What a strange, lurching time it had been, in the century-and-a-bit since the Huns had crossed the Volga in 370. Everything had been turned upside down: heaved into motion through the irresistible power of climatic fluctuation and human migration, allied to the usual random historical movers of chance, ambition, and individual agency. For those at the time, life could seem bewildering, and it is perhaps not surprising that writers of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries turned to a metaphor that would prove wildly popular throughout the medieval west: that of fortune’s wheel.
