Of the two factors singled out by Gibbon for special emphasis, that of the role of the barbarians in the collapse of the Roman West has divided opinion more than any other. In the post-1945 world there was a strong view, particularly prevalent in France, that the barbarians were to blame for the fall of Rome, and this is echoed, in more measured terms, in Jones's Later Roman Empire. Rather less inclined to pin blame on the Germanic peoples, however, is The Barbarian West 400–1000, published in 1952, in which Michael Wallace-Hadrill condensed the events of the late fourth, fifth, and early sixth centuries into a single chapter, before allocating greater space to the Lombards in Italy, the Franks in Gaul, and (in a third edition) the Visigoths in Spain. A recurrent theme is the survival or restoration of romanitas, rather than its collapse. At the same time, early barbarian society was subjected to intense, and in many ways sympathetic, analysis by Edward Thompson, whose Marxism led him to explore the development of social division among the Germanic peoples over the course of the Migration Period.

The real challenge to the notion that Rome was overthrown by the barbarians, however, came in a series of sharply argued articles and books, the first of which was published in 1980. Here Walter Goffart downgraded the importance of the so-called Germanic peoples, not least by questioning the scale of the barbarian migrations, the Völkerwanderung. His reading has been vigorously challenged, especially by Heather and Ward-Perkins, albeit with only limited success. They have reminded us of the reality of the disruption, even if the barbarian numbers were small. The brutality and destruction, however, were geographically confined and chronologically short-lived. This is not to deny that disruptive military violence was a regular feature of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, but much of it was not instigated by barbarians. The Vandals, Alans, and Sueves unquestionably caused major damage on their route from the Rhine through to Spain between 407 and 409, as has been well mapped,64 but already by 418/19 there were signs of revival in Gaul, famously characterized by the senatorial poet Rutilius Namatianus as ordo renascendi, “renaissance.”