Why did the Roman Empire fall?
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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.
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