why did the roman empire fall when it had so much domination? they revolutionised so much
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Imagine the Roman Empire as a big house. At one point, it was just a tiny shack that pretty much nobody paid attention to. But over time, the shack expanded and grew. It gobbled up more land from its neighbors and built more rooms. This happened again and again until it basically became a three-story mansion.
It was incredibly rich. Suddenly, lots of people in the neighborhood wanted to live in that house and some would be forced to.
At first, the big house had several really good owners. For the most part, they made sure the occupants were happy, wealthy and fed. But most importantly, they made sure to keep expanding the house. However, this couldn’t last forever and the house pretty much stopped expanding during the reign of one of its owners, Trajan. From here on out, a majority of the owners after Trajan would be in maintenance mode; their goal wasn’t to keep building up the house, but to make sure it looked pretty.
There’s only one problem: maintaining a big house requires lots of money and people. You need staff to cook the food, water the garden, clean the sheets, and it isn’t cheap either. To make matters worse, a big house sometimes attracts the attention of jealous neighbors and thieves/robbers. As time went on, the owners became worse and often fought each other for control of the house.
This, in turn, made it easier for the robbers to break in, which they started doing more and more often. Eventually, the house started falling apart. Nobody knew what to do, even though they had lots of fancy things. Fancy things can’t save you if you don’t have power or money. And when the money dried up, the workers started quitting.
As an aside, I want to add that the fall of Rome is somewhat of a misnomer. The western half was definitely carved up by barbarians, but the eastern half survived well into the 1400s – only a few decades before Columbus sailed to America!
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