The End of the World

Part 2; Part 3; Part 4.

I happened to stumble across these videos which are apparently the final part of Terry Jone's Barbarians series. I must say that I am very pleased to see Jones again, having thoroughly loved his work on Monty Python, and was surprised to see that he has become something of a popular historian on British TV as he has done more than just this series here. I now have a few more videos saved to watch later with Jones.

As for this particular series, while the videos in this post are from the final part they can stand alone from what I can tell and are still quite enjoyable. Jones does a good job in speaking to his audience and telling a version of the history of the Huns and Vandals that may be unfamiliar to many. While I didn't find his revisionist history about Attila to be all that convincing, he did make some very good points about Genseric and the Vandals. Their sack of Rome in 455 while not bloodless doesn't appear to have been as horrible as popular history claims, they just did a better job of extracting the city's valuables than did others. Genseric also had an interesting claim causus belli in that the treaty he had signed with Emperor Valentinian III which betrothed their children was nullified when he was overthrown and murdered. Eudocia, daughter of the murdered Valentinian III and betrothed to Genseric's son, appealed to the Vandals for rescue from the usurper. This puts the 455 sack into different perspective once these facts are known in my view. Anyways, this part was enjoyable and I recommend watching them. I'm going to slowly watch the other parts and complete the series as soon as I can. Enjoy!