# Why did the Roman Empire Fall?



## Inderjit S (May 9, 2005)

A nice little topic for all the history students who grace the forum. Why did the Roman empire fall? I'm not looking for one specific reason, I realise that there are many reasons for the fall of the Roman empire-so list and discuss them.


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## scotsboyuk (May 9, 2005)

Inderjit S said:


> A nice little topic for all the history students who grace the forum. Why did the Roman empire fall? I'm not looking for one specific reason, I realise that there are many reasons for the fall of the Roman empire-so list and discuss them.



What a question!

I presume that you mean the Western Empire as opposed to the Byzantine?

The Western Roman Empire didn't so much 'fall' as slowly crumble and degenerate over a long period. The Empire was weakened by barbarian invasions in the 3rd century A.D., which, some argue, it never fully recovered from.

By the 5th century A.D. the Empire no longer had the same nationalistic feel to it as it did under Augustus or the early Emperors. Barbarian tribes, forced out of their homelands by the Huns moving westwards, came to settle in the Empire. These barbarians often integrated with Roman society and adopted Roman values and customs and worked within Roman law. Evidence of this can be seen in Visigothic land purchases, for example. That the Visigoths didn't just take the land, but rathe rbought it, indicates a pattern of assimilation into the Empire. The barbarians settled in various areas of the empire, which came to have an autonomous flavour to them despite the barbarians integrating, to some extent, with Roman society.

The Western Roman army had become over-stretched as is indicated by the Roman's dependence upon an increasing number of barbarian troops to defend the empire. There is perhaps no better example of this than during the famous Hun invasions of the Empire. The Huns were famously defeated at Chalons in 451 A.F. by a combined Romao-Visigothic army under the command of a Roman general with barbarian roots.

The army's growing dependece upon barbarian troops is perhaps symptomatic of the nature of the decline in the Western Empire. The Roman army had at one time only been open to Roman citizens before then allowing non-Romans to enter its ranks. Even this latter state of affairs still placed an emphasis upon being Roman and the non-Roman soldiers were granted citizenship at the end of their army career.

Christianity also had its part to play in the decline of the Western Empire. Christian values of mercy and forgiveness were somewhat contrary to the traditional Roman virtues of glorious wars and vengeance. Of course one shouldn't take a Gibbonian view and blame Christianity for all the Empire's troubles, but there is a strong case to be made for widespread social upheaval catalysed by Christianity's rapid spread.

We should of course remember that the famous date of 476 A.D. is one, which we can call 'the end of the Western Roman Empire' only with hindsight. To contemporaries it would not necessarily have signalled an end to the Roman way of life. Indeed one should remember that Roman values and customes continued on for some time after 476 A.D. (they still exist today in various forms).

The real decline of Rome came when people simply did not care any more. When people started to look to their own locality for authority and leadership instead of Rome the Roman Empire in the West was truely dead. A good example would be Gaul under the Franks. The Merovingians relied upon the Gallo-Roman elite to continue and maintain the institutions that had worked under the Romans. As the Gallo-Roman elite looked more to the Merovingians they came to integrate with Frankish culture and slowly the Roman institutions began to fall apart. As the Franks came to dominate Gaul the old ways gradually came to mean less and less and there were fewer and fewer people who could keep the baths working or the roads in repair.

Roman values had dominated Europe for centuries and they had provided certainty and a fixed reference point for all those within the Empire. As outsiders came to dwell inside the Empire and brought their own values it caused a break down in that system. The Western Empire didn;t fall to a particular sword, but rather a change in values and cultural conditions. The Empire came to be fragmented and this allowed the centralised Roman authority to break down with order only being maintained through cooperation with peoples the Romans called 'barbarians'. This in itself eroded the idea of what it meant to to be 'Roman'.


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