why did the roman empire fall when it had so much domination? they revolutionised so much

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why did the roman empire fall when it had so much domination? they revolutionised so much

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The “fall” was complex. Edward Gibbon wrote a six volume history “The decline and fall of the Roman Empire” where he gave a multiplicity of causes – a good quote was “The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and, instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long.” Gibbons placed a large emphasis on the fall being due to large scale immigration and assimilations of “barbarians” along with their associated culture that was less disciplined and militaristic. The discipline of the military was a vital contributor to Roman stability. As many others have pointed out, the Eastern Roman Empire remained for centuries after the Western Empire fell. But if we are referring to the Western Roman Empire there are a lot of factors that haven’t been mentioned. More recently, inflation has been given prominence as a factor. Most of the gold and silver for coinage was mined in Iberia and later Dacia. It got to the point where those mines were exhausted with the technology they had then and coinage started to suffer from dilution with less valuable metals. For instance, there was a huge demand for silk, that have come into the Empire from the silk road. The traders refused to take any coins that weren’t pure silver. Thus, the silver supplies were being exhausted from Rome and the government kept minting coins of lesser and lesser value leading to huge inflation. For instance, Augustus introduced the denarius as a currency (at the end of the 1st century BCE) and it was approximately 95% silver. Caracalla instituted the debasing of both gold and silver coins such that by the end of his reign the denarius was 50% silver. By about 300 AD there was only 0.5% silver and prices throughout the Empire had sky-rocketed because now the government could issue far more coinage than before. Of course inflation is intimately convolved with other government issues and so one can never say that any one thing led to the fall of a once-great empire.

[https://dailyhistory.org/What_Role_Did_Inflation_Play_in_the_Collapse_of_the_Roman_Empire](https://dailyhistory.org/What_Role_Did_Inflation_Play_in_the_Collapse_of_the_Roman_Empire)

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