"The origins of European Kingship (c. AD 400-500): Towards a new model of military leadership in Late Antiquity."

Early medieval concepts of kingship are primarily seen as the result of processes of ethnic solidarity, or as the self-explanatory outcome of the institutional disintegration of the western Roman empire. My project will argue that the fifth-century emergence of new forms of kingship was the result of a crisis of leadership structures within the imperial Roman army.