The initial concept of The Roman Barbarian Wars grew out of my fondness for J.F.C. Fuller’s classic Decisive Battles of the Western World and out of my fascination with the Roman barbarian age. Fuller’s book retold western history from the viewpoint of its greatest battles. His expressive writing wove together the prominent events and personalities of history, whose influences and fates, respectively, cumulated in decisive, history changing, battles. Inspired by Fuller’s book and by his style of writing, I set upon the task of writing a book that treated Roman barbarian history in a similar fashion.
My fondness for the Roman barbarian age (and of reading and writing) heralds back to my teens. In those days, I spent many an entrancing hour delving into the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, Michael Moorcock and especially Robert E. Howard. I resolved to find out more about the real history and cultures on which the fantasy worlds of the aforementioned authors were based. As the years passed by I became more interested in the reading of history and less in fantasy and fiction.
Turning the concept into an actual book was immensely facilitated by my part time career as a magazine writer. Before I conceived of the idea of the Roman Barbarian Wars, I wrote a short article about pirates for the now defunct Command Magazine. Encouraged by its publication, I wrote a feature piece about the Gallic sack of Rome in 390 BC. It was published in Military Heritage magazine and became the basis for the second chapter of this book. I continued to write many more articles both for Sovereign Media, which published Military Heritage, and for the Primedia (now Weider) History Magazine group. To my good fortune, every article I wrote eventually saw publication. I wrote not just on the Roman barbarian age, but also about the Second World War, the Habsburg-Ottoman Wars, and on diverse subjects like the First Chinese Emperor or Brian Boru, the Irish Warrior King.
Many of my magazine articles, however, continued to concern the battles of the Roman barbarian age. These articles formed the chapters of my slowly evolving book which first saw publication by Trafford Publishing in 2011 before being released, as a revised edition, by Pen & Sword Books. Since most of the chapters in The Roman Barbarian Wars are thus based on magazine articles, for the most part, each can be read independently of the others. On the other hand, reading the chapters in proper sequence will allow for greater appreciation of the background of the different cultures and personalities involved. The histories of those cultures, of the tribal peoples of Europe – the Celts, the Iberians and the Germans – and of the Roman Empire, turned out to be every bit as fascinating as any of the fictional literature which first inspired me to read and write.
L.H. Dyck