Western Roman Empire Dbq Analysis

The Western Roman Empire mostly has itself to blame for its ancient decay! Rome’s fall was inevitable since the initiation of its grand expansion. Rome had grown to such a large size, that it could no longer take care of itself to the level that was needed. Internal factors caused the Roman empire to wane. Three facts that support this statement include, but are not limited to; its several civil wars and revolts among slaves and plebeians, a reliance on war and trade that eventually destroyed the economy, and the rise of Christianity which questioned Rome’s mores and values. Inflicting war and havoc with other Roman counties was a large internal factor that lead the Roman Empire to its termination. According to Doc.
4, “Septimus Severus defeated his rivals in a civil war… his line devalued the currency…within a century, the roman coin was completely worthless.” Since the coin became completely worthless in order to give the soldiers in the civil wars more supplies, the economy became largely dependent on barter. When ancient roman ruler, Alexander Severus died, it triggered a power struggle that lasted a total of 50 years. This in turn caused the border to collapse which brought illegal barbarians into roman territory. “The civil wars, raids, and accompanying social unrest destroyed trade”. (Doc. 4) This caused the economy to fail due to how dependent it was on barter and trade. In an attempt to save the economy, government officials created more taxes. The people who were unable to afford the taxes, got their crops confiscated. Eventually, the poor somehow paid the taxes for the rich. If the civil wars hadn’t occurred as often, then there wouldn’t have been a need to completely devalue the currency for more soldiers and supplies. Then the economy would’ve been stable and the difference in social class wouldn’t be so explicit and obvious, since high taxes wouldn’t have shown the social-economic gap, and plebeians wouldn’t see need to revolt with other illegals.

The main reason that Rome had so many civil wars and outsider invasions was because its greed of expansion.
Doc 2. States “Rome’s fall was an inevitable effect of its grand size.” Due to Rome’s enormous extent of land from conquering, they couldn’t keep up the amount of gold and reliable soldiers to maintain roads and routine maintenance. The numerous Roman-ruled countries created the necessity for soldiers and protection to break up any civil wars and stop any foreign barbarians from invading and ruining Roman property. However, many Roman-hired foreign soldiers were disloyal and unfaithful to Rome and there weren’t enough Roman soldiers to protect the borders which allowed for invasions, riots, and revolts to occur. This was also stated in Doc. 2 as “borders became difficult to secure.” To keep the roads in shape for trade, Rome needed a lot of gold, which was never enough. This hurt the economy because lacking the ability to maintain roads meant that they also couldn’t maintain trade. If there wasn’t a large, increasing rate of civilizations and countries being conquered by Roman officials, then Rome would’ve been able to preserve their economy, and drastically decreased the amount of riots and invasions caused by anger and
rage.