Thomas S. Burns – författare

"Thorough and convincing . . . likely to become the standard work on the subject." —Library Journal"Highly readable." —Medieval Literature"A major work of synthesis." —Walter E. Kaegi "Burns has achieved much for the modern study of Ostrogoths." —Antiquaries Journal

"Excellent." —The Reader's Review"Thomas Burns takes us thoroughly through this moment of crisis, giving us a precise analysis of the principal players in this period of transition." —Military Illustrated"The book is well-written and throws new light on the events in the West a short while before the Fall of the Empire. Highly recommended!" —The Journal of Indo-European Studies"With this impressive study Burns has greatly enriched late antique scholarship." —Religious Studies Review"This is a substantial and well documented book which has reminded me that the importance of reading is not so much to absorb facts, but to take in new ideas." —Besprechungen und Anzeigen"What Burns has accomplished here is a thoroughly interesting and compelling study of late-medieval piety in one diocese. It may well serve as a model for other local historians willing to engage in this important inquiry." —SpeculumA major work on Roman policy toward the barbarians during one of the most exciting and challenging periods in the history of the Roman Empire, when barbarian soldiers became part of the forces defending the Roman frontier and gradually its rulers. By the close of these five decades, the Western Empire—hence Western Civilization—had changed forever.

The barbarians of antiquity, so long a fixture of the public imagination as the savages who sacked and destroyed Rome, emerge in this colorful, richly textured history as a much more complex-and far more interesting-factor in the expansion, and eventual unmaking, of the Roman Empire. Thomas S. Burns marshals an abundance of archeological and literary evidence, as well as three decades of study and experience, to bring forth an unusually far-sighted and wide-ranging account of the relations between Romans and non-Romans along the frontiers of western Europe from the last years of the Republic into late antiquity. Looking at a 500-year time span beginning with early encounters between barbarians and Romans around 100 B.C. and ending with the spread of barbarian settlement in the western Empire around A.D. 400, Burns removes the barbarians from their narrow niche as invaders and conquerors and places them in the broader context of neighbors, (sometimes bitter) friends, and settlers.His nuanced history subtly shows how Rome's relations with the barbarians-and vice versa-slowly but inexorably evolved from general ignorance, hostility, and suspicion toward tolerance, synergy, and integration. What he describes is, in fact, a drawn-out period of acculturation, characterized more by continuity than by change and conflict and leading to the creation of a new Romano-barbarian hybrid society and culture that anticipated the values and traditions of medieval civilization.