Text 4. The Fall Of Rome

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Rome did not fall as the result of single invasion. The pressures that brought it down had been weakening it for centuries. Since the time of the Pax Romana, the empire had been fighting off attacks from outsiders. Romans called the invaders barbarians,which meant people from beyond the Roman frontier.

Over a period of about 300 years, many barbarian tribes made their way south into the Roman Empire.

The Romans looked down on the barbarians as uncivilized partly because they were different from Romans. They did not share Roman ideas about government and culture. Yet the barbarian tribes had their own government systems, including elected assemblies, and their own cultural values.

In the A.D. 200s, the Romans’ internal troubles allowed barbarian invasions to reach the heart of the empire. Diocletian and the emperors who followed him fought the invaders to make the frontiers of the empire secure.

As the invasions continued, the empire needed more soldiers to defend itself.

To relieve the pressure of barbarian attacks, some Roman emperors tried to “buy off” the invaders. These emperors gave the tribes land to live on, and they hired barbarians to serve in the army. By the A.D. 200s, the frontier of the empire was no longer a clear-cut boundary between the barbarians and the Roman world. The barbarians were gradually becoming part of the empire.

In the late A.D. 300s, pressure from the barbarians was growing. In A.D. 378, the Visigoths, who had settled in the eastern part of the empire, revolted against the Romans. They killed the leader of the eastern part of the empire, Emperor Valens, and defeated his army. Then, encouraged by their victory, the Visigoths marched into Rome in A.D. 410.

The success of the invasions showed the weakness of the Roman army. Gradually, the emperors were losing control of their territories. In the early A.D. 400s, the barbarians overran and looted Britain, Gaul, Spain, and North Africa.

Historians use the year A.D. 476 to mark the fall of Rome. Unlike Rome, Constantinople withstood barbarian attacks. The eastern part of the Roman Empire remained intact for another thousand years.

As the Roman empire grew weaker under the pressure of barbarian attacks, Christianity grew stronger. During the A.D. 300s and 400s, even barbarian tribes such as the Goths, Vandals, and Franks had converted to Christianity.

Nevertheless, some Romans blamed the empire’s many problems on the widespread growth of Christianity.

Pagan Romans were upset and angered to see the empire decline under Christian leadership. They blamed the decline on the fact that the Romans had abandoned their pagan gods. In past centuries, the pagans argued, Romans had made sacrifices to the pagan gods, and the empire had gotten stronger. Now Romans were no longer allowed to make these pagan sacrifices. The Christian god, they said, did absolutely nothing to protect the empire.

This charge against Christianity was so serious that a church leader named St. Augustine felt he needed to respond. In the early A.D. 400s, he spent 13 years writing a book called The City of God. This book, consisting of 22 volumes, explained what Christians believed to be the role of God in human history.

In The City of God, St. Augustine argued that the decline of Rome taught an important lesson. Cities such as Rome, like all worldly things, break down, he wrote. But the city of God, which for St. Augustine represented the Christian faith and its believers would last forever.

When the Roman Empire finally fell in the west, the church did not fall with it. In fact, Christianity continued to grow and increase its influence in the centuries that followed.