The Fall of the Roman Empire

The Fall of the Roman Empire is a six-volume narrative history tracing the transformation of Roman power from the third-century crisis to the political and religious world of around 1000 CE. Rather than treating 476 as a single terminal event, Nick Holmes follows the empire’s repeated reinventions, the fragmentation of Roman government in the West, the survival of the eastern empire and the formation of new states across Europe and the Mediterranean.

Arranged chronologically, the books move from Diocletian and Constantine through the Gothic and Hunnic invasions, Justinian’s reconquests, the final Roman–Sasanian war and the early Muslim conquests, before turning to the Carolingian, Byzantine, Islamic and Viking worlds. Holmes combines emperors, battles and institutions with plague, climate, migration and economic strain to explain both collapse and continuity.