Fall of Rome

The fall of Rome
When someone is thinking about empires they immediately think about the Roman Empire however when they do they do not understand how it fell. Rome fell in 476 CE due to barbarians. The fall of the Roman Empire was not sudden and was not only caused by the invasion of barbarians there were key factors that caused the weakening and then the fall of such an extensive empire. These factors include the rise of Christianity, the splitting of the Roman Empire and the poor economic reforms made by Diocletian. The creation of Christianity changed the Roman Empire negatively. The Empire used to have their pantheon of gods but after the creation of Christianity the empire began to have very different religions. The emperors during the early days of Christianity; intolerance towards Christians was a common theme among emperors. The emperor Nero is known for blaming the fire of Rome on Christians because he wanted to find a scapegoat. But once the empire was more tolerant to Christianity it grew and the Romans would allow non-Roman Christians to settle inside their lands and join their army. This caused tension inside the army. Some pagan soldiers were discharged because of the tension and the roman army was weakened. In other situations where Roman cities were under attack instead of defending the city against the barbarians at the gate the Christians ran to churches and began to pray for divine intervention. This led to cities far away from the capital to be easily captured by barbarians. The strength of Christianity caused weakness in the empire which led to its downfall.
Before the time of Diocletian there was no such idea as an eastern Roman Empire there was just an Empire which was strong and unified. Both sides of the Roman Empire were as important and the army was split among the two. But after the splitting of the empire, civil wars began, the west wanted to be stronger than the east and vice versa. This caused tension within the empire causing it to be weakened to outside threats. Towards the end of the empire the western empire became stronger. When the Western Roman Empire asked for help from the east, the east was slow to react to their calls for help. If there was a unified empire there wouldn’t need to be calls for help. They could just command their armies to go and defend the other side of the empire. Having multiple emperors caused tension which was not good for the empire and led to the fall of the Roman Empire.
The economic instability of the Roman Empire led to the fall of Rome. During the 3rd century CE Emperor Diocletian passed many economic reforms. These reforms changed the economy of the Roman Empire drastically. He passed a law which did not allow the price of different goods to be over a certain price limit. This caused merchants selling their goods to lose money and many of these merchants decided to leave the Roman Empire because of this. The Roman Empire began to lose money because people weren’t making any money off of selling their goods. Rome was powerful because they were rich. But after Diocletian the Empire was not well off and the economic crash of the Roman Empire led to their downfall as they were not able to defend against barbarians.
The Roman Empire ended because of the instability of their country. The Religious tension, the rivalries between the halves of the empire and the economic instability of the empire led to its end.