Terry Jones - Terry Jones Barbarians

It took some nerve to write this book and the TV series associated with it. It embraces over 700 years of history on three continents, and involves us striding into the territory of many dedicated and highly impressive scholars.

But it's been a bit of an obsession. We first proposed a TV series on this subject to the BBC in 1997 and have been coming back pretty much every year. And for some reason it's a subject that stirs the passions. What other TV project would have four grown men shouting angrily in an office over the significance of a gerundive in a line of Tacitus?

Terry Jones' Barbarians is about all those peoples whom the Romans wrote off as uncivilized, but it's also a chance to take a look at the Romans themselves from an alternative point of view from the point of view of the people they trashed. And as such it fits into a thesis we've been banging on about in Terry Jones' Medieval Lives and in Terry's radio series The Anti-Renaissance Show. That thesis is that we've all been sold a false history of Rome that has twisted our entire understanding of our own history glorifying (and glossing over) a long era of ruthless imperial power, celebrating it for the benefit of Renaissance tyrants and more modern empires, and wildly distorting our view of the so-called 'Middle Ages' and of the peoples whom Rome crushed and who were then blamed for its fall. Oh yes, and it includes a few measured comments on the Church while we're at it.

We are certainly not experts in the field, and we are indebted to the many real scholars and historians who have allowed us to pick their brains and stomp all over their patch in our inevitably heavy boots. Many thanks to all of them for being so tolerant and generous with their advice. We should particularly like to thank Dr Walter Pohl for his helpful comments, Dr Peter Heather for taking the time to explore answers to our occasionally obsessive questions, Dr Hartmut Ziche and, above all, Professor Barry Cunliffe, whose kindness in carefully steering us away from some real mistakes, and whose unfailing and discreet enthusiasm for the project, have been of enormous help. To all these people: our apologies.

We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the TV production team, especially Nick Kent of OFTV, who managed to get the BBC and the History Channel to sign up to the project and watched over it with a fatherly eye; to David McNab, the series editor; to the producer/directors Rob Coldstream and David Wilson (who had to master a vast amount of material and wrestle with us in the heat of pseudo-academic passion); and to the production assistants and researchers Clare Lynch, Susannah Davis and Sarah Veevers.

If you treat this book as a Lego construction, take it apart and reassemble it in chronological order, you will find a story that goes from the first stirrings of Rome around the fifth century BC through to the last Roman emperor nearly 1000 years later. But there will be odd-shaped gaps, and a number of left-over pieces scattered around the floor. This isn't a history of Rome, and the narrative here is a different one from the others that have been written.

There are, of course, hundreds of books in English covering the period, but no general look at it from a non-Roman perspective. The 'barbarians' of the early period, through to the first century AD, have been written about in books specifically on individual societies mostly Celts and Germans. For the later period, the general reader has had to browse among a series of huge narratives written in the shadow of Gibbon's great Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The people whom the Romans called Barbarians are either on the periphery of the main story, or come into it as invaders.

But we're looking at the world they created and inhabited, and it's Rome that is the intruder, or, later, their sometime host, sometime prey. Our interest in Rome lies less in what these people did to the Empire than in what the Empire did to them. And since 'they' are actually the people who created the world we live in, this becomes quite literally a question of 'What did the Romans ever do for us?' The answer, as you will have already figured, is not usually very nice.

So what we have constructed here is not a chronological journey through the Empire's history. We have, instead, chosen to survey the non-Roman world in four sections.

In Part One the world of the Atlantic Celts is traced from its fullest flowering in the first century BC through to its final destruction by Roman armies 200 years later. We then look at the failure of the Roman state in Celtic territory during the third century, and the steady breakdown that led to the re-emergence of a separate Atlantic world in the old Celtic lands.

Part Two is about German territory (in which we include Dacia) and the Germans. So we look at the way in which the Germans resisted Roman occupation in the first century AD, the great civilization of Dacia, which Rome extinguished in the second century, and then the Goths and their attempts to integrate themselves into the Empire in the fourth and early fifth centuries.