>>17988790
Really? Other than for the new elites, the majority of the population lived worse than they did under the Romans. Taxes hardly changed, the majority of the population became legally inferior and no longer had access to a reliable court system. Wars became war more common and destructive to the local community, unlike Roman civil wars, Visigothic and Merovingian civil war was even more common and bloody, with participants deliberately targeting rural land to destroy to prevent their enemy from having them, which Roman civil wars avoided lest they lose support. They were ruled by an unsympathetic ruling class which did not give away wealth or patron public works both rural and urban unless they happened to be their favourite city. Unlike the Roman Empire, people did not receive tax breaks in case of poor conditions. The introduction of serfdom and bondage created a massive class of unfree men that did not exist beforehand. Any opportunity to actually rise in status that was not as a bishop ceased to exist.
A Roman living in the 6-7th centuries lived a worse, more unstable and violent life than a Roman in the 4th. The economic collapse that occurred in the 5th century would not start to reverse until the 11th and not until the 12th did large cities start becoming economically viable again.