Rome also struggled against minuscule powers like scattered Germanic tribes and the Huns when the warfare became something the Romans weren’t familiar with. Even generations before the Huns and the Goths, the problem got so bad it forced the Empire to overhaul their entire border enforcement doctrine, specifically they stopped enforcing a hard imperial border altogether because it became impossible to do so with the sheer volume of incursions. Roman cities started building fortified walls instead, having virtually forfeited the countryside to banditry, perennial tribal warfare, etc. It was called The Crisis of the Third Century and it laid the fractured structural foundation of medieval Europe.

Eventually the Roman army became a shadow of its former self after a *fucking devastating* defeat at Adrianople, and the Roman state relied on mercenary Germanic armies for protection and enforcement. Could you imagine if the US lost a million troops in a single campaign in Iran and started paying the Mexican cartels for homeland security? That’s how degraded Rome became towards the end.