Your turn
Each lab is one part of the video. Drag, tap and slide, and see what happens.
Each lab isolates one idea. The map and the scales are simplified teaching models, not measurements.
Tap the buttons and slide the sliders.
Drag the year. When is there one empire, when two halves, and when only the East?
From Augustus (27 BCE) to the split (395), the end in the West (476) and the fall of Constantinople (1453).
Slide the slider. Watch Rome split into two halves!
You have 8 legions. Tap the red border to post them. Where do raiders slip through?
A long frontier with limited, costly troops: any stretch left thin becomes an opening.
Tap the red line to put soldiers there. Can you stop the raiders?
Simplified map. Raids are random, not historical.
Slide through the years. How much silver was left in a Roman coin?
Silver content of the denarius: about 95–98% under the Augustan standard, 83.5% by 148–161, 50% by 235, about 5% by 274.
Slide the slider. Watch the silver go away!
Values from the denarius silver table, smoothed between dates.
Tap a date to replay it on the map.
Huns, Goths and Adrianople, the split of 395, the sack of Rome in 410 and the loss of Carthage in 439.
Routes are simplified.
Pile troubles on each half. Which one gives way?
Same pressures, different resources: the richer, walled East could absorb more.
Tap to add troubles. Which half falls down?
A teaching model: the weights are illustrative, not measured.
Tap the evidence cards. Which way does the needle point?
Historians debate catastrophe vs. transformation. Weigh the evidence both ways.
Long ago, Rome ruled a huge empire. It went all the way around a big sea. But the western half of Rome did not last.
Rome's edge was very, very long. Soldiers had to guard all of it, and soldiers cost lots of money.
Generals fought to be the boss. The rulers put cheap metal into the silver coins, so each coin was worth less. A terrible sickness made many people ill.
New people came to Rome's lands. Many just wanted a safe home, but they were treated badly, so they fought back. The West lost its best farms, so it had less money for soldiers. In the end, a general sent the last boy emperor away.
The eastern half was richer. Its big city had the sea on three sides and thick, strong walls. It kept going for almost a thousand more years!
The Western Roman Empire fell because many pressures piled up over about two centuries until it could no longer pay for, or control, its armies. The biggest were a huge border that was costly to defend, civil wars between rival emperors, money trouble (coins with less and less silver, and heavy taxes), plague, and migrations and invasions by peoples such as the Goths and Vandals, who took the land and taxes that paid for soldiers.4522
Its traditional end date is 476 CE, when the general Odoacer removed the teenage emperor Romulus Augustulus and ruled Italy as a king.23 But only the western half fell. The eastern half, ruled from Constantinople, carried on as the Roman Empire (we call it the Byzantine Empire) until 1453.78
Rome did not fall on one day. Here are the key dates, from the first emperor to the very last.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 27 BCE | Augustus becomes the first Roman emperor.1 |
| 117 CE | The empire reaches its largest size, about 5.9 million km² (2.3 million square miles).4 |
| 165–180 | The Antonine Plague spreads through the empire.19 |
| 235–284 | The Crisis of the Third Century: civil wars, at least 26 claimants to the throne, a debased currency.17 |
| 293 | Diocletian shares power between four rulers (the tetrarchy).14 |
| 330 | Constantine dedicates Constantinople, a "New Rome" in the East.15 |
| 378 | Goths defeat a Roman army at Adrianople and kill Emperor Valens.10 |
| 395 | After Theodosius I dies, the empire is run as two halves, West and East.93 |
| 410 | Alaric's Visigoths sack the city of Rome.11 |
| 439 | The Vandals capture Carthage and Rome's rich North African provinces.12 |
| 451–452 | Attila the Hun invades Gaul, then Italy.13 |
| 455 | The Vandals sack Rome.12 |
| 476 | Odoacer deposes Romulus Augustulus: the traditional end of the Western Empire.23 |
| 1453 | Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II captures Constantinople: the end of the Eastern Empire.8 |
The historian Alexander Demandt once collected 210 different explanations that people have given for Rome's fall.4 Most historians today group the serious ones into a few big pressures that fed each other.
