ABSTRACT
THE Barbarian invasions, after having brought disorder and terror to a climax for more than two hundred years, were to revolutionize history. The great migrations of peoples, which followed one another at the end of this period in all the provinces of the Empire and led to the sack of the towns and the devastation of the countryside, poured hundreds of thousands of men into Italy, Gaul, Spain, and the Balkans and almost completely wiped out the complex, refined, softening and corrupt civilization which the triumph of eastern influences had installed in the Roman world. This savage intrusion of a new element reduced the general level of civilization, the habits of life and the economic system to a stage which had been passed several centuries earlier, but at the time it prepared the way, by bringing about the fusion of the old Latinized or Hellenized populations with the Germanic influx, for a new stage of development.
