Attila
The Fall of the Roman Empire was a period of Roman history which followed the Pax Romana and included the Crisis of the Third Century and the barbarian invasions. The Roman Empire reached its territorial height in 117 AD, but, following the death of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, the empire devolved into a series of civil wars and external conflicts which rendered Rome unable to enforce its rule. In 395 AD, the Roman Empire was divided into the Western Roman Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire, and the Western Roman Empire was destroyed in 476 AD. The Eastern Roman Empire survived as the "Byzantine Empire" until 1453, when it was conquered by the Ottoman Turks.
Background[]
The divided Roman Empire in 395 AD
In 324, after winning a long series of wars against imperial rivals, Constantine I established himself as sole emperor, but his death was followed by a further collapse into civil war. The eastern and western halves of the empire were increasingly divided. The wealth and power lay in the east, where Constantine created an alternative capital at Byzantium (Constantinople). The Western Roman Empire was under constant pressure from tribes beyond the Rhine and Danube, who raided across the frontier and sometimes settled within Rome's borders The Eastern Roman Empire had a dangerous neighbor in the Sassanids, a dynasty that took over control of Persia from the Parthians in 224. Successive Roman emperors had much the worse of fighting with the Persians.
History[]
The career of Emperor Julian, known as the Apostate, reveals much about the state of the Roman empire in the 4th century AD. A nephew of Emperor Constantine I, he narrowly survived with his life in the round of massacres and usurpations that followed Constantine’s death in 337. When Constantius II emerged as victor in this vicious power struggle, he appointed Julian his subordinate co-emperor in the west while he fought Sassanid Persia in the east. But when Constantius ran into trouble fighting the Persians and called for Julian to bring his army to the east, the Gallic legions refused to go and instead proclaimed Julian emperor. A civil war was avoided because Constantius died of a fever in 361. Now sole emperor, Julian led a large army deep into Sassanid territory in 363. The expedition was a disaster. Julian was killed in a skirmish and the Romans had to accept humiliating peace terms. This was an empire in which emperors were elected by armies and mostly lived as military commanders; in which the need to campaign simultaneously on different frontiers led to divisions of authority; and in which resources were stretched to cope with the military problems posed by external pressures.
Rome's faltering army[]
The Roman army that faced these pressures in the 4th and 5th centuries CE was significantly different from the army that had enforced the Roman Peace (Pax Romana) of the 1st and 2nd centuries. It was divided into border forces - permanent garrisons for the forts and fortifications around the frontiers - and mobile field armies stationed deeper inside the empire. The field armies could be a reserve to respond to military emergencies wherever these occurred, but they were also power bases for their commanders who needed to uphold their slice of authority inside the empire. The senior officers who commanded the armies had previously been drawn from the aristocracy of Roman senators, but by the end of the 3rd century they were career soldiers, drawn from anywhere in the empire. These senior officers made and unmade emperors. Shortages of material resources showed in a decline in the quality of equipment, and shortages of manpower were even more evident. The volunteers who came from the poorer strata of Roman citizens no longer dominated the ranks. The legions were staffed mostly by conscripts, although the border forces included a large number of hereditary soldiers - the children of career legionaries settled in the area where they served. The army had long ceased to be ethnically Roman, but was recruited from across the multi-racial empire, including from "barbarian" tribes who had been permitted to settle within the empire’s frontiers. The employment of non-citizens as auxiliaries—for example, from allies of Rome beyond the frontiers—was a long-established tradition, but increasingly tribal warbands served alongside the legions under their own chieftains as allies or “federated” people. The prominence of "barbarian" soldiers in the Roman army was to be crucial to the development of events as the western empire declined.
Roman forces became more varied. Although armored legion infantry remained central, there was a growing emphasis on missile weapons, with specialist artillery units and bodies of bowmen. Cavalry had an increasing impact on the battlefield. The Romans deployed heavily armored horses and riders in imitation of the Persian cataphracts, as well as lighter cavalry with spears and mounted archers. These developments were doubtless a response to the occasional setbacks the Romans suffered at the hands of enemies who were practised in missile and cavalry warfare, such as the Goths who defeated Valens at Adrianople in 378.
Weak political leadership[]
A collage of the barbarian invasions
The mounting problems of the Roman empire did not, however, stem from such defeats - pitched battles were rare in any case. The issue, especially in the western empire, was a failure of political organization and resources. The Romans were unfortunate to confront at this point in their history a major movement of the Germanic peoples. During the second half of the 4th century Ostrogoths and Visigoths, Vandals, Burgundians, and Lombards, Franks, Alemanni, and Saxons were all driven westward or southward by pressure from nomadic steppe horsemen, chiefly the Huns, who attacked them from the east. Although the Roman empire continued to apply long-established processes by which such people were settled, Romanized, and taken into the armed forces as auxiliaries and allies, the tide was too powerful to be controlled.
The battle of Frigidus in 394 and its aftermath show a failing system in action. The battle was fought between forces loyal to Emperor Theodosius I, ruling from the eastern empire, and a usurper in the west. Theodosius' forces were commanded by Stilicho, the son of a Vandal father and a Roman mother. The other side was commanded by Arbogast, a Frank. Both were generals in the Roman army. Stilicho's forces included a large contingent of Visigoths, led by their chieftain, Alaric I. Stilicho defeated the usurper, but soon found himself engaged in a prolonged struggle against Alaric's rampaging followers, transformed from allies into enemies. In 410, after Stilicho's death, the Visigoths sacked Rome, the first time the city had fallen to hostile forces in almost eight centuries. Yet only a few years later, the Romans were again appealing to the Visigoths as allies to help fight the Vandals, another Germanic people.
The incursions of the Huns into Roman a territory between 441 and 452, under the leadership of the dreaded Attila, revealed an empire that had lost coherence and control. The Romans succeeded in checking Attila at a battle near Chalons in 451 but only his death in 453, not in battle, brought the Huns' forays to an end. By then the Roman empire in the west was falling apart.
Collapse in the West[]
The fall of the western Roman empire is traditionally dated to 476, when Emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed by the commander of Rome's Germanic allies in Italy, Odoacer. But Odoacer did not claim the imperial title, which was held by Emperor Zeno at Constantinople.
Filling the Void[]
Germanic kingdoms were established as the empire fell. In Gaul the Franks established a powerful state under Clovis. The Visigoths ruled Spain, from which they had evicted the Vandals who themselves established a kingdom in North Africa. In Italy Odoacer was defeated by the Ostrogoths under Theodoric in 493, Theodoric then ruling as theoretically a viceroy of the eastern emperor in Constantinople. Under Emperor Justinian in the 6th century, there was a determined, but failed, effort to restore imperial control over Italy and the rest of the western Mediterranean. Nor was the memory of the empire lost in Western Europe - the Frankish ruler, Charlemagne, was to claim the imperial title in Rome in 800.