When Did The Roman Empire Fall?
We all know social media recently declared that men think nonstop about the Roman Empire. True or not as a general claim, I do spend a lot of time thinking about it.
Partly because I’m in the process of re-learning Latin. And as anyone who reads Latin primary texts can tell you, it’s either the Roman Empire or medieval European Catholicism. Given that choice, I say Imperium Romanum it is!
But if we want to talk about the Roman Empire, we need to address the question of when it fell. Because it’s not all that clear! (As an aside, it’s also a little unclear when it began, though the options there are far fewer.)
The Options
Let’s talk about our options here.
The traditional view says the Roman Empire fell in 476 CE. Why? Because that’s the year the final Emperor in the Western half of the Empire (i.e., the half that included Rome itself) was deposed.
Historians have poked a lot of holes in this narrative in recent decades. For one, they point out that the whole ‘decline and fall’ narrative has a lot of shortcomings. In lots of ways, a ‘continuity and change’ narrative makes more sense. That is to say, large parts of Europe (especially Italy) around 480 CE, or 500 CE, or even as late as 600 or even 700 CE (!) didn’t look all that different from Europe in 475…
