Author: Walter Goffart
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691216312
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294
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Book Description
Despite intermittent turbulence and destruction, much of the Roman West came under barbarian control in an orderly fashion. Goths, Burgundians, and other aliens were accommodated within the provinces without disrupting the settled population or overturning the patterns of landownership. Walter Goffart examines these arrangements and shows that they were based on the procedures of Roman taxation, rather than on those of military billeting (the so-called hospitalitas system), as has long been thought. Resident proprietors could be left in undisturbed possession of their lands because the proceeds of taxation,rather than land itself, were awarded to the barbarian troops and their leaders.
Author: E. A. Thompson
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299087043
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
This collection of twelve essays examines the fall of the Roman Empire in the West from the barbarian perspective and experience.
Author: Derek Williams
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1250083818
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323
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Book Description
"A vivid picture of the clash between ancient civilization and prehistoric cultures." - Kirkus Reviews From 27 B.C. to A.D. 117, the Roman dreams of boundless empire began to falter. The very size of their conquests made them hard to manage, and the caesars also had to accept the scale and intractability of the problems posed by the barbarians. The period covered by the book is one of great change and the opening of a new era. For the once mighty Romans this was a time when power was passing; for the barbarians it was the late Iron Age: a time of transition when internal stresses and fear of Roman aggression were creating dangerous shifts in the tribal equilibrium. Derek Williams's Romans and Barbarians sees the clash of cultures from the standpoint of four individuals whose curious fate it was to venture or be sent beyond the outer watchtowers of the Roman empire. They bore witness from the grassy steppe of Europe's southeastern corner from across the grump Carpathians, towering beyond the Danube; from the fearsome German forest; and from beyond the Firth of Forth in the wilderness of northernmost Britain. Each portrait reveals different aspects of the Sarmatian, German, and Celtic peoples facing the empire's European frontiers. Together these four viewpoints provide a rich portrait of the classical and Iron Age worlds, mutually uncomprehending yet strangely unable to do without each other. The outcome is a skein of violence, tragedy, misadventure, and courage, offering a preview of the cruel but creative forces from whose fusion modern Europe was eventually to emerge.
Author: Professor Danuta Shanzer
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 140948209X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408
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Book Description
One of the most significant transformations of the Roman world in Late Antiquity was the integration of barbarian peoples into the social, cultural, religious, and political milieu of the Mediterranean world. The nature of these transformations was considered at the sixth biennial Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity Conference, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 2005, and this volume presents an updated selection of the papers given on that occasion, complemented with a few others,. These 25 studies do much to break down old stereotypes about the cultural and social segregation of Roman and barbarian populations, and demonstrate that, contrary to the past orthodoxy, Romans and barbarians interacted in a multitude of ways, and it was not just barbarians who experienced "ethnogenesis" or cultural assimilation. The same Romans who disparaged barbarian behavior also adopted aspects of it in their everyday lives, providing graphic examples of the ambiguity and negotiation that characterized the integration of Romans and barbarians, a process that altered the concepts of identity of both populations. The resultant late antique polyethnic cultural world, with cultural frontiers between Romans and barbarians that became increasingly permeable in both directions, does much to help explain how the barbarian settlement of the west was accomplished with much less disruption than there might have been, and how barbarian populations were integrated seamlessly into the old Roman world.
Author: Barry W. Cunliffe
Publisher: Other
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
Author: Peter Heather
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199752720
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 752
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Book Description
Empires and Barbarians presents a fresh, provocative look at how a recognizable Europe came into being in the first millennium AD. With sharp analytic insight, Peter Heather explores the dynamics of migration and social and economic interaction that changed two vastly different worlds--the undeveloped barbarian world and the sophisticated Roman Empire--into remarkably similar societies and states. The book's vivid narrative begins at the time of Christ, when the Mediterranean circle, newly united under the Romans, hosted a politically sophisticated, economically advanced, and culturally developed civilization--one with philosophy, banking, professional armies, literature, stunning architecture, even garbage collection. The rest of Europe, meanwhile, was home to subsistence farmers living in small groups, dominated largely by Germanic speakers. Although having some iron tools and weapons, these mostly illiterate peoples worked mainly in wood and never built in stone. The farther east one went, the simpler it became: fewer iron tools and ever less productive economies. And yet ten centuries later, from the Atlantic to the Urals, the European world had turned. Slavic speakers had largely superseded Germanic speakers in central and Eastern Europe, literacy was growing, Christianity had spread, and most fundamentally, Mediterranean supremacy was broken. Bringing the whole of first millennium European history together, and challenging current arguments that migration played but a tiny role in this unfolding narrative, Empires and Barbarians views the destruction of the ancient world order in light of modern migration and globalization patterns.
