What the fuck happened to the Roman Empire?

soy in the aqueducts

BPA in the fish sauce

How it fell:

>Roman emperors could not derive legitimacy from the consent of the governed, from the gods, or from noble ancestry
>Romans had hated kings since the days of the Etruscans, so there wasn't really any "legitimate" place in Roman society for an emperor
>this made them profoundly vulnerable to military coups, as their only real base of support was money
>at the same time, the influx of cash from military conquests ended, at the same time that the costs of protecting and administering a huge empire started to really sink in
>during the republican days, citizen-soldiers would defend the realm for free, but now there were professional soldiers that needed to be paid all the time, both due to the huge amount of area that needed to be protected and to prevent them from sacking Rome
>the system worked alright most of the time, but there was simply no wiggle room to deal with a crisis
>crises happened, in the form of foreign wars at the edge of the empire, and pandemics caused by the unprecedented amounts of trade and movement
>to deal with the excess costs of war, Roman emperors debased the currency (mixing silver into gold coins, for example) which led to hyperinflation and decreased trade
>after the plagues (probably some of the first smallpox epidemics) the tax burden on the average person increased so intensely that the populations never fully rebounded, they were taxed too heavily to expand onto marginal land and survive farming there
>farmers were now the first people to die during crop failures, and people did everything in their power to avoid any representative of the Roman state, for fear of literally being taxed to death
>at the same time, Roman slaves did not regenerate their own population, due to the harsh conditions not allowing for reproduction
>archaeological evidence shows the population of Western Europe falling steadily from 200 to 700 AD

...

The short answer is The Crisis of the Third Century.

youtube.com/watch?v=2B9b9mUPJik

They got Christianized, and as a result became weak and decadent, then some better people took their lands.

>after the Crisis of the Third Century, a thirty year long civil war which saw something like twenty different emperors, Diocletian took power to rule with an iron fist
>Diocletian abandoned the pretense that Rome was still a republic, turning the Principate (after princeps, the title that Caesar adopted) into the Dominate
>Diocletian establishes the tetrarchy, splitting the empire into two halves and creating emperors for each
>in order to control the hyperinflation, Diocletian implemented price controls, which further depressed trade
>in order to control the peasants fleeing for the cities (the cities had a grain dole that the emperors paid out to keep the loyalty of the mob) he introduced laws stating that people had to practice whatever the profession of their father had been
>to avoid taxation, because trade had collapsed, and because nobody was legally allowed to leave, people began to move into self sufficient communities called latifundia, a system which would later evolve into feudalism
>because the population of Rome had declined so dramatically, it was no longer possible to have the legions be all Roman, let alone all land-owners
>a marked Germanization of the legions occurred in the later empire as foreigners were recruited as mercenaries
>during the fifth century AD, a horde of Germans fleeing the Huns flooded into Western Europe, and the Roman states was too weak to stop it
>in some places, such as Britain, the Roman military simply leaves, never to return, in others, the Romans entrust the protection of areas to local chieftains, effectively delegating themselves out of existence
>in 476 AD, the German king Odoacer invades Rome and deposes the last Roman Emperor and doesn't bother to name a new one
>in the Eastern half, which is much wealthier and more defensible, a theocratic version of Diocletian's dominate continues until 1453

QED

>better people

people who had also been christian for a century

autist

No, but this is

Sassanide empire was equally strong to them and in order to not lose the valueable provinces in the middle east they had to give up the western provinces.