The kingdoms that replaced Roman administration in the western provinces were not anti-Roman. This is the most important correction to the standard narrative of Rome’s fall, and it matters because the standard narrative — civilized Rome overwhelmed by barbarous outsiders — is both factually wrong and interpretively misleading. The Visigothic kingdom in Spain, the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy, the Burgundian kingdom in the Rhône valley, the Frankish kingdom in Gaul — these were not negations of Rome. They were, in varying degrees, continuations of Rome under different management, sustained by Roman administrative forms, legitimated by Roman imperial titles, and often governed by rulers who had spent significant portions of their careers in Roman service and who regarded Roman civilization as the culture they had inherited rather than the culture they had defeated.

On August 24, 410 AD, the Visigoths under Alaric entered Rome through the Salarian Gate and spent three days sacking the city. It was the first time a foreign enemy had taken Rome in eight hundred years — since the Gauls in 390 BC — and the psychological shock of the event reverberated across the Mediterranean world in ways that exceeded its military or economic significance. Jerome, writing from Bethlehem, described the impact in terms usually reserved for cosmic events. Augustine, prompted by pagan Romans who blamed Christianity for the calamity, spent the next thirteen years writing the City of God in partial response to the question of what the sack meant. What it meant, in fact, was both more and less than the commentary of the time suggested.

Edward Gibbon spent six volumes and most of his adult life explaining why Rome fell, and he was not the first. The question has generated more scholarly production than almost any other in historical study, a volume that says less about Roman history than about the intellectual needs of subsequent civilizations that measured themselves against Rome’s shadow. Every generation finds its own answer, and every answer reveals as much about the present as about the fifth century.