Roman Empire Dbq

Everybody has heard of one the greatest falls of all times, the fall of the Roman Empire, but not many people know the real reasons why Rome may have came crashing down. Rome began to fall and stall, everywhere around Rome was falling also. Rome, we can say, was one of the greatest empires there was because of the size of their empire, the size of their government and strength of their army, but there was a problem. The Roman Empire fell, why? Out of the many reasons, in my opinion, foreign invasions, natural disasters, and the assassinations of its emperors, were the biggest reasons.

One of the reasons was foreign invasions. The fall of Rome is like the domino effect. The domino effect cis when you place dominoes on their sides, next to each other, then purposefully knocking down its neighbor. This creates a chain and all of the dominoes fall one after the other. For the fall of Rome, it was the Huns invading from the east that caused this effect, they invaded the Goths, who

then invaded the Roman Empire. Invasions began in 27 BCE and ended in 476 CE. Which means that Rome was being invaded for over 400 years. Probably because the barbarians wouldn’t stop fighting until they got what they wanted. That’s a really long time. In my opinion, they were lucky to even last that long. All the invasions must have started chaos, so it was good that they held it together for that long.
In addition, there were many severe natural disasters, which were another big factor to the “fall.” Natural disasters are something that humanity has to deal with. Some you can’t prevent but can only be prepared. In the empire, many earthquakes occurred. They weren’t ordinary earthquakes. They were large, violent, and destructive, and led to economic problems because they had to repair the damages they caused, and the empire became weak and unstable. Earthquakes weren’t as bad as tsunamis and floods though. Plagues were then spread from people who entered Rome from South Asia. Most had a severe case of measles, which took the lives of many. There was no cure. I think that might be one of the reasons we have advancements in medicine today, because they needed to find a cure to stop the horrible disease. Because of the diseases and other disasters, the population reduced by hundreds of thousands.

The last factor of Rome’s decline was the assassinations of their rulers. There were 21 rulers in a 50 year period and 13 were assassinated. It was a big change, and it caused a lot of hassle for Rome to have a new ruler every couple of years or even months. Imagine having a different president every couple of months, and each with new ideas and laws. It’s a lot to handle and adapt to. That’s how the Romans felt. Because of the frequent changes, the empire became very unstable, weak, and started to lack stability and power. Therefore, they could easily become conquered.
In conclusion, Rome had several reasons for its decline.

It didn’t just happen in a day. Although others might think that the wars, government, and many others had a bigger impact, but I believe that these had the most effect. The foreign invasions made it hard to keep together. They held it together for 400 years and was bound to fall sometime. The natural disasters didn’t help either. Hundreds of thousands of lives were lost. Also, their rulers didn’t last long, so the Romans had to adapt to a new ruler very frequently. 68% of the emperors were assassinated. That makes them a target for other empires to take over, because they know that they are very unstable. It’s important to explore the reasons for past civilization’s downfalls because then we can learn from their mistakes and prevent them from happening. Let’s see if we can learn from this because if it can happen to a massive empire like Rome, who knows what would happen to us if something like this were to hit us just like it hit

Rome.