Open Debate: What truly triggered the fall of the Roman Empire?

dubs
could we go back as far as the marian reforms? making armies loyal to their general or the imperator was a disaster waiting to happen

christianity communism capitalism degeneracy dirty bathtubs aliens civil wars barbarians germanics sex atheism fascism hedonism homosexuality heterosexuality pedophilia bestiality greed pride slaves liberalism conservatism warmongering welfare religion paganism orgies shorter swords

seems legit

Basically what's happening in Europe with Muslims

Barrack emperors.

Should have never voted for muslims.

Men.

Those failed land reforms by those two brothers during the republic were really important (think it was just after the 3rd punic war)

Rome had a land issue crisis waiting for it to eventually bite it on the arse, it was a war economy which got to big and people squabbled for what was inside it

I think the real killer was the great flocks from the Cities to the countryside, which was due to many reasons, I cant remember when that started to happen but it was very late on. Something i read ages said that Rome had a very early form of Feudalism in its last few decades

This is pretty much the basic answer to this question because it's vague as fuck and doesn't really answer it at all. Really there is not one thing that caused Rome to fall. But to answer OP's question, corruption is definitely not the answer because corruption is not something that tips the empire over. It's a slow, slow decaying.

Jesus and ovid's exile.

The Roman empire didn't fall, it just turned into a church.

choose your favorite.

truth is, anyone who understands how the Roman empire worked knows why it was intrinsically, endemically meant to fail in the long run.

Sulla, Augustus and Caracalla just fucked everything up.

oh please don't say that, that hurts my soul :(

byzantine empire should be called the roman empire, they still identified as it and for all intents and purposes were the roman empire

Wasn't there a large Roman force fighting against another Roman pretender/usurper in the last few years of the WRE that proved Germanic troops weren't as dominant numerically in the WRE armies as previously believed?

Mid-3rd century, capture of Valerian, loss of 60-70,000 elite veteran Roman soldiers would lead to a temporary schism where the Roman Empire turned into temporarily three distinct "imperiums". Also the general rise of the more aggressive Sassanid/Neo Persian Empire compared to the less active Arsacid/Parthian Empire didn't help.

Diocletian's division of the empires certainly didn't help much. I wonder why it was so successful under Diocletian but failed later? I guess heirdom is always a certain way to fail.

I agree totally with this. Everything seemed to boil into an issue. Even in the power structure, the Roman Republic to the Empire was so broken. The precedent of taking power by force was a cultural one that'd doom the empire. The more power given to the militaries and its leaders, the more pompous and arrogant the leaders got. So many times the empire almost collapsed under military anarchy.

Estates not paying taxes while trying to maintain a professional army/ pay for Germanic mercs put their economy in the shit. This combined with rebellion and barbarians doomed the West

>Shitty Economy
>Rise of the Sassanids
>White people from Germania
That's about it

Acceptance of mass immigration

Pol strikes again

A lot of reasons spanning hundreds of years. This is going to be a two parter.

Right from the get go the empire never had a clear succession law and even before the emperors, there was a precedence of armies being loyal to whoever was paying them, namely whichever general lead them and promised to pay them more, establishing a long history of an army divided amongst it's leadership with dubious loyalties to the state.

Fast forward and you have emperors popping up every couple of decades and civil wars are the new national past time. Even worse, because of the threat of civil war capable generals were executed or assassinated to prevent them from gaining too much power. Added with the common man now being too afraid to enlist because it was basically playing Russian roulette.

So you have corrupt politicians, paranoid emperors, incapable generals, and an army that has to recruit more and more non-citizens to function.

Now add to this that these civil wars completely fucked the economy because romans at the time had zero concept of inflation. Making this worse for the Western half, the split centralized far too much of the wealth around the Eastern half causing the Western Roman Empire to stagnate. And then you begin to have massive crop failures and an ever increasing disparity in the wealth gap creating a proto-feudalistic system. By the end of the Roman empire, the wealthy land owners held more actual power and loyalty than the emperor.

And this is all just internal, made even worse by the fact that most of the leadership of the roman empire at the time, didn't really understand the idea that it could actually collapse. They vastly overestimated their abilities to handle the crisis at hand and really only made it worse with posturing.

He's right you know
Really makes one think

>communism
>pacifism

So now let's look at the external threats.

As said, the Roman empire just began to fall apart and could no longer fight off the enemy at the gates. What's worse is that the emperors failed to see allies when they were useful and instead postured themselves into more enemies.

