THE WESTERN ROMAN EMPIRE had been disintegrating from a combination of external pressure and internal shrinkage for a long time before the last western emperor was deposed in AD 476. The leaders of the many “barbarian” peoples who had, in reality, exercised power in the provinces for a long time, continued to rule there. Continuity with the greatness identified with Rome was maintained in two institutions : the Christian Church, and the survival of the eastern section of the empire, ruled by emperors based in Constantinople. The subject of this chapter is the extent to which Roman traditions in the attack and defence of fortifications survived into, or were modified, in the time traditionally called the “Dark Ages”.

The eastern empire was in no doubt about itself : it was Rome, although its language was Greek. Its realm, encompassing the Balkans, Asia Minor, the Middle East, and North Africa, maintained a high level of culture and civilisation. It preserved the military traditions, the architecture and technology, and the professional soldiers and skilled craftsmen. It was, as well, a crossroads between east and west. It would undergo profound social and economic transformation during the centuries to follow, but its existence provided a link with the past that influenced the world around it for another thousand years. In western Europe, Germanic peoples now occupied the land of the old empire. The Franks were in modern (northern) France, the Burgundians west and south of the Alps, the Vandals in North Africa, and the Visigoths in the Iberian peninsula. The Ostrogoths held most of Italy. The Angles and Saxons settled in Britain. Modern scholarship and archaeological investigation have profoundly modified previous conceptions of what these settlements involved. For the most part, it seems that existing aristocratic families were not wiped out, but shared power with the new rulers. Writers drawn from their ranks (lay people or churchmen) often provide the only record of events. The new peoples, through processes still not entirely understood, gradually became merged with indigenous peoples, although sometimes the latter were driven out. While the classic view of the Dark Ages has been substantially revised to recognise much continuity with what went before, it is undoubtedly true that levels of culture and technology declined significantly with the ending of the structures of the previous, centralised regime.