battle in Northern Germany, ca. 350 AD. The evidence suggests that the Roman Army (at this late date) was fully capable of taking on the barberians-and winning.
Does this turn our ideas about the late roman empire around? I thought by this date, it was a tottering ruin-with mostly paid mercenary soldiers. Anybody have more info?
The Roman Empire didn’t collapse because it couldn’t win any battles. It collapsed because it couldn’t win battles every where and when it needed to.
Right…the Roman armies won a bunch of battles in the 4th-5th centuries…Strasbourg, Ctesiphon, Solicinium, Argentovaria, Pollentia, Verona, Narbonne, Chalons. It just didn’t help much.
In addition to the above, the real breakdown of the Roman Empire is generally reckoned to have started a bit later at Adrianople in 378. That was the first really serious unpatched breach of the empire’s borders.
Weren’t there a series of plagues (like malaria and such) that swept through the empire, especially the Italian peninsula, after that which contributed to the final collapse? That and the low birth rate I thought were generally accepted for the final collapse, not prowess on the battlefield.
-XT