01-28-2017, 08:49 PM
(01-28-2017, 06:56 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:(01-28-2017, 05:59 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: And yet the Empire had been demographically stagnating for a couple of centuries, trade was already breaking down during the crisis of the third century, the Empire itself broke into pieces, and the Huns themselves did not end up toppling the Empire, even in the West. The very fact their army increasingly relied on Germans auxillaries and generals towards the end should be a sign.
Historical revisionism is fun and all, but this sort of thing is a little absurd. The Romans were not going from strength to strength until they encountered a civilization they couldn't handle, they had been falling for 3 centuries before Odoacer topple Romulus Augustulus.
The Roman Empire was also stagnating in technology and culture. The slave system that became even more dominant ensured the absence of as middle class of entrepreneurs and technical people who might have given the Roman world a stimulus that might have forced it into something more modern. Just imagine the Romans with steam engines (which would have proved useful for steamships and railroads), bicycles, and the printing press. Imagine them with a fully-capitalist order. Sure, it would have been an environmental catastrophe...
People in despair from economic distress and political chaos quit looking forward to happiness in This World, and turned to what desperate people have often done -- to Pie in the Sky When You Die, which Christianity eventually expressed best. Thus Christianity won out over alternatives in exotic cults. But Christianity had its demographic consequences in encouraging multitudes to become monks and nuns and to not procreate, and in disparaging business. The Roman Empire was both authoritarian and chaotic, offering safety to nobody but plenty of opportunity for the most ruthless operators.
The big question was not when the Empire would collapse. By the mid-5th century, what remained of the Roman Empire was a shell. Odoacer simply deposed Romulus Augustulus in 476 and had no need of another Emperor as a vassal that the successors of Julius Caesar had been.
I'm pretty sure he actually sent the insignia of office to the sitting emperor in the East with the expectation that he would be confirmed as the next one, as had frequently been the practice over the past couple hundred years. The Emperor sent Theoderic instead, and he was the one who eschewed the title of Emperor in favor of King.
And the Empire up to about 180 was actually a pretty thriving place. Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius really had their shit together. The Antonine plagues, Commodus, the whole of the 3rd century, is when the wheels really started to come off the whole thing.
So that, yeah, by the 5th century the Western Empire was pretty much a bad joke.