Why did the Roman Empire fall?
In: Other
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.
Latest Answers