By the late empire Rome had huge contigents of non-citizens from various tribes fighting for them as now sane roman would throw the die and enlist. So these barbarians were trained and equipped to be roman soldiers, however were still treated as outsiders. This came to a head when the Senate in their wisdom decided to deal with the Goths living in Illyria by attempting to murder them all. This turned a potential friendly force in Alaric into a well trained and hostile army that was then massively pissed off. Made worse when Honorious decided to spurn Alaric's peace offers and lead to the gothic sack of Rome.

On top of all this you have massive amounts of germanic tribes being pushed west by the huns and a rome that's now utterly incapable of stopping them. First, Britain was ceded because it was indefensible. Then the Vandals tore through and the Suebians after. Plus others and all the while, Roman leadership is still playing politics and hamstringing themselves.

Ultimately, Rome fell long before Augustulus was sent to exile. It just took a long time to decay. It tore itself apart from the inside with constant strife leaving it in a weakened state while everybody else around it only got stronger, until by the time they came knocking there was simply nothing that could be done anymore.

Rome caused Rome's fall.

It worked under Diocletian because despite being split, the other Augustus and both Caesars were still loyal to Diocletian.

Once he removed himself from power, it was a free for all. Diocletian was simply the only person at the time who could make it work because he was the only person who genuinely had the best interest of the empire at heart.

When constantine made it the christian empire

There wasn't one thing, there were lots of factors. And a beard wouldn't be too common on a Roman btw.

Augustus basically solved that though by making the state distribute the land and/or gold to retiring soldiers instead of the generals.

It's a joke list. Some of it could have contributed, some of it couldn't have.
Pretty sure I saw a version with "Peak Timber" in the list.

disgusting picture

That was a very informative and depressing post... It's only natural that Rome would fall, but damn did they fall hard.

I wouldn't say Augustus screwed it up, I'd say he prolonged its lifespan by quite a while.

why dont you then senpai

Honestly what I find scarier is just how... quiet its fall really was.

As a historian painting a time period in hindsight and looking at it from above, its natural to paint it with such a dramatic lens.

In actuality by the time Rome officially died, it was barely anything more than a change in management sign above the door. And just like that one of the greatest civilizations in human history is gone.

>dramatic elipsis
How the hell is that scary?
( not who you we're talking to btw

By far the most important reason, and often somewhat underrated in these threads, is the Roman army destroying itself in the wars between emperors and "usurpers".

The empire was a ticking time bomb from the very beginning. If not for Augustus, and later Diocletian, it would have collapsed by the 3rd century.

And desu after the 3rd century, it wasn't even worth saving.

The Republic is where it's at.

>persia threatening rome ever

They never threatened Rome but they were a massive pain in the ass

Gay feminist barbarian Christians

Even when Rome was sacked, the concept of an imperium still floated around and drew in the barbarian settlers into the Roman scheme. It's only with Justinian that this came crashing down for good, and rather than one empire there were three, the Byzantines, the Franks, and the Saracens.

>What truly triggered the fall of the Roman Empire?
Islam

This.

...

>ctrl F "the jews"
>0 results

It was the Jews.
It's always the Jews.

How is he wrong? Caving to mass migration and letting them settle in their own communities fucked them, they couldn't exert authority over settled barbarian tribes within their own borders.

Lel.

Ricimer betraying Majorian

I'd say the WRE government dolling out increasingly large amounts of autonomy to localized regions of non-Romans throughout Gaul and Spain.

Letting them settle together, under their own leaders was not the issue. Such had been done in one form or another from the earliest days of the principate. The problem is often thought of as a failure/unwillingness to integrate these 'immigrants'. In fact, the entire reason they did not integrate was because the Roman state did not want them to - they were more useful if they maintained cohesive, distinct identities - often with a martial focus - because it made them more militarily useful.

The real death knell fell in 418 when the Goths were settled in Aquitaine and were granted the right to draw taxes themselves, in effect forming a state within a state. This created for the first time a permanent court that offered local magnates an alternative to the patronage of the imperial court, and saw for the first time not just the billeting of federate troops on Roman land, but the surrender of a chunk of an ever dwindling tax base when the state could least afford it. This also had the effect of giving these nominal Gothic federates reasons to pursue their own 'foreign policy' if you will, distinct from that of Rome's, because they now had a real stake in their settlement.

t. DPhil on the history of the Western Empire c.450-480.

Rome was based to a large degree on plundering outside regions. This is inherently unstable, because a shape's area grows at O(x^2) while the circumference grows at O(x). Sooner or later the constituent parts will be forced to turn on each other.

Underrated post
There's way too much focus on meme and arguments on this board instead of serious discussions.

