For all the tribulations and transformations experienced by the Roman empire in the third and fourth centuries, the territorial configuration of its western half in 400 was not significantly different from that of 200 years before. Just a lifetime later imperial power was extinct in the west, which lay parcelled out among an assortment of kings and other warlords, predominantly Germans. Ex uno plura. The political map was to be redrawn time and again in the years ahead as new barbarian powers asserted themselves, as the empire strove to re-impose its control, as Islam expanded its dominion. Not one of the Germanic kingdoms of 750 had arisen at the direct expense of the fifth-century empire: the Anglo-Saxons had descended in force upon an already abandoned Britain; the origins of the huge regnum Francorum lay with Clovis (c. 481–511); the Lombards had entered Italy only in 568. But, as all this demonstrates, the west had continued to know political fragmentation. Indeed, it has known it ever since. If the unitary ideal, among the most potent of Rome's legion legacies, has never been far from the forefront of the western European consciousness, it is the political plurality bequeathed by the fifth-century collapse which in practice has always prevailed.

To multiplicity of polities corresponded diversity of ethos and inner form. That Germanism, Romanitas and Christianity worked as shaping influences upon all the barbarian kingdoms may be granted. But the generalisation conceals a host of variables. The Germans were no undifferentiated mass, and the nature of their contribution varied from kingdom to kingdom.