fall-of-rome - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Could The Roman Empire Have Survived?No empire, from Sargon’s Akkadian Empire to the Soviet Union, lasts forever. There’s always an expiration date....

After Rome Fell, Europe's Barbarians Had To Figure Out How To Be KingsPolitical structures and institutions—the bedrock of the systems that underpin our world and society—aren��t a given. They can and do evolve and strengthen, or, alternatively, crumble into nothingness. That’s one of many reasons the fall of the Roman Empire is a valuable example for us to bear in min...

Rome's Fall Left Britain A Violent, Cityless Hellscape In the year 350 AD, to paraphrase the historian Robin Fleming, Britain was as Roman a place as anywhere in the Empire. It had a dense network of roads and ports, luxurious villas with mosaic floors and private bathhouses, a profusion of small, prosperous towns that served as markets for regional tra...

Rome's Collapse Turned Petty Kings, Strongmen, And Warlords Into The French

Decades before Romulus Augustulus was deposed in 476 AD and the Western Roman Empire officially went out of business, the provinces of northern Gaul (roughly the area between Paris and the lower Rhine in what’s now the Netherlands and northwest Germany) had long since slipped from the grasp of the a...

Theoderic The Great Was A Barbarian General Cloaked In The Language And Political Concepts Of The Past

As the central institutions of the Roman Empire in the west crumbled and the provinces splintered off and went their own way over the course of the fifth century, new kingdoms popped up to take their place. Today, we tend to identify these new political units with specific barbarian groups: the Visi...

After The Visigoths Sacked Rome, They Established A Full-Blown Kingdom

When last we met the Goths, they had just sacked the city of Rome in 410 CE, the act for which this barbarian people is both famous and infamous. They were, after all, the first group in 800 years to pillage the Eternal City, and that kind of action is going to leave a mark in the history books. The...

The Roman Empire Was Brought Down By Structural Rot 

One way of telling the story of the fall of the Roman Empire is to examine the lives and personalities at the very top of the political spectrum, the emperors, generals, court officials, and kings at the center of power who made the life-and-death decisions that reverberated throughout the Roman wor...

The Roman Empire Accidentally Killed Itself

It took just 80 years for the Roman Empire to fall apart as a political unit....