This is exactly it. Plus as soon as a group that had been fighting the Roman authorities for years and had sacked Rome itself was granted land holdings on the Gironde the jig was up. Such actions could be easily emulated by any warlord with a cohesive enough following.

Damage inflicted upon west Roman provinces by protracted warfare with the invaders, combined with permanent losses of territory, generated massive losses of revenue for the central state, as we have seen. The Visigoths caused such damage to the areas around Rome between 408 and 410, for instance, that nearly a decade later these provinces were still contributing to state coffers only a seventh of their normal taxes. The Vandals, Alans and Suevi, likewise, cut a swathe of destruction through Gaul for five years after 406, before removing most of Spain from central imperial control for the best part of two decades. Worst of all, the Vandals and Alans then shifted their operations to North Africa, seizing the richest provinces of the Roman west in 439. Every temporary, as well as permanent, loss of territory brought a decline in imperial revenues, the lifeblood of the state, and reduced the western Empire’s capacity to maintain its armed forces.

Objectively broadest truest answer for everything history.

A plague that killed a third of the population. They never got over it and these problems that should've been tiny kept getting worse and worse until it was finally destroyed

The Jews did of course

Christianity was a jewish ploy to destroy the Roman Empire

>implying Rome fell
It phased out naturally and smoothly without anyone especially noticing.
Rome wasn't built in a day nor did it fall overnight

A lot of things, but probably the increasing tax burdens most of all. When you're driving your citizenry away from being landowners something is going very wrong.

>like 1/5th of Pannonia was totally desolate because the land taxes were so high

To be fair corrupt as fuck officials are what drove the Goths into revolt.

>get them to agree to disarm in exchange for settlement
>they trade their wives and daughters to be allowed to keep their weapons

shit that's accurate

You're dumb. The Roman East was the most profitable, inhabited, sedentary, and most importantly rich part of the Roman Empire. The Persians were a massive threat to that and the Romans consistently for the most part got the shit kicked out of them during the third century by the Sassanids. Like another user already pointed out, the power vacuum caused by the successive death of Gordian III, Valerian's capture, the loss of a MASSIVE Roman army of 60,000+ men, and the submission of his successor to Shapur caused the Roman Empire to split into three while a consecutive wave of pretenders and usurpers fought in civil wars over the spoils, weakening the empire from within.

The Persians weren't trying to conqueror or annihilate Rome, they simply wanted to expel the Romans from Asia, and came close to doing many times. The Sassanids and Germanic tribes were the biggest threats, and the Sassanids we know even tried to get the Germanics to fight Rome when it was convenient for them. There's a reason why just short of 8 centuries of conflict and war between the Romans/Byzantines and Parthians/Persians are a major factor on how the future of the Middle East, Asia, and Europe turned out.

He is right in the sense that there was never even the possibility of the Persians conquering the Roman Empire ever. At worst their invasions, even the final war with Heraclius, were little more than massive raiding parties intended to prop up the Shah's authority and prestige. They were Rome's biggest rival but even then never truly posed an existential threat to them.

He's wrong because he's claiming the Persians were attempting to conqueror the Romans in the first place. That was never their objective or their goal.

>even the final war with Heraclius
>was little more than raiding parties
Nice downplaying.

>They were Rome's biggest rival but even then never truly posed an existential threat to them.
This is completely and utterly out of sync with the reality that's known to us. I will repeat, the Persians goals were to remove Roman/Byzantine influence from Asia. They had no interest in following that up with an insane belief they would go to Europe to conquer or vanquish Rome or put them under their hegemony. You can even make a direct quantitative comparison where Rome managed to sack or capture Ctesiphon five or six times against the Arsacid dynasty/Parthian Empire yet only hit Ctesiphon (attested wise) only once against the Sassanids/Persian Empire.

Their goal, their objective was to reduce the Roman/Byzantine influence in the Near East, Levant, Mesopotamia, and Caucasus, and they routinely were successful in that endeavor. Ardashir and Shapur, the first two Sassanid monarchs and rulers, frequently and consistently defeated Roman forces for over 30 years without fail for the most part; even one of the more successful Roman Emperors like Alexander Severus, suffered a humiliating defeat on the outskirts of the Sassanid capital city.

Calling their wars with the Romans/Byzantines, especially Khosrau Parviz's aka the final Byzantine-Persian War "little more then massive raiding parties" is utterly nonsensical and downplaying the fact that the Byzantines were reduced to just Greece and Constantinople after 22 years of Persian dominating taking almost all of Anatolia, the Levant, and their North African holdings from them.

