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The fall of the Western Roman Empire, also called the fall of the Roman Empire or the fall of Rome, was the loss of central political control in the Western Roman Empire, a process in which the Empire failed to enforce its rule, and its vast territory was divided among several successor polities.
Romulus Augustus was deposed as Western Roman Emperor in 476 while still young. However, Julius Nepos continued to claim the title of Western Emperor after his deposition. The decline of the Roman Empire is one of the traditional markers of the end of Classical Antiquity and the beginning of the European Middle Ages.
The crisis of the Middle Ages was a series of events in the 14th and 15th centuries that ended centuries of European stability during the late Middle Ages. [1] Three major crises led to radical changes in all areas of society: demographic collapse, political instability, and religious upheavals.
The Roman Empire was one of the largest in history, with contiguous territories throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. [49] The Latin phrase imperium sine fine ("empire without end" [ 50 ] ) expressed the ideology that neither time nor space limited the Empire.
The Dark Ages is a term for the Early Middle Ages (c. 5th –10th centuries), or occasionally the entire Middle Ages (c. 5th –15th centuries), in Western Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, which characterises it as marked by economic, intellectual, and cultural decline.
This led to the debasement of currency and a breakdown in both trade networks and economic productivity, with the Plague of Cyprian contributing to the disorder. Roman armies became more reliant over time on the growing influence of the barbarian mercenaries known as foederati. Roman commanders in the field, although nominally loyal to the ...
The population already started to decline from the late 4th century onward, although around the middle of the fifth century it seems that Rome continued to be the most populous city of the two parts of the Empire, with a population of no fewer than 650,000 inhabitants. [53]
In the view of the Greek historian Cassius Dio, a contemporary observer, the accession of the emperor Commodus in AD 180 marked the descent "from a kingdom of gold to one of rust and iron" [9] —a famous comment which has led some historians, notably Edward Gibbon, to take Commodus' reign as the beginning of the decline of the Roman Empire.