After my presentation on the history of the early Goths at the Society Virtual Conference in May, I received some questions on those aspects of the Adrianople campaign of AD 376-378 in which I reject the traditional interpretation of events by Roman historians such as Ammianus Marcellinus. Get Full text in PDF
Asiatic nomad armies created some of the greatest empires the world has ever seen. Michael Fredholm von Essen analyses the nomad strategy that eventually transformed them from tribal federations content with opportunistic raiding into empire builders. Get full text in PDF.
This is the first of two books which describe the Goths, their arms and armour, dress and equipment, army organisation, campaigns, battle tactics, and strategy. The focus of this first volume is the early Goths, before they became integral to the history of the Roman Empire. The emphasis lies on the Goths themselves, outside and […]
Most history was always written from the perspective of great empires such as Rome, Persia, and China. For them, and their historians, the nomads of the Eurasian steppes were little more than savage troublemakers. Nomads of different tribes and lineages were also hard to distinguish from one another. Few imperial commentators went farther than merely […]
This is the first in a series of articles on the Goths. Later articles will describe the military organisation and battle tactics of the Romano-Gothic successor states, their weapons and armour, as well as the history of their wars from the emergence of the Goths as a people to the fall of the Gothic kingdoms […]
PART 1: Armies of the North PART 2: The Struggle for Ireland, 1772-1457 BC What do we know about the wars of the Nordic Bronze Age? Archaeology provides some answers, and if taken with a fair amount of scepticism and acceptance of uncertainty, old chronicles bring additional small nuggets of what might possibly have happened. […]
The Yayoi period is sometimes regarded as the Japanese Bronze Age. This is not strictly true, as iron was in widespread use and Japan accordingly never had a true bronze age. However, the Yayoi period succeeded the stone-age Jomon period, and was itself followed by the iron-dominated Kofun period, during which a new potent force […]
