The Fall of the Western Roman Empire

The fall of the Western Roman Empire refers to the gradual collapse of centralized Roman authority in western Europe over the fifth century CE, conventionally dated to 476 CE, when the Germanic general Odoacer deposed the last Western emperor, Romulus Augustulus, and did not appoint a successor. The process behind that symbolic date was decades long, involving repeated barbarian invasions and settlements within Roman territory, civil wars, economic decline, the loss of tax revenue from provinces cut off by invasion, and the empire's own difficulty maintaining large professional armies. The Eastern Roman Empire, centered on Constantinople, survived this crisis intact and continued for another thousand years, which is why historians describe the fifth century collapse as specifically the fall of the western half of a single empire rather than the end of Rome as such.