The Fall of Rome

Why this matters

Debasing Roman coins to pay soldiers solved one problem by creating a bigger one: the inflation that followed hurt the same ordinary Romans and soldiers the government needed most. Money losing value quietly is a less dramatic cause than an invasion, but it did real damage long before any Gothic army reached the city gates.

Rome didn't actually end in 476 CE, and getting my students comfortable with that fact takes some doing, since the Eastern half of the empire kept functioning as the Byzantine world for close to another thousand years after the west went down. The fall stops looking like a clean ending once that half survives it entirely.

From one teacher to another

Somebody always wants a single villain for the fall of Rome, and I spend most of this lesson taking that away from them. We sort the causes into political, economic, and military buckets first, then I hand them Jordanes's account of the 410 sack, written by a Gothic-descended historian nearly a century and a half after the fact, so they have to weigh the source instead of just reading it. By the time they get to 476 CE, they've already learned that the fall was western-only, gradual, and about as messy as history actually gets.