Rome fell due to overspending

>rome fell due to overspending

What did the government spend their money on? luxury bread?

kys

80% of the state's revenue went towards their useless soldiers.

The Late Roman Army was ridiculously huge, they had over half a million soldiers.

This. The money went to bribing soldiers not to rebel and put their general on the throne.

overspending was just one of a myriad of reasons for the fall of West Rome. Other factors including corruption/bribes, an inefficient legal code that suffered from centuries of rewrites and changes due to said corruption, a breakdown in military discipline where soldiers were more loyal to gold than the state, and literally throwing money at all their problems to make them go away, only for those the empire bribed away to come back once the gold ran out.

buying off barbarians, who then attacked anyway

Did rome even fall?

I thought it became the byzantine empire?

The army, mostly.

How the shit could guys with swords be so expensive?

You're living in an economy where the majority of people are working at barely subsistence agriculture. Supporting ANY kind of professional standing force is ridiculously expensive for the sort of economy that is creating it. Having half a million men who live on the borders of civilization, far away from farms and towns, who need a constant source of food, tools, clothing, etc; necessitating even more people to constantly transport said supplies to those people, all over the course of Europe, is expensive.

they could have managed if there wasn't a goddamn civil war every 5 minutes

Was it the same huge army that had been unable to expel 20k Goths for decades?

Because
A) There was a lot of them
B) they had the annoying habit of mutinying unless they got paid well, as well as getting a nice big bonus every time a new emperor ascended.

They literally had to pass a law setting the maximum price of food that can be sold to the military, because people would spread the word and towns on the army's path would jack up prices.

The cycle goes like this

>republic falls
>Romans have hated kings since time immemorial, so nobody can establish a monarchy
>without a republic or a monarchy, the only thing keeping the Roman Army from marching on Rome is delicious denarii
>as a result of this, the Roman empire needs to pay heavy amounts of money to pay the army not to sack the capital
>plagues happen
>it is impossible to lower taxes to account for the lowered tax base
>because the taxes now fall on a smaller group of people, individual tax rates become so high that the farmers are now the first to die in a famine
>because of high taxes, population never grows to recover from the plagues
>overtaxation, civil war, and depopulation continue to feed on one another until the trade networks are destroyed, the Roman currency is worthless, and the average Roman does everything in their power to avoid any representative of the Roman state
>the barbarian invasions actually reduce the rates of malnutrition in some areas by eliminating the central government
>the East manages to break out of this cycle because its per capita income is way, way higher and its frontiers are more defensible

No see that actually gives you a constant economy and purchaser of goods. Its a neverending loop of sales and purchases.

>There was a lot of them
Not really no there wasn't

Thats actually one of my peeves with historians and this theory. Its nonsensical stance that the economy of the entire Mediterranean would collapse from the weight of a quarter million professionals and as many auxiliaries that engaged in natural missions protective of investment.

>they had the annoying habit of mutinying unless they got paid well
Extorting exorbitant amounts from the state is a better more reasonable explanation. Thank you for not being a retard.

Of course it never fell, that's probably why it's the first thing they "teach" you. Constantine expanded it and simply fused the Babylon mystery religions into it. Wasn't long before Islam was spawned.

There are a few other factors you'll want to be aware of.

First of all, conquering a place is like buying a bunch of shit with your credit card.

There's a huge windfall, you blow that, and then the bills start adding up. Every new conquest meant a windfall for the generals and tax collectors, but it meant the Romans had more to defend, and more often than not the new provinces didn't provide enough tax revenue to provide for their own defense costs.

Secondly, Roman style slavery drove down populations. Roman slaves were kept in barracks, and did not generally have children of their own. The Romans didn't bother to breed their slaves because as a military hegemon, they could always catch new ones.

The population of Europe in 700 AD was lower than in 200 AD, and slavery was one of the primary reasons why.

Finally, trade and urbanization meant plagues, and because of the defense obligations and political patronage machine, the Roman economy was incapable of recovering from plagues, because the higher per capita tax burden would impede population growth.

Relative to virtually any non-modern state the Roman army was very large. Rome didn't have the sort of financial / taxation apparatus that modern states have, either. Paying and supplying a quarter million people spread across all of Europe and the middle east is a significant undertaking and by far the largest part of their state expenses. Accession / Discharge bonuses and land settlement were also expensive. Especially during the crisis of the third century this became a huge problem and emperors started just defacing their currency to pay their army a bonus so that they didn't get swiftly replaced.

The currency debasement started way earlier than that, like during the early second century.

Sure, but by the third century inflation was really starting to catch up with them.

Nah. Dawg. Rome fell because it ran out of people to conquer that were rich and then became the richest country on earth and then all the German immigrants came in and ruined everything.

Also Christianity ended money lending slavery and took 1000 years to get over it so capitalism could take off again.

>when you start out as the shitters stealing from the rich and settled people and you fall apart because you become said rich and settled people and some other shitters steal your shit

it's the circle of shit