What follows is the first instalment of The So-Called Dark Ages, a serialized history of Late Antiquity, adapted from Herbert Bushman’s ongoing Dark Ages podcast.

In telling the story of the Early Middle Ages—once called The Dark Ages, a term that has now fallen from favor among most historians—I’ve decided to begin with the last hundred years or so of the Western Roman Empire, with a focus on the groups that the Romans described as barbarians.

And within that category, there’s really only one logical starting point, and that’s the Goths. They’re arguably the first domino that set off Europe’s transition into the post-Roman era.

They were, of course, not the only domino. And here is where I run into a structural problem that inevitably attends any narrative description of this historical period. It’s the same structural problem faced by anyone who wants to explain what happened to Rome in the fourth and fifth centuries: There are simply too many things happening. Too many battles, too many wars, too many peoples appearing, disappearing, and migrating across Europe with bewildering speed.

So my plan is this. I’m going to talk about the Goths for five instalments—where they came from, what they did, how they moved around inside the Roman Empire, and how they affected it. The plan is to take them up to around 476 C.E., which is the traditional date given for the fall of the West. Then once we’ve gotten through all of that, we’ll rewind and take a look at other groups, starting with the Huns, and do the same thing—then move on to the Vandals, and so on.