The Fall of the Roman Empire

            In history this week, I learned about the decline and fall of Rome. There were six reasons why the empire collapsed which I will briefly explain: -Split of the empire
-Lack of military cohesion
-Economic struggles Political rivalries and turmoil
-Moral decline
-Barbarian invasions

         I will also briefly describe the important people and acts that led to the fall of the empire.

         The emperors in Rome thought it would be better if the empire was split in two, East and West. Turns out, they were very wrong. Instead of the emperors only focusing on their own land (like they were supposed to), they fought over Rome and weakened its military. This was a very big problem.

          Another problem was the military. The military was not agreeing or cooperating with each other. The disagreement led to people fighting in the military, even if they were all Romans. People sometimes were killed in these arguments. This means that less people would be in the military, which was not good.

          There were a couple reasons for economic struggles. First, the government was losing money, so they started to put less of the material that the coin was made of into the money. This decreased the value of the money, which allowed the government to make more of it for itself. Second, the emperor started to give out free food and games. Food and games were the only things the people in Rome were working to get money for, so they decided to stop working. This played a major role in the fall of the empire.

          You can’t imagine that everybody liked the emperors on the throne. Some of the people that did not agree with or like the government of the time started rivals. Depending on the size and skill of the rival, these could be a problem or not, but even if it was not big enough to cause any damage, these rivals greatly weakened the military and Rome itself.

          Moral decline means that the people in Rome did not care whether they were doing something wrong or not. Even if they did know that they were doing something they shouldn’t be doing, they were fine with it. This could mean robberies, murders, etc., which is clearly not good. You could imagine it would be much more difficult for the military to fight when there is trouble going about.

          Lastly were barbarian invasions. Anyone could see that this was a major problem for Rome, especially when you add in all the other stuff going on. Something that makes it even worse was that most of the people in Rome had ancestors that used to be barbarians which left to start a new civilization. If these people fought against the barbarians, it would be fighting against distant family, so they fought against Rome instead.

            Finally, here are some people that led to the fall of Rome. Emperor Theodosius was after Constantine and helped with the decline of Rome. There were also many emperors between him and Constantine and after Theodosius like Honorius, and Romulus Augustulus that really messed things up in the empire. I would like to talk about them, but there are way too many. There were also some emperors before Constantine that did a great job if they were trying to bring down Rome.

           History this week was very interesting to learn about. We learned about the founding of Rome, when it became one of the largest empires the world has ever seen, to when it fell. It is amazing how fast an empire comes and goes when people don’t know how to take care of it.