Why did the Roman Empire fall?
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The Roman Empire fell for a combination of reasons. First, it became too big to manage easily, and defending its vast borders stretched the army thin. Second, political corruption and bad leadership weakened the government. Third, economic problems like heavy taxes and inflation made life hard for citizens. Lastly, invasions by various groups, like the Visigoths and Vandals, kept chipping away at the empire’s territory and power. All these issues combined over time, leading to its collapse.
There were a combination of lots of different things. A lot of the wealth of the Roman Empire was fueled by their expansion. They would bring either spoils of war or at least high taxes from the recently conquered into the core of the empire. But the empire grew too big to do any more conquering. An army could spend the better part of a year just marching from one side of the empire to the other. So they needed separate armies in each territory in order to manage and if possible expand. But then the armies and their commanders gained loyalty to the local territory and not to a city they have never seen. And in a lot of cases there were nowhere further they could expand to because they had conquered all the way to the ocean, another great empire, or wasteland. So there were a lot of fighting between different parts of Rome. The big armies that had been paid from basically war loot no longer had such income. The empire did manage to stay big for some time by hiring cheap mercenaries, mostly from Germany. However they learned Roman tactics and got Roman equipment so when they returned home they would start teaching others and used Roman fighting techniques and Roman equipment to raid Roman settlements. There were a ton of other reasons for why the Roman Empire became weaker, and it was actually quite impressive that it held out for hundreds of years.
want to add, inflation
it was customary for new emperor to buy loyalty of his soldier when he take the throne,
and when treasury is tight, they came up with the easiest solution, lowering silver content of the coins to mint more coins
A pair of back to back plagues that combined killed a larger percentage of the population than the black death was a big part of it.
Whuf…man, you could (and lots of very smart people have) write entire books about that question. Probably the shortest answer is that Rome – even once it was divided up into the Eastern and Western Empires – never did come up with a lasting, peaceful succession plan for the Imperium. It got to where power-grabs and military coups were the routine methods of creating new emperors. There were some very able and intelligent emperors in there who accomplished a lot, but their achievements never lasted beyond their lifetimes, or at best, their immediate successors’. That made the Empire(s) ability to weather tough times, whether it was barbarian invasions, plague, famine, etc, difficult and questionable.
The other way to look at it is that Rome didn’t really “fall.” It wasn’t like the end of the USSR in 1991 where things just suddenly collapsed in the space of a couple of years and the country ceased to exist literally overnight. It was a long, slow, dragged-out process lasting centuries. Everyday Romans at the time wouldn’t have thought things were “falling”. *Sure, maybe Caesar told the cities in Britain they’d have to look out for themselves from now on, and maybe a legion had a bad defeat up in Germany somewhere, and maybe there are more pirates in the Mediterranean than there used to be, but things have been bad before and we’ve always bounced back…* Even after the western Empire had effectively disappeared, the eastern Empire was still humming along, and it eventually reasserted sovereignty over much of the old Western territory under Justinian the Great in the mid-6th century. The people who lived there considered themselves Romans of the Roman Empire; the fact that it didn’t contain the city of Rome (by that point effectively abandoned) and they were Greek-speakers mostly living in what’s today Greece, the Balkans, and the Levant was neither here nor there to them.
What ended the Eastern Empire (“Byzantium” was a term not used until the empire was gone, created by a German historian in the 1600s) is a little more straightforward. A long series of bankrupting wars against Persia (today Iran), then several of the earliest and worst waves of the Bubonic Plague wiped out huge swaths of the population and severely weakened the Empire, then the Muslim armies began attacking out of the Arabian peninsula. It was effectively gone by the beginning of the 13th century and what was left was finally finished off with the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Still, a nearly-2000-year run for an Empire is not bad, historically speaking.
It depends on what you consider the fall of Rome.
It is conventionally remembered that Rome fell in the year 476, but that isn’t the whole story.
First, a bit of background:
Prior to the rise of the Roman Empire, Alexander the Great conquered the middle east and the eastern mediterranean. Alexander died and his empire fractured as his four generals fought over his territorial conquests. For centuries after Alexander’s conquest, the eastern mediterranean was ruled by Greeks, and became linguistically Greek speaking and heavily Greek influenced.
When the Romans eventually conquered the eastern Mediterranean, the lingua franca of the region was already Greek. Whereas the Romans considered other people groups they conquered to be barbarians, they never called the Greeks ‘barbarians’, because they respected the Greeks, and were heavily influenced by Greek culture, religion, philosophy, mathematics, and aesthetics. Even centuries after Rome conquered the eastern mediterranean, the eastern half of Rome spoke Greek. (This is why the books of the New Testament, which were written in the eastern mediterranean in the period when Rome ruled that region, are all written in Greek.) But the western half of Rome was culturally dominated by the Romans and used Latin as their lingua franca.
By the time of the emperor Diocletian (283-305), the empire was having trouble administering its two halves, so he divided the empire into two administrative halves: the Latin speaking west, and the Greek speaking east.
The Latin west gradually collapsed due to corruption and barbarian invasions in the face of Roman in-fighting and gradual loss of military power (which was expensive and difficult to maintain), and the city of Rome itself fell in the year 476. Several pandemic plagues ripping through that region didn’t help, and certainly contributed to its f all. But this doesn’t mean the Roman empire fell at that time. The eastern half, which spoke Greek, and which had Byzantium (re-named Constantinople in 330) as its capital, didn’t conclusively end until the Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453. But it did gradually lose bits and pieces of its territory.
The eastern Roman empire is referred to as the Byzantine empire to differentiate what era of Roman history is being referred to, but they themselves just identified as Romans, and as the Roman empire. But they were distinct in that
* they spoke Greek rather than Latin
* In the period which Historians refer to the as the Byzantine empire, they were religiously Christian
* their capital was Constantinople, not Rome.
Later on during the Byzantine era, when they had an empress, Irene, the royal court had a huge dispute with the Pope in Rome, and the Pope crowned Charlemagne (a germanic warlord) as the “Roman Emperor” with the justification that the title “Roman Emperor” wasn’t being used at the time (because they had an empress), which pissed off the Byzantines. This spawned the ironically named “Holy Roman Empire” in the 800’s, which is a whole different entity, which wasn’t holy, wasn’t Roman, and wasn’t an empire, but was a confederation of Germanic kings and princes.
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