By the waning days of the empire, most people in the countryside who weren’t outright slaves had become, effectively, debt peons to some rich landlord, a situation in the end legally formalized by imperial decrees binding peasants to the land.31 Without a free peasantry to form the basis for the army, the state was forced to rely more and more on arming and employing Germanic barbarians from across the imperial frontiers—with results that need hardly be recalled here.
Important note!
