how did the roman empire fall ,how did it die off?

Question

was it defeated and how long did it take to be defeated and who.

Answer 1

1) militarily - rome was built on the discipline if not the fighting skills of its citizen soldiers. Then it began hiring bararion mercenary troops and paying them in land within the empire thus destabilising the society that they were meant to protect.

2)christanity - where as in early imperial times aspiring young romans sought to advance their prospects through a military career with the coming of official christanity many of the finest minds adopted a life of devotion to God within monastaries and the more ambitious sought their fortune within the ecclesiastial establishment.

3)Social Change - The nobility began the process of enriching themselves through expansion of their land holdings creating vast estates worked by slave labour. The disposessed poorer roman citizens crammed into the cities especially the city of Rome itself where they were claimed their entitlement as citizens to " bread and circuses". The equivilent of todays social security benefits. Thus were lost to the state the vigour and energy of the small holding citizen class.

Answer 2

I answered a similar question in my finals at uni - The Roman empire went not with a bang but with a whimper" Discuss.
From memory as the answers above prove there was no one reason that the empire fell, it was a combination of many things. Corruption in the upper classes (although to one extent or another that had been there since Caesar's time), the restrucure of the emperors so that their sons had jurisdiction over certain areas as it was becoming too big to manage creating civil wars, internal fighting over religion, and in a way the Roman machine just burnt itself out.
You can tell it died slowly by looking at the archeological evidence - there were coins left in Britain long after the Romans were meant to have left and even then the Pagans were still worshipping Roman gods alongside their own well after the Roman's left.
There is far more to it than all of this but look to the archeology for more evidence on this.

Answer 3

First of all, let's be clear why this is a problem.
Most empires are the domination of one nation over others. They fall because either someone from outside conquers them (Persians conquered by Alexander the Great) or because the central authority gets weak and the subject peoples reassert their independence (French, Spanish, British, etc). But there are still Persians, French etc around today.
The great thing about Rome was they managed to co-opt other peoples till before too long they (or at least their upper classes) thought of themselves as Romans. So when Rome went, all of that went. So why did the Western Empire fall??
It wasn't orgies - orgy-giving became less popular as the centuries wore on. It wasn't Christianity - the West was less Christianised than the East, which survived.
I think that the answer is that internal instability led the fourth-century emperors to denude the frontiers and fill the army with Germans. The discipline of the army collapsed. The barbarians actually wanted to keep Rome going - it was, after all, their meal ticket - but didn't know how.

Answer 4

It took several centuries to collapse

Causes:
Directly: Mongolian Invaders

Indirectly (Why Mongolian Invaders were able to defeat them): Empire overstretch. The Empire was to stretched so thin from all its conquests and acquired territories that it could no longer maintain stability in the areas it held. With all the soldiers off fighting wars in distant lands, there was no one left to protect the capital, both from internal dissent and external invasion. A combination of these two led to the demise of the Roman Empire.

Allusions are often made of modern day United States to that of the overstretched Roman Empire.

Answer 5

Lots of argument about this one. The how is complicated because it fell a bit at a time to different people. Britain was abandoned because the local commander wanted to use the army to make himself emperor and then the Anglo-Saxons took it over. The west (Gaul, Spain, Italy, Africa) was overrun by Germans (Goths, Franks, Vandals) in the 5th century, partially retaken in the 6th and lost again. The Middle East was taken by the Arabs in the 7th century. The Balkans and Anatolia were fought over by various people and eventually taken by the Turks. Reasons include that their enemies were getting more sophisticated than they had been when Rome made its conquests, that the Romans never settled on a good succession model and kept fighting civil wars, that they may have been poisoning themselves with lead. But the astonishing thing about Rome isn't that it fell, it's that it stayed up so long over such a large area. As Voltaire said, it fell because all things fall. Perhaps the odd thing is that nobody set up another one.

Answer 6

It collapsed very gradually. Power was divided into four rulers around the 3rd century AD and the empire fragmented over the next 100-150 years. Once a strength, now a weakness, Rome's fairly fluid borders became difficult to maintain and the empire suffered multiple invasions. There is no one point where you can mark the fall of Rome. It became fragmented and dissolute from the top and gave way piece by piece as neighbouring forces (mongols, goths etc) became stronger.

Answer 7

the Roman Empire became weak because it became too large. it was impossible for the emperors to keep tabs on the such a large kingdom. it collapsed through countless attacks throughout the empire. the actual city of Rome collapsed slowly as the attackers cut off the water supply through the aqueducts from outside the city walls. without water, they did not stand a chance. there wasn't one single group of people who conquered the Roman Empire. the last settled area to fall was that of Constantinople.

Answer 8

The Romans Empire crumbled from within-Corruption-loose morals-a very permissive society-attempted to make the world (as it was known then)under their domination and the people their slaves, began to think of themselves supreme to all-indestructible--defeated all the countries except the Germanic Tribes,who fought the most fierce for their home,what belonged to them was to them of the utmost importance and value.It wasn't just one nation or one army but the gluttony of the Romans and the disintegration of morals and society as a whole had weakened them that various barbarians -of whom in the past they had sacked and enslaved many-defeated Romanic rule all over what is now Western Europe-with Ghenghis Khan being one of them within a years time.

Answer 9

The Grecians and Egyptians were prominent by the end of the Roman age - invasions by the Turks as well.
Constantine tried to unify Rome again under Christianity, but it was a doomed mission.

Answer 10

It took over a thousand years of decline before the empire fell. The final end came about when the Turks conquored Constantinople in the fifteenth century.