Fall of the Roman Empire: A History from Beginning to End

At its height, the Roman Empire was the largest and most powerful empire ever seen in the Western world. It covered 2 million square miles (5 million square kilometers) of territory, where a population of over 80 million was protected by a disciplined, well-trained army of almost half a million troops. By the third century, the empire had become so vast that it was effectively divided into two parts: the Western Empire, including the city of Rome, and an Eastern Empire governed from the city of Nicomedia in present-day Turkey. To most people at the time, it probably seemed that the Roman Empire would endure forever. What no one could have guessed was that the western part of this mighty empire was on the cusp of a dramatic decline that would lead to its complete collapse barely 300 years later.

What caused the fall of the Western Roman Empire? Modern scholarship suggests no single cause, but rather a cataclysmic series of events. The Roman Empire was the most powerful polity in the Western world, but no empire could withstand the impact of this cascade of massive challenges, and its final collapse plunged Europe into the period that would become known as the Dark Ages. This is the complex and engrossing story of the fall of the Roman Empire.