ABSTRACT
The real explanation for the loss of Anatolia was, as Frankopan has pointed out more clearly than anyone else, the fact that it was handed over to them by the Roman elite. To minimize the role of the Huns runs the risk of making the fall of the Roman west too parochial and insufficiently global an event. Historians are usually warned against hindsight, but taking a long view of Roman history does seem to pay off. In the 1970s and 1980s a series of mostly French historians, writing mostly about what is France, made the case that the ancient world only came to an end in the eleventh century – the revolution of the year 1000. Although 1204 should certainly be understood as a product of the empire’s political system, it was nonetheless a single event rather than a process, which by contrast is how the falls of the fifth and the eleventh century were experienced and worked though.
