why did the roman empire fall when it had so much domination? they revolutionised so much
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The splitting of the western and eastern Roman Empire was the beginning of the end; the Eastern Empire contained Egypt, which the entire region relied upon for grain. Giving up your food supply = bad idea.
Multiple reasons but they can all be summarized as crazy amounts of corruption, rome arrived were allot of modern societies are reaching now: housing was monopolized, inflation was out of control, allot of bullshit jobs and nepotism, etc. unfortunately for them there was ALLOT of barbarians outside the gates while this was all going on. You’d see the same dissolving of allot of current places if not for our extended period of peace.
It didn’t fall, it just sorta floated downward.
Imagine that you have the best lemonade in town and decide to throw a party with a couple of friends. You are there, drinking your lemonade and then people start noticing you. They want to join the party and drink your lemonade, so you ask them to bring something to the party, like candies or games. This makes the party even better and more people want to join, so you tell them to bring something and you’ll give them the lemonade. Only, there’s a lot of kids and only so much lemonade, so you start watering it down. It’s a little bit, at first, and barely noticeable, so people keep coming and coming and you have to keep watering it down. At some point, it’s not lemonade anymore, just water with a scent of lemon. You look around and the party is still going, but nobody comes to your lemonade stand anymore.
The “barbarians” didn’t want to invade or destroy Rome. They wanted to live inside the safety of its borders and enjoy the comforts it offered to its citizens. Only, due to a lot of factor (mainly its size and corruption) there was less and less that Rome could offer. At some point, there wasn’t *anything* to offer to the barbarians, but they were still expected to work and fight for Rome.
Barbarians had been deposing and electing emperors for centuries, only, at some point, they just deposed one and decided they didn’t care enough to nominate a new one.
The splitting of the western and eastern Roman Empire was the beginning of the end; the Eastern Empire contained Egypt, which the entire region relied upon for grain. Giving up your food supply = bad idea.
In the late 3rd century AD, the Empire split in two. It was an almost entirely administrative decision. The Empire was simply too big for one Emperor. After the sack of Rome and abdication of the last western Emperor, the west basically folded. The Eastern Empire remained strong and became known as the Byzantine Empire, which lasted until the 15th century, when it was conquered by the Ottomans.
In the late 3rd century AD, the Empire split in two. It was an almost entirely administrative decision. The Empire was simply too big for one Emperor. After the sack of Rome and abdication of the last western Emperor, the west basically folded. The Eastern Empire remained strong and became known as the Byzantine Empire, which lasted until the 15th century, when it was conquered by the Ottomans.
The splitting of the western and eastern Roman Empire was the beginning of the end; the Eastern Empire contained Egypt, which the entire region relied upon for grain. Giving up your food supply = bad idea.
Multiple reasons but they can all be summarized as crazy amounts of corruption, rome arrived were allot of modern societies are reaching now: housing was monopolized, inflation was out of control, allot of bullshit jobs and nepotism, etc. unfortunately for them there was ALLOT of barbarians outside the gates while this was all going on. You’d see the same dissolving of allot of current places if not for our extended period of peace.
In the late 3rd century AD, the Empire split in two. It was an almost entirely administrative decision. The Empire was simply too big for one Emperor. After the sack of Rome and abdication of the last western Emperor, the west basically folded. The Eastern Empire remained strong and became known as the Byzantine Empire, which lasted until the 15th century, when it was conquered by the Ottomans.
The Roman empire was REALLY big. Like imagine England to the west part of North Africa to further east than egypt, all of france, all of italy and spain, the balkans, turkey to saudi arabia.
Now imagine you need to protect that vast territory against invaders. The most advanced form of communication was basically sending a letter by horse or by boat. It could take years to actually get an army recruited and send them off to beat invaders. This became such a big problem that they just divided the empire in half so they could react to threats a bit faster
Such a vastly huge territory was also at risk of revolts since most of the territory was basically groups they conquered and would rise up if they saw weaknesses.
In addition to that, the whole army was ludicrously expensive to train and maintain. The amount of money spent on the Roman military was larger than many empires had in total.
Take all these factors and throw in the fact that Roman leadership was highly unstable, with many emperors being killed and replaced in short periods of time, and its not hard to see how they transformed from all-conquering to a bloated empire with fragile control over most of its territory and the inability to fund and defend the extents of its borders.
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