The point that I wish to stress at this moment is that Gibbon’s figures for clerics and monks are perfectly reasonable. Hundreds of thousands entered the Church either as secular clergy or as monks in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries—far more, one should note, than the number of barbarians who entered the Empire, under any assess-ment. Combining all the levels of clergy as well as the numbers of monks and nuns, despite the probable decline of the Church in the Balkans, there may have been as many religious in what had been the lands of the Roman Empire in 600 as there had been soldiers in 400, who, as we have already noted, are usually thought to have numbered between 400,000 and 600,000. And when one compares the two estimates one should remember the likelihood of an overall decline in the population between the fourth and late sixth centuries, and the possibility of a substantial collapse in the population resulting from the Justinianic Plague, which several scholars, including Michael McCormick and Lester Little, have seen as being of crucial importance in preventing social and economic revival following the barbarian migrations. Some have estimated a death rate of the scale of the Black Death. This estimate of the mortality rate can be no more than a guess. We have literary evidence for the eastern Empire (though Procopius’s account may be rather too influenced by Thucydides) and for certain cities of Gaul, where the information supplied by Gregory of Tours may be rather more reliable; we also have references from the British Isles. As yet, however, significant quantities of archaeological evidence are lacking—although the presence of rats, the likely carriers of the disease, has been noted on some sixth-century sites. The best we can do is say that the evidence suggests some cities and districts were very significantly affected, but we do not have adequate source material to make any secure deductions about others. Assuming that there was a population decline of some scale, if there were as many clerics, monks, and nuns in the early seventh century as there had been soldiers in the mid-fourth, they would have constituted a larger proportion of the population.