The Fall of the West

CHAPTER 11 · 410–476 · The Rise and Fall of Rome, 264 BC – AD 476

One arrow on this map matters more than all the others: the barbarian arrow that goes by sea. In 429 Geiseric — lame, cunning, the ablest politician of the age — ferries the whole Vandal-Alan people, perhaps 80,000 with some 15–20,000 warriors, from Spain across the strait of Gibraltar and marches east along the African coast. On 19 October 439 he takes Carthage without a siege, and with it the one thing the Western empire cannot lose: its fiscal core. Understand the mechanism, because this — argued by Heather, Wickham and most current scholarship — is how the West actually dies. Africa was th

The turn: Carthage, 19 October 439.

This chapter is one scene of an interactive atlas: the map repaints as the dates advance, campaigns draw themselves, and every chapter argues its causes and consequences — then a field exam asks you to prove it on the map.