Opposing Forces In Imperial Rome

Opposing Forces in Imperial Rome
It would come as no surprise if someone were to comment that the fall of the Western Roman Empire took place at the hands of Barbarians. In 410 C.E., the Visigoths crossed Roman walls and took the capital of the Roman Empire. “Pressured by defeat and battle, starvation, and the movement of other groups, the Visigoths moved westward from their homeland north of the Black sea.” (McKay, 210) What is in dispute is what additional forces – whether internal or external – also led to that fall. The fall of the Empire was not simply due to the encroaching military effort of a number of gothic tribes that had long since surrounded Rome, but was, in fact, only possible and, thus, plausible because of internal factors …show more content…
For each distant defeat the military pursued, smaller factions of regional ethnic tribes migrated towards the capital in an effort to protect themselves against further torment but also to align themselves with an economic system that provided opportunity. “Successive civil wars dislocated the army’s administrative and logistical structures, its training patterns, recruitment and also its discipline, which suffered whenever license was given in an effort to win loyalty.” (Goldsworthy, 409) These gothic tribes formed what resembled city-states on the outskirts and surrounding the empire and mirrored the empires’ economic system as taxes were a major source of revenue for the empire and its wars. In fact, in an age when the economy was “operating at maximal output…there was much extra slack left by the year 400 to fund still larger armies after the major increases in tax extracted a century earlier to fund the new armies required on the Persian front.” (Heather, 445) There it was, even at maximal output, the economy had all but plateaued partly because the strain put on the empire’s economic system was further exacerbated by the insecurities of those elite paying the taxes; taxes they believed had been levied, in the first place, in order protect the empire. In order to guarantee safety against encroaching forces, merchants able to afford the tax levy were paying dues both to the government of the empire but also “tended to ingratiate themselves with the rising barbarian powers” so as to further guarantee safety. This Romano-German relationship was founded on peaceful, mutually beneficial

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Opposing Forces In Imperial Rome

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