The cataclysmic end of the Roman Empire in the West has tended to mask the underlying features of continuity. The map of Europe in the year 500 would have been unrecognizable to anyone living a hundred years earlier. Gone was the solid boundary line dividing Romancivilization from what had been perceived as ‘barbarism’. Gone were the familiar institutions of almost half a millennium. And gone was a ruler who could survey the whole of the West as his domain. Instead, the West was fragmented into a patchwork of shifting ‘barbarian’ kingdoms while the gradually shrinking East continued under an emperor in thrall to a domineering church and overweening eunuch chamberlains.
