Italy and the West AD 410-476

The process of history in the Western Empire, during the period which lies between the death of Alaric (410) and the fall of Romulus Augustulus (476), is towards the establishment of Teutonic kingdoms, partly displacing and partly embracing the old local administration within their boundaries, but as a rule remaining in some sort of nominal connection with the imperial system itself. In the course of this process, therefore, the imperial scheme, in which the invading barbarians take a regular place under the name of foederati, still survives, along with much of the old provincial machinery, which they find too useful to be disturbed; but while much that is old survives, much is also added which is new. Germanic tribes, with their kings and their dooms, their moots and theirfyrds, settle bodily on the soil, as new forces in the domain of politics and economics, of religion and of law. The Latinized provincial pays a new allegiance to the tribal king: the Roman possessor has to admit the tribesmen as his ‘guests’ on part of his lands; the Catholic priest is forced to reconcile himself to the Arianism, which these tribes had inherited from the days of Ulfila; and the Roman jurist, if he can still occupy himself by reducing the Codex Theodosianus into a Breviarium Alaricianum, must also admit the entrance of strange Leges Barbarorum into the field of jurisprudence.