At its peak around 117 CE, the empire wrapped all the way around the Mediterranean, across Europe, Africa and Asia, with perhaps 60 million people.4 Its border ran along rivers such as the Rhine and the Danube, along desert edges, and and, a few years later, across northern Britain on Hadrian's Wall (begun around 122), 73 miles (118 km) long.16 Every stretch needed soldiers, forts and roads, and the Romans could not communicate quickly enough to manage it all.22 The long border through the forests of Germania proved too expensive to defend.4
From 235 CE the empire fell into what historians call the Crisis of the Third Century. In about fifty years there were at least 26 claimants to the throne, mostly generals backed by their armies, and many were murdered.17 For a while the empire even split into three rival states.17 Armies busy fighting each other were not guarding the border. Emperors Diocletian and Constantine restored order, but rival emperors kept fighting in the centuries that followed.61
Soldiers had to be paid, so emperors stretched their silver by mixing in cheaper metal. The main silver coin, the denarius, went from almost pure silver in Augustus's time to about half silver by 235 and around 5% by 274.18 When coins are worth less, prices rise. Add heavy taxes and broken trade routes, and the economy suffered for decades.117
| Year (CE) | Silver in a denarius |
|---|---|
| 14–37 | about 97.5% |
| 64–68 | 93.5% |
| 148–161 | 83.5% |
| 235 | about 50% |
| 274 | about 5% |
The Antonine Plague, from 165 to 180 CE, may have killed 5 to 10 million people, roughly one in ten.19 Another epidemic, the Plague of Cyprian, struck from about 249 to 262.20 Fewer people meant fewer farmers, soldiers and taxpayers. Some historians, such as Kyle Harper, argue that disease and climate shifts deserve more of the blame than they used to get.21
In the late 300s the Huns arrived in south-eastern Europe and drove Germanic peoples such as the Goths toward Roman land.313 Many of these people wanted to live inside the empire, not destroy it, but Roman officials treated them badly.422 In 378 the Goths crushed a Roman army at Adrianople; the emperor Valens and upwards of 10,000 soldiers died in a single afternoon.510 The Visigoths sacked Rome in 410, the Vandals took Carthage in 439 and sacked Rome in 455.1112
The historian Peter Heather puts it simply: the western state collapsed because the newcomers stripped it of the tax base it used to pay its armies.5 Losing North Africa, the West's main source of grain, was an especially heavy blow.4
By the 470s, real power in the West belonged to army commanders who ruled through "puppet" emperors.3 In 475 the general Orestes put his young son, Romulus Augustulus, on the throne. A year later, the soldiers mutinied and chose a new leader, Odoacer, a Germanic warrior who had risen to command in the Roman army.23 Odoacer executed Orestes but spared the boy because of his youth, gave him a pension and sent him to live with relatives in southern Italy.2
Instead of naming a new emperor, Odoacer sent the western imperial regalia to Constantinople and called himself king, formally accepting the Eastern emperor Zeno as his overlord.53
Both halves faced invaders, civil wars, money trouble and plague. The East survived for several reasons:
Under Justinian I (527–565) the East even reconquered Italy, North Africa and parts of Spain, and built the Hagia Sophia.5 Its people called themselves Romaioi, "Romans", right to the end in 1453.7
In the West, one emperor was replaced by more than a dozen kings and princes, most of them non-Roman in origin: Anglo-Saxons in Britain, Goths in Gaul and Spain, Vandals in North Africa.5 Some historians see this as a violent collapse. Others see a slower transformation, because much of Rome lived on.45
Heather adds a reminder: for the peasants who made up perhaps 90% of the population, daily farm life changed surprisingly little.5
Three big ones: (1) an enormous border that was very expensive to defend, (2) civil wars and money trouble at home, including coins with less and less silver, and (3) migrations and invasions, like the Goths and Vandals, which took land and the taxes that paid the army. Historians agree it was a mix of causes, not one.
The Western Roman Empire is traditionally said to have fallen in 476 CE, when the general Odoacer removed the teenage emperor Romulus Augustulus and ruled Italy as king. The Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire lasted until 1453, when the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II captured Constantinople.
No single person. Odoacer, a Germanic commander in the Roman army, removed the last emperor in Italy in 476 (a rival western emperor, Julius Nepos, kept the title until 480, but never ruled again). Before that, the Visigoths under Alaric sacked Rome in 410 and the Vandals under Gaiseric took North Africa in 439 and sacked Rome in 455. But centuries of civil war, money trouble and plague had already weakened the West.
In the West, the single emperor was replaced by more than a dozen kings and princes, most of them non-Roman in origin: Anglo-Saxons in Britain, Goths in southern Gaul and Spain, Vandals in North Africa, and Odoacer (and later other kings) in Italy. Many of these kingdoms kept Roman institutions, Latin and the Church. In the East, the Roman Empire simply carried on.
The East was richer, with more cities and trade, so it could raise more taxes and pay more soldiers. Its capital, Constantinople, was protected by the sea and huge double land walls, and its strength tended to steer invaders toward the West.
The 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon suggested it did, but most historians today think military, economic and political problems mattered far more. The Eastern Empire was just as Christian and survived for another thousand years.
From Augustus becoming the first emperor in 27 BCE to 476 CE is about 500 years for the empire in the West. Counting the Eastern Roman Empire until 1453, Roman emperors ruled for nearly 1,500 years.