Peter Heather

No.

And we've got the speeches that the then Eastern Emperor's spokesman gave while trying to sell the agreement to the Senate of Constantinople, which is a gathering of Eastern landowning opinion.

And he pretty much admits, which is...

astonishingly rare that the empire has been forced into it but he also looks forward to gothic autonomy disappearing in the medium term yeah he projects that as a likely outcome yeah sure of course like our public sector debt issue it'll just sort of disappear growth will make it disappear right

The problem in Western Europe is that we haven't really seen the Huns yet.

All we've seen is the kind of knock-on effects of the Hunnic advance guard.

There is no evidence for large-scale Hunnic intrusion into the fringes of Europe itself before the year 400.

When we first get Huns in large numbers in what's now Hungary...

That's about 410.

Coincidentally, I don't think it's a coincidence.

Other people think it's a coincidence.

The years before the sudden appearance of the Huns in Hungary, we get a massive outflow of population from that central European region, the Great Hungarian Plain and its adjacent areas, one into Italy and one across the Rhine into Gaul.

So two massive invasions, one in 405 into Italy, and one at the end of 406 into Gaul.

The Roman sources concentrate on the effects of these things.

There was a source which told us what the causes were, but it survives only in fragments.

And in a bowdlerized, confused, later version where someone had read it and copies a bit out...

So it's entirely reasonable, as some of my colleagues would do, to argue that the invasions come first and the Huns move into a power vacuum.

Myself, I think it's the other way around.

Well, it does smash the first one.

Okay.