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This chapter describes developments in the territory north of the Haemus mountains — included in the late Roman provinces of Moesia Superior, Dacia Ripensis, Moesia Inferior and Scythia Minor — from the late fourth to the early seventh century. It examines the impact of the Gothic war of 376–382 and the successive destructive invasions by Goths, Huns, Avars, Sclavenes and Slavs of 441 and 447 on these provinces. It also looks at attempts to restore the defences and settlements of the region from the late fifth century onwards, particularly in the reign of emperor Justinian (527–565). Periods of invasion were followed by phases of peace and reconstruction, but recovery never came even close to restoring the territory to its condition before these invasions. By the end of the first quarter of the seventh century, the Roman organization of the area had been wiped out.

This chapter focuses on four main chronological periods: the era prior to the arrival of the Huns, when the Goths were settled beyond the Danube; a first major phase of Gothic intrusion into the Balkans from 376 to the definitive departure of Alaric's Goths for Italy (407–408); the Hunnic era down to the late 460s; and, finally, from the arrival of the Amal-led Goths in Macedonia (473) until the departure of Theoderic the Amal for Italy (488–489). In each of these periods, the rhythm of relations between the Goths and the institutions of the Roman Empire as well as the population of the Balkans varied substantially, although some common themes and threads of development emerge. In each of them, it is also important to make a conceptual distinction between the Romanness generated by and for the central Roman state, and the Romanness of the provincial Roman populations of the Balkans.

Arianism has been extensively studied as a fourth‐century phenomenon, usually seen as brought to an end by the Council of Constantinople in the East and the Council of Aquileia in the West (both 381 ce). The chapter is concerned with the ending of Arianism as a significant movement within the early church. This involves giving special attention to the Homoians, the Neo‐Arians and the Theodosian Code in the East, to the Opus Imperfectum in Matthaeum in the West, and to Ulfila and the Goths.

In AD 410 when Rome fell to the Goths, a crisis understanding was brought about that took on various questions that have been buried in antique thought. Pagan civilization and tradition proliferated in Rome, and the life-source of the Empire remained in the ancient religions. However, the rise of Christianity may have caused a significant effect towards its demise, at least until Alaric and the Arian Goths took over. As this chapter looks into some of the aspects of the fall of Rome, it attempts to examine how Augustine was able to initiate the City of God in 413. It shows that the plan and structure for this work is rooted on Christian tradition and it presents two groups of men, cities, or societies. It attempts to provide a thorough examination of the content of the various books of this work particularly in the context of the refutation of paganism, the source of his ideas, and other such aspects.

Arator's epic was recited by him in April 544 on the steps of a church in Rome: a minute of the ceremony of presenting his work to the Pope still exists. It is a triumphalist poem in what was a short-lived respite from Gothic attacks, and Arator himself had just a few years earlier fled to Rome from the Gothic-dominated city of Ravenna, where his career had begun. His theme is the Acts of the Apostles; from the New Testament account he selects episodes for poetic elaboration in his own mannered but recognisably epic style (Lucan, it emerges, is a particular favourite), and with an eye to speeches that he can reconfigure as powerful and vivid homilies. His colourful finale, in which Peter and Paul join forces in Rome, is particularly effective.

From the end of the third century, Rome ceased to be the emperors' principal residence. In the wake of intrigues in Constantinople in 400–402, the Goths who were settled in the Balkans and Illyria made a move towards Italy. This chapter shows that the expedition of the Vandals against Rome was a simple raid, and not the prelude to an invasion of Italy. Rome did not undergo destruction and massacres, but was weakened by the exodus of its wealth and its élite. The Roman Church had lost the liturgical furnishings of its tituli, which Pope Leo had to renew in their entirety. The Vandal sack, in this instance, had been a profitable act of piracy coupled with diplomatic victory. The chapter also explores the civil war and the devastation of the Gothic war.

This chapter provides a discussion on the revolt of Procopius. It then explores the way Valens and Valentinian provoked the revolt by their own harsh treatment of those who had supported Julian. Procopius wisely understood that if his revolt was to make any headway, it would need large amounts of capital, and from the outset, he acted on this knowledge. Moreover, it is shown that Valentinian was similarly manipulative in his attempts to graft his own house onto that of his predecessors. Furthermore, it reveals how Valentinian and Valens had already sowed the seeds for revolt by initially drawing the contrasts with their predecessors far too sharply and thus alienating some of the most powerful citizens of the eastern empire. It then describes how the revolt provided the proximate for Valens' war against the Goths, who had sent Procopius auxiliaries.

This chapter describes how Valens, in consultation with his brother, determined to launch a major expedition against the Goths to retaliate for this. In a three-year campaign, Valens succeeded in defeating the Goths but did little significant damage to their forces. It then devotes some time to examining further how the ideals of triumphal rulership affected Valens' choice to campaign against the Goths. Valens used a diplomatic infraction as an excuse for a foreign war designed to boost his position as emperor and to satisfy the policy demands of his aggressive brother. Moreover, some principles of late Roman foreign policy are presented. After Julian's death, when the Goths encountered the new and highly confrontational Valentinianic dynasty, Romano-Gothic relations continued to deteriorate.

This chapter puts into the spotlight the historical moment when Danish and Swedish emerged from East Norse, and the background to that emergence, starting with the runes, also accounting briefly for development after that historical moment. Coalescence of the Danish and Swedish provincial realms into larger kingdoms that eventually led to post-medieval nation-states eventually made their two East Norse variants into Danish and Swedish, separate national languages; the Roman Church brought strong Latin influence to bear on the languages of the North; and the Hanseatic League’s lingua franca, Low German, provided mercantile vocabulary on a large scale to both Danish and Swedish. Mainland West Norse, left to its own devices during the twelfth century, followed a very different path before its emergence as Modern Norwegian.

Chapter One examines the influence of Old Norse myth on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poetry in English. Interest in Old Norse material was first fuelled by antiquarians and historians in England and Scandinavia investigating the early history of their respective nations. Old Norse literature was regarded as an important source of such history. The Goths, as ancestors of the northern Europeans, were celebrated as bearers of political liberty, so interest focused on the god Odin as an historical chieftain and lawgiver. But he was also regarded by some as the inventor of runes and poetry, and allusions to him in this role, as well as the first versions of some Old Norse poems, begin to appear in the work of poets such as Dryden and Pope. Old Norse poetry itself begins to be seen as having literary merit, rather than being of merely antiquarian interest.

Despite many defenses of the traditional account, there is no secure evidence for a Scandinavian origin of the Goths, no runic evidence, and linguistic parallels between Gothic and Old Norse are inconclusive. In their continual encounters with the Romans, the Goths experienced considerable language contact. Not only are there many borrowings from Latin, but many Greek words in Gothic have their Latin form and there are layers of borrowings from Greek as well. The entire Gothic corpus contains a little over 70,000 words preserved in some fifteen documents. Many mysteries surround the Gothic translation of the Bible, traditionally ascribed to Wulfila. Evidence for multiple translators is presented from lexical, morphological, and syntactic localization, as well as the range from fully idiomatic to marginally acceptable to ungrammatical constructions.