There was in the later Roman world a veritable 'explosion' of documentation and pictorial representation of rural life that paved the way to the medieval world by illustrating the ruralization of the lives of even urban inhabitants. The first thing, which must be studied in any discussion of the countryside in late antiquity, is whether production on the land had declined. There are some reasons why it might have done so: war damage, particularly in frontier regions; loss of land to barbarian settlements; over-taxation in certain parts; shortage of manpower; bad management, particularly as a result of absentee landlords or imperial ownership. But it is necessary to look at the positive evidence also: whether there was better management and technological improvement; and whether new land was being brought into production and new labour resources made available. Assessment of the productivity of the land must include some discussion about the forces of production and the ownership of land.

The majority of the Tervingi decided to abandon dieir homelands, and under the leadership of Alavivus and Fritigern petitioned to cross die Danube and enter the Roman empire. With this crossing, and die officially approved settlement of die Tervingian Goths in the Balkans in 376, the narrative of the barbarian invasions and settlements can be said to have begun. This period of invasion can usefully be distinguished within die larger history of barbarian migration and assimilation into the Roman world. An edict appended to the Liber Constitutionum reveals a subsequent set of allocations, probably made in the 520s, in which land was divided equally between Romans and barbarians. Early information on the first settlements, therefore, is very slight. Since the empire of Valentinian III was shored up by die barbarians, it was possible to drink that little had changed since the days of Theodosius I.

The legacy of Theodosius I to the Roman world contained three elements of capital importance. First, his insistence that the Nicene version of Christian orthodoxy prevail routed Arianism from its strongholds in the Balkans and in Constantinople itself and laid down the lines of development for Roman Christianity, both east and west. Second, his settling as autonomous federates the barbarian peoples who had crossed into the Roman empire both before and after Adrianople, his gready increased use of federate troops in the Roman armies, and his cultivation of the chieftains of the barbarians, especially the Visigoths. Finally, Theodosius' determination that his dynasty should rule the whole Roman world led to a costly civil war against Eugenius and, at his own death shordy thereafter, the division of the empire between his two young and incapable sons, controlled by ministers whose rivalries split the resources of the state at a time when they needed to be united.