Author: Ludwig Heinrich Dyck
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 1473877881
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
“A great book that summarizes pieces of Roman military history that are often not mentioned or difficult to find sources for . . . an entertaining read.”—War History Online As Rome grew from a small city state to the mightiest empire of the west, her dominion was contested not only by the civilizations of the Mediterranean, but also by the “barbarians”—the tribal peoples of Europe. The Celtic, the Spanish-Iberian and the Germanic tribes lacked the pomp and grandeur of Rome, but they were fiercely proud of their freedom and gave birth to some of Rome’s greatest adversaries. Romans and barbarians, iron legions and wild tribesmen clashed in dramatic battles on whose fate hinged the existence of entire peoples and, at times, the future of Rome. Far from reducing the legions and tribes to names and numbers, The Roman Barbarian Wars: The Era of Roman Conquest reveals how they fought and how they lived and what their world was like. Through his exhaustive research and lively text, Ludwig H. Dyck immerses the reader into the epic world of the Roman barbarian wars. “I was reminded, as I picked up this superb book, of that magnificent scene from Gladiator when they unleashed hell on the Barbarian hordes at the beginning of the film. Dyck has produced a book that celebrates the brilliance of the Roman commanders and of Rome itself from its foundation to its eventual demise.”—Books Monthly “Dyck’s details of ancient battles and the people involved provide as much sword-slashing excitement as any fictional account.”—Kirkus Reviews “His vivid prose makes for a gripping read.”—Military Heritage
Author: Thomas S. Burns
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 9780801892707
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The barbarians of antiquity, so long a fixture of the public imagination as the savages who sacked and destroyed Rome, emerge in this colorful, richly textured history as a much more complex—and far more interesting—factor in the expansion, and eventual unmaking, of the Roman Empire. Thomas S. Burns marshals an abundance of archeological and literary evidence, as well as three decades of study and experience, to bring forth an unusually far-sighted and wide-ranging account of the relations between Romans and non-Romans along the frontiers of western Europe from the last years of the Republic into late antiquity. Looking at a 500-year time span beginning with early encounters between barbarians and Romans around 100 B.C. and ending with the spread of barbarian settlement in the western Empire around A.D. 400, Burns removes the barbarians from their narrow niche as invaders and conquerors and places them in the broader context of neighbors, (sometimes bitter) friends, and settlers. His nuanced history subtly shows how Rome's relations with the barbarians—and vice versa—slowly but inexorably evolved from general ignorance, hostility, and suspicion toward tolerance, synergy, and integration. What he describes is, in fact, a drawn-out period of acculturation, characterized more by continuity than by change and conflict and leading to the creation of a new Romano-barbarian hybrid society and culture that anticipated the values and traditions of medieval civilization.
Author: Erik Jensen
Publisher: Hackett Publishing
ISBN: 1624667147
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
What did the ancient Greeks and Romans think of the peoples they referred to as barbari? Did they share the modern Western conception—popularized in modern fantasy literature and role-playing games—of "barbarians" as brutish, unwashed enemies of civilization? Or our related notion of "the noble savage?" Was the category fixed or fluid? How did it contrast with the Greeks and Romans' conception of their own cultural identity? Was it based on race? In accessible, jargon-free prose, Erik Jensen addresses these and other questions through a copiously illustrated introduction to the varied and evolving ways in which the ancient Greeks and Romans engaged with, and thought about, foreign peoples—and to the recent historical and archaeological scholarship that has overturned received understandings of the relationship of Classical civilization to its "others."
Author: Walter Pohl
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311059756X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 777
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Book Description
Roman identity is one of the most interesting cases of social identity because in the course of time, it could mean so many different things: for instance, Greek-speaking subjects of the Byzantine empire, inhabitants of the city of Rome, autonomous civic or regional groups, Latin speakers under ‘barbarian’ rule in the West or, increasingly, representatives of the Church of Rome. Eventually, the Christian dimension of Roman identity gained ground. The shifting concepts of Romanness represent a methodological challenge for studies of ethnicity because, depending on its uses, Roman identity may be regarded as ‘ethnic’ in a broad sense, but under most criteria, it is not. Romanness is indeed a test case how an established and prestigious social identity can acquire many different shades of meaning, which we would class as civic, political, imperial, ethnic, cultural, legal, religious, regional or as status groups. This book offers comprehensive overviews of the meaning of Romanness in most (former) Roman provinces, complemented by a number of comparative and thematic studies. A similarly wide-ranging overview has not been available so far.
