Fall Of The Roman Empire Dbq Essay

The fall of the Roman Empire in 476 C.E. happened for many reasons. The first reason being the laziness of the Roman Empire’s military. The second reason is that many natural disasters including diseases struck the empire. The third and final reason is the social injustices that weakened patriotic spirit for Romans.

For the vast majority of the empire’s existence, Roman soldiers wore helmets and breastplates as armor and practiced military drills. Then, in 400 C.E., the Roman military felt there wasn’t a need for drills anymore. “But when, because of negligence and laziness, parade ground drills were abandoned, the customary armor began to seem heavy since the soldiers rarely ever wore it.”(Document B). When faced with battle from constant

Near the end of the Roman Empire there were many natural disasters that caused numerous Roman casualties. “The shores of the Mediterranean were left dry by the sudden retreat of the sea,... but the tide soon returned with the weight of an immense [flood] which was severely felt on the coasts of Sicily, Greece and Egypt.” (Document F). During this flood 50,000 people died in just Alexandria. This loss of lives meant that there were drastically less people to draft into the military. The number of people who died in natural disasters and from fighting without armor was a huge blow to the Roman Empire. Along with the natural disasters, there was disease that swept the empire, causing even more deaths and a massive decline in the amount of people fit to fight for Rome. “A series of plagues that swept the empire… which brought diseases [from] southern Asia to new areas like the Mediterranean, where no resistance had been established even to contagions such as measles. The resulting diseases decimated the population. The population of Rome decreased from a million people to 250,000.”(Document F). After all of these diseases struck the empire it was very difficult to find soldiers fit for battle. This led to Roman military officials recruiting Germanic soldiers to defend Rome. Since the Roman Empire needed to pay for its troops it also needed the money to do this. The empire decided to increase

In the Roman Empire people with wealth, and money to spare could get away with a lot more than people with little money. “A [wealthy lawbreaker]... is not punished for his injustice, while a poor man… undergoes the legal penalty.”(Document E). This sentence states how a person with wealth can basically bribe a law official into letting them get off the hook. This would lead to a spike of crime since so many Romans could get away with anything even if it was illegal. Think of the flaws in that ‘system’, if somebody robbed some money, they could theoretically bribe law enforcement out of punishing them with the money they had stolen! Along with people getting away with so much, this flaw led to decline of patriotic spirit among the lower-class citizens. They would be less willing to fight for the empire that they live in because of the unfairness and injustice of its law enforcement. All of this leads back to the fact of their weakening military, making the Roman Empire extremely vulnerable to the many invasions near its