Spellbreakers Ep. 0179: The Barbarian Invasions Saved Western Civilization?
Host Matt Trump (fighting a temperamental mic cord) turns his leftover map slides into a full episode on a provocative question: did the barbarians actually destroy Rome, or preserve it? Picking up from last week's Phantom Time detour, he leans on Belgian historian Henri Pirenne and the book Medieval Cities, bought decades ago as an Austin physics grad student, to argue a mainstream but revisionist case.
The thesis: the Germanic tribes (Goths, Angles, Saxons, Franks) did not want to burn Rome down. They wanted in, preserving Roman civilization under new rulers, feudalism, and above all the…
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