Decline of the Roman Empire

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Categories: Roman Empire | Western culture | Late Antiquity

For the book see The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. For the movie see The Fall of the Roman Empire

Decline of the Roman Empire is a historical term of periodization which describes the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. The term was first used and coined by Edward Gibbon in the 18th century in his famous book The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but he was not the first, and not the last, to speculate on why and when the Empire collapsed. It remains one of the greatest historical questions, and has a tradition rich in scholarly interest. In 1984, German Professor Alexander Demandt published a collection of 210 theories on why Rome fell.1

The traditional date of the Fall of the Roman Empire is September 4, 476 when Romulus Augustus, the Emperor of the Western Roman Empire was deposed. However, many historians question this date, and use other benchmarks to describe the "Fall". Why the Empire fell seems to be relevant to every new generation, and a seemingly endless supply of theories are discussed on why (or if at all) it happened.

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Mainstream theories

Influential theories and theorists include:

  • Edward Gibbon placed the blame on a loss of civic virtue among the Roman citizens. They gradually outsourced their duties to defend the Empire to barbarian mercenaries who eventually turned on them. Gibbon considered that Christianity had contributed to this, making the populace less interested in the worldly here and now and more willing to wait for the rewards of heaven.
  • Henri Pirenne published the "Pirenne Thesis" in the 1920s which remains influential to this day. It holds that the Empire continued, in some form, up until the time of the Arab conquests in the 7th century, which disrupted Mediterranean trade routes, leading to a decline in the European economy.
  • Historians of Late Antiquity, a field pioneered by Peter Brown, have turned away from the idea that the Roman Empire "fell". They see a "transformation" occurring over centuries, with the roots of Medieval culture contained in Roman culture and focus on the continuities between the classical and medieval world. Thus it was a gradual process with no clear break.
  • Historians such as Arnold J. Toynbee and James Burke argue that the Roman Empire itself was a rotten system from its inception, and that the entire Imperial era was one of steady decay of its institutions. The Romans had no budgetary system. The Empire relied on booty from conquered territories (this source of revenue ending, of course, with the end of Roman territorial expansion) or on a pattern of tax collection that drove small-scale farmers into destitution (and onto a dole that required even more exactions upon those who could not escape taxation), or into dependency upon a landed élite exempt from taxation. Meanwhile the costs of military defense and the pomp of Emperors continued. Financial needs continued to increase, but the means of meeting them steadily eroded.
  • The historian Vegetius theorised and has recently been supported by the historian Arther Ferrill that the Roman Empire declined and as a result fell, due to a combination of increasing contact with barbarians and the subsequent 'barbarization', as well as a surge in decadence and the following lethargy. Hence, resulting in complacency and ill-discipline among the legions, making it primarily a military issue.
  • The scientist Peter Turchin in War and Peace and War : The Life Cycles of Imperial Nations 2005 (ISBN 0131499963) contends that great empires, including Rome, fell because of inequalities within society; that as the rich became richer and the poor poorer, internal cooperation between groups declines. He writes that cooperation among groups allow for great societies to form in the first place and therefore when inequalities naturally emerge from success, the seeds of its destruction are in place.
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Historiography

Historiographically, the primary issue historians have looked at when analyzing any theory is the continued existence of the Eastern Empire (Byzantine Empire), which lasted for about a thousand years after the fall of the West. For example, Gibbon implicates Christianity in the fall of the Western Empire, yet the eastern half of the Empire, which was even more Christian than the west in geographic extent, fervor, penetration and sheer numbers continued on for a thousand years afterwards (although Gibbon did not consider the Eastern Empire to be much of a success). As another example environmental or weather changes impacted the east as much as the west, yet the east did not "fall".

Theories will sometimes reflect the eras in which they are developed. Gibbon's criticism of Christianity reflects the values of the Enlightenment; his ideas on the decline in martial vigor could have been interpreted by some as a warning to the growing British Empire. In the 19th century socialist and anti-socialist theorists tended to blame decadence and other political problems. More recently, environmental concerns have become popular, with deforestation and soil erosion proposed as major factors, and epidemics such as malaria also cited. Ramsey McMullen in the 1980s suggested it was due to corruption. Ideas about transformation with no distinct fall owe much to postmodern thought, which rejects periodization concepts (see metanarrative). What is not new are attempts to diagnose Rome's particular problems, with Juvenal in the early 2nd century, at the height of Roman power, criticizing the peoples' obsession with "bread and circuses" and rulers seeking only to gratify these obsessions.

One of the primary reasons for the sheer number of theories is the notable lack of surviving evidence from the 4th and 5th centuries. For example there are so few records of an economic nature it is impossible to to arrive at even a generalization of how the economies operated. Thus, historians must quickly depart from available evidence and comment based on how things ought to have worked, or based on evidence from previous and later periods, or simply based on inductive reasoning. As in any field where available evidence is sparse, the historians ability to imagine the 4th and 5th centuries will play as an important part in shaping our understanding as the available evidence, and thus be open for endless interpretation.

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Notes

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References

es:Caída del Imperio Romano he:שקיעת האימפריה הרומית pt:Queda do Império Romano