Shilla gold crown in the 400s

In the fifth century, Rome, Britain, and the Korean Peninsula experienced profound political changes. Great conflicts reshaped the centers of power in each region.

In Rome, the Western Roman Empire collapsed in 476. Germanic peoples had been moving into Roman territory for generations, establishing kingdoms within the weakening empire. Eventually, Rome could no longer maintain the political and military system that had protected its vast territories for centuries. In 476, the Germanic leader Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus, traditionally regarded as the last Western Roman emperor. Western Europe then entered a long period of political fragmentation. Rome itself remained an important city and later became the center of papal power, but it would never again be the capital of a vast empire. The fifth century marked the beginning of this long transformation.

Britain experienced an equally dramatic change. For centuries, much of Britain had belonged to the Roman Empire, and its native Britons, a Celtic people, had become deeply influenced by Roman civilization. After Roman forces withdrew in the early fifth century, however, Angles, Saxons, and Jutes began migrating to and expanding across Britain from the North Sea region.

It was in this turbulent world that the legend of King Arthur was born. If a historical figure lay behind Arthur, he may have been a Brittonic military leader who resisted Anglo-Saxon expansion around the late fifth or early sixth century. The 2004 movie King Arthur takes this possibility further by depicting Arthur as a Roman military officer. In reality, the Britons gradually lost control of much of what became England and remained strongest in Wales, Cornwall, and other western regions. Nearly a thousand years later, the Welsh-born Henry Tudor seized the English throne in 1485 and deliberately drew upon the legend of Arthur to strengthen the legitimacy of the new Tudor dynasty.

On the Korean Peninsula, another struggle for strategic territory was unfolding. The Han River basin, including the area around present-day Seoul, was one of the most important regions on the peninsula. The Han River system, fed principally by the North and South Han Rivers, carried enormous volumes of water across a wide area. In an age when moving heavy goods over land was difficult, these rivers functioned as major transportation arteries.

Silla did not yet dominate the Korean Peninsula in the fifth century. It was still competing with Goguryeo, Baekje, and the Gaya states. But during this period it accumulated the political organization, wealth, military power, and technological capabilities that would support its dramatic expansion in the following century. In the sixth century, Silla conquered the Gaya states and seized the Han River basin. In the seventh century, after much further warfare and with Tang assistance, Silla defeated Baekje and Goguryeo and eventually controlled most of the Korean Peninsula south of the Taedong River.

The fifth century therefore appears as an age of both glory and instability. Arthur's legendary Excalibur and Silla's surviving golden crowns symbolize the power and prestige associated with warriors and rulers of the age. Yet the ruins of the Western Roman world and the weathered Goguryeo monument at Chungju remind us of something very different: even the greatest political power is temporary.

The fifth century created warriors, kingdoms, and magnificent objects, but it also demonstrated how quickly one political order could disappear and another take its place.