The late Roman army was the last wall between an exhausted Empire and the chaos gnawing at it from every frontier. Gone were the days of identical legionaries in segmented armour marching like a living machine. In their place stood a far more fragmented, but no less determined, force: a patchwork of professional soldiers, provincial levies, allied barbarian contingents (foederati), mailed cavalry and grim frontier garrisons hardened by decades of raids and emergency campaigns.

These troops were drawn from every edge of the Roman world—Hispania, Gaul, Africa, the Balkans, Syria, Egypt—speaking different languages, worshipping under different rites, yet all marching under the same battered standards. Some served in the mobile field armies (comitatenses), constantly on the move, rushing wherever the latest crisis flared: a Gothic incursion along the Danube, a Persian advance on the eastern frontier, or yet another usurper claiming the purple. Others belonged to the limitanei, tied to lonely forts, watchtowers and river crossings, living face to face with the wilderness Rome could never fully tame.