The Persians were very much a "existential" threat to the Eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire in every sense of the word.

Memes

Degeneracy. Greed and lust if you want the core reason.

You had a broad wall at one point. A great territory that was cemented into the ground both figuratively and literally. This was the Roman Empire.

What greed and general degeneracy does though, it creates selfishness. How this looks from a higher perspective is this:

Instead of that one wall that made Rome a discernible territory, you now had smaller pockets forming. Creating many small walls, like smaller cells, in the once massive cell.

These are the pockets of leaders and their greed, their degeneracy.

Leaders abandoned the broader picture to focus on their personal pictures. Gradually you saw the collapse. Internal fueds, fueds created by slavery, enemies outside of Rome, all this degenerate behavior. It created many focal points in a empire that relied on one massive focal points.

This is what always happens when people are sick of each other. They leave the whole to form smaller pockets with people who share their pain or frustration. And these people could be backwards in relation to the true definition of what's Good and Fair. Further causing more problems for their tiny territory.

It all catches up to people eventually, it may take 400 years, it may take a decade, it may take 600 years. Trending behavior will eventually produce a reaction.

Christianity saved a plethora of people though, prevented them from getting involved with the futile agendas of the various leaders who were doomed for destruction. All those leaders who actually thought Rome could be saved, all those leaders who tried to suck as many people into the futility of attempting to save the morbid beast that was Rome.

It's depressing because Rome simply stopped being Rome. Even the heart of the empire, the city itself had ceased to be a thriving, organized, sophisticated, impetuous and visionary group of people with their traditions, legacies and identity. It was deserted, dilapidated, sacked and filthy. The empire no longer had busy colonies and cities growing and stirring with art, science and trade, only isolated people surrounded by the barbaric wilderness, it was the real dark age.

Good.

Fag.

Are you sexually frustrated?

Lead pipes

This guy got lead poisoning. Rome? Done.

It's always easier for an army to become rich by sacking its own capital than the enemy capital.

The Roman republic checked this tendency by having their military be made of land owning citizens.

Unfortunately, as Rome gained more territory and fought more wars, the small-holding farmers in Rome were bought out and driven out of their land by an increasingly powerful oligarch class.

This meant less politically reliable soldiers.

After the Marian reforms, there was nothing to stop the soldiers from simply marching on Rome.

The first few emperors were able to stem the tide, but once the honeymoon wore off, the Roman empire was constantly racked by coups, civil wars, and assassinations. The only way for any ruler to stay alive was to give more and more money to the military, which meant increasing taxation on farmers.

Plagues decimated the population, which never recovered, because the tax burden of the Roman military, weighing on a smaller number of people, prevented the people from expanding into the uncultivated land.

Archaeology shows Roman towns growing smaller and smaller as time goes on, and those Roman farmers that survived did their best to avoid any representative of the Roman state.

The only way to pay for the stress surge induced by an actual barbarian invasion was to debase the currency, which had the effect of demonetizing the entire Roman economy after several bouts of hyperinflation.

Rome met these increasing burdens by extending citizenship further and further, recruiting barbarians into the legions, and delegating rule of Roman territories to barbarian chieftains who would later become the kings of these lands. Eventually, the entire Roman empire was run by barbarians and there was no point keeping an emperor around in Rome when the chieftains could run things themselves.

can you explain this one to me? i dont know much about anything.

Nero made an assassination attempt on his mother, it failed then he murdered her.

Classical Rome died during the crisis of the third century.

What was left was a shadow of its former self.

christianity was a mistake

Christianity, slave morality.

Then why did you try to steal all the cool christian things for your pesudo-pagan cult, Julian?

this desu

If you mean how the western roman empire fell it was a multitude of things that put weight on till it collapsed.
If you are asking how the eastern roman empire which was around after the west fell it collapsed due to having crusaders abd ottomans.

Apart from what the other user said, his successory laws were what doomed the system. The tetrarchy would've worked if Diocletian would have not gone so far with his idea of a divine imperial family that was over actual family ties of the emperors (and their descendants).

Diocletian came in when the empire was already totally doomed.

Christianity.

kek

>constantine made it the christian empire
Consantine made a edict of tolerance retard

It was Theodisius who made christianity the state religion of Rome.

It's a slippery slope man

Well technically, the vast majority of of people involved in the empire and its fall were male, so you're not totally wrong.

So the bitches who sat around doing nothing but pumping out babies can't take more blame per capita?

>bolshevization
KEK

>What truly triggered the fall of the Roman Empire?
I bet it was gay parades, refugees and Islam.