When Did the Roman Empire Fall?
It is a truth universally acknowledged that all historical empires have an expiration date. The Assyrian Empire fell when its capital, Nineveh, was sacked by the combined forces of Medes and Babylonians in 612 BC. The Persian Empire of Darius III fell when it was conquered by Alexander the Great in 330 BC; even its great successor, the Sassanian Empire, fell with its last king, Yazdegerd III, to the armies of the Arab Caliphate in AD 651.
More recent imperial formations all have well-known death dates: for example, the Aztecs’ regional hegemony in the New World (d. 1521); the millennia-old Middle Kingdom of China (d. 1911); or the House of Habsburg’s dynastic European empire of Austria-Hungary (d. 1918). The only major historical empire whose year of death is still disputed is Rome. Some even say that the empire never died at all, but lives on in various forms until the present – imperium sine fine indeed.
The question of how and why Rome declined and fell is complex and well-trodden, while also being intimately tied into debates about the nature of empire, migration and indeed European and Western identity. To avoid getting lost in this morass, my aim is more limited: to provide the Roman Empire with a dignified death certificate, clearly stating the time and place of its demise. Since from AD 395 onwards the Roman Empire was divided into two independent entities, we will look at events and years affecting both the Western and Eastern halves of the Roman Empire.
