The Fall of the Roman Empire

Introduction

The Roman Empire is the post republican phase in the development of the ancient Roman civilization. It was an autocratic form of government comprising large territorial holdings in Europe and the Mediterranean (Heather, p. 52). The chronological framework of the Roman Empire, covering a period of time since the reign of the first emperor in August before the fall of the empire in the West, is 27 BC or 476 years (Everitt, p. 74). The East Roman Empire continued to exist, gradually transforming itself into Byzantium Empire. In this paper, I analyze the causes and events that led to the fall of the Roman Empire.

Discussion

Many hypotheses have been advanced to explain the decay of the Roman Empire and many dates have been proposed to indicate the exact order, from ' the beginning of its decline in the third century, to the fall of Constantinople in 1453(Duncan, p. 98). However, from a strictly political-military point of view, the ' Western Roman Empire finally fell in the fifth century after it was invaded by various non-Roman peoples and thus deprived of its nucleus peninsula at the hands of troops in the Germanic Odoacer riots of 476 (Pennel, p. 63). The exact dates this event remains uncertain, and some historians have divergent opinions even about the fact that this fall is the result of a single event or a long and gradual process (Kohne, p. 111).

Germanic Armies

What is certain is that the Empire had already appeared before the 476 compared to previous centuries in which the much less Romanised areas were vulnerable to changes. Germanic people were characterized by a footprint, especially in the army, which was the mainstay of the imperial power(Scullard, p. 75). Although the ' Roman West collapsed under the invasion of the Visigoths to 'early fifth century, the overthrow of the last emperor, Romulus Augustus , was not made ??by foreign troops, but rather Germanic Roman army. In this sense, if it had not Odoacer the title of emperor to declare instead Italiae Rex and "patrician" Emperor of the East, the empire might even be said to be conserved, at least in name if not in its identity, for some time changed profoundly: not only the Roman and increasingly influenced by Germanic peoples, already before 476 had cut large areas of the imperial power and domination in the territories now only formally subject to the emperor (Scheidel, p. 11).

In the fifth century, in fact, the people of Roman ancestry had already been "deprived of their ethos of the military" , as the Roman army was nothing but a mass of federated troops of Goths , Huns , Franks and other barbarous peoples who fought in the name of the glory of Rome (Pennel, p. 69). In addition to the Germanic invasions of the fifth century and the importance increasingly incisive barbaric element in the Roman army, historians also identified other aspects to explain the long crisis and the final fall of the Roman ...