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After the withdrawal of Roman troops from Britain, for example, life was surprisingly peaceful, and RomeвЂ™s successors adapted many elements of Roman life and government such as titles, infrastructure, and documents. Moreover, modern scholarship tends to see those incursions less as a cause and more of a symptom of the fading out of this particular form of Roman state in the West. If anything, the integration of various groups from beyond the military borders kept the Roman army going at all. Attila led Huns but also other Goths, Franks, and Burgundians.

When the Roman general Aetius forced Attila to retreat, he led a force of Visigoths, Franks, and Burgundians. When it did come to invasions-like the Hunnic incursion in 451-things were far from clean-cut. High-ranking aristocrats wrestled power from each other, leading armies consisting of soldiers labeled either вЂњRomanвЂќ or вЂњbarbarian.вЂќ Modern research shows it was often difficult, if not outright impossible, to distinguish between the two. In fact, the upheavals of the 5th century, the most popular of the supposed falls of Rome, were mostly civil war. In the east, the Roman Empire continued up until 1453, over which time it adapted into a very different form of state, known to us as the Byzantine Empire, whose inhabitants kept calling themselves вЂњRomans.вЂќДЄt the same time, from the middle of the 7th century a different successor, the Islamic Caliphate, conquered large parts of Roman territory, named themselves as Roman emperors on their coins, and continued many if not the majority of the Roman EmpireвЂ™s features, including taxation, urban life, and bureaucracy.

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In the West, over the course of over a century, the Christian empire fragmented into a series of successor states that continued many elements of Roman bureaucracy and societal order. Europe will fall just like the Roman Empire did, right-wing writers argued.ДЄ historian would tell Johnson that, first of all, there was never a вЂњfallвЂќ of the Roman Empire. Most recently, during the civil war in Syria, this became a crucial pillar of the narrative that Syrian migrants were coming to destroy Western Civilization.

The narrative pushed by the political right for a very long time is actually rather simple: A time of transformation is seen as a series of calamities, caused by the weakening of the morals of a dying empire that was run to the ground by hordes of invading barbarians. By the beginning of the 5th century, Christian authors such as Jerome used the real and purported crises of their time for their own means. The notion that decadence-of whatever stripe suits the argument being made-and вЂњbarbarianвЂќ incursions caused the fall is so powerful it was a rhetorical trope even before the Roman Empire in the West disappeared. Historians have had to refute those narratives over and over again. Johnson is not the first to try and, sadly, definitely not the last. In political rhetoric, though, RomeвЂ™s fall is a simple affair.

The so-called fall of Rome was a complicated, multicausal affair. Historians assign different weight to societal or economic factors and argue over the degree of continuity or decline. Others, from the Ottomans to the Romanovs, would envision themselves as such in the future. There are many legitimate historical theories that try to explain how the Roman Empire transformed, over the course of a few centuries, into a group of successor polities ranging from the kingdom of the Franks to the Byzantine Empire that saw themselves as heirs of Rome. Johnson is reproducing a xenophobic and dangerous vision of history. In fact, this is a well-established far-right trope, rooted in a weaponized narrative of the вЂњfall of RomeвЂќ that has little to do with what historians know about it. Ostensibly, this was meant as a warning against the pitfalls of inaction in face of the climate crisis. The empire could no longer control its borders, people came in from the east, all over the place, and we went into a Dark Ages.вЂќ вЂњWhen the Roman Empire fell,вЂќ he said while traveling to the Italian capital last week, вЂњit was largely as a result of uncontrolled immigration. It was in Rome ahead of this yearвЂ™s G-20 summit that aspiring classicist Boris Johnson, BritainвЂ™s prime minister, decided to lay down another of his misguided visions of history.

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