Barbarians

I learned medieval European history from a textbook written by the DEVILISHLY INTELLIGENT MAN, named Professor Manteuffel. The lecture began with the fact that hundreds of barbarian tribes were pushing to the borders of the Roman Empire: Huns, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Swebs, Allans and many, many others. Unfortunately, the textbook did not explain where all these barbarians suddenly came from and pushed so much that literally some pushed others ever deeper into the Roman Empire.

My teaching stalled because, without knowing the answer to this question, I was unable to read further comprehension, because all my attention was still focused on this question. I searched the manual in all the pages, but unfortunately I did not find the answer. There were even numbers that would allow me to somehow count these tribes. I came across the answer only years later, in the book “Empires and Barbarians” – Peter Heather.

It turned out that barbarians were so much, because he was a baby boomer at least as in 1972 in Poland. It’s strange that I didn’t come up with it myself. The Roman Empire had about 100 million inhabitants at one point, and the cobbler’s income level in Ancient Rome was roughly the same as that of a shoemaker in London in the 19th century.