How Do You Understand The Decline Of The Roman Empire?
Edward Gibbon wrote a multivolume work on the decline of the Roman Empire that will take you the rest of your life to read, but you don’t have to plow through this tome to understand the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. The fact is, several obvious trends in the first few centuries AD spelled doom for Roman power. Here are those trends. The Empire had become too big to effectively administer. At its largest, the Roman Empire stretched west throughout Europe, south to the African coast, and east to the Persian border. At the end of the third century, the emperor Diocletian split Roman territory in half, keeping the eastern part for himself and giving the western part to a coemperor. Each senior emperor had a junior emperor, effectively dividing the Roman Empire into four parts. The Roman army was increasingly dominated by mercenaries and barbarians. As fewer native Romans opted for military service, the legions were increasingly manned by barbarian tribesmen from countries like Ger
