As we talk about diverting resources, this slowly, the West declines and collapses in 476 AD. So, the Visigoths sack Rome in 410 AD, and in 476 AD the last Western emperor is deposed, marking the end of the Western Roman Empire. High-level question: what is the reason for that decline and the collapse of the Western Roman Empire? So, non-stop civil wars, as we've talked about, weak emperors, there's an economic money crisis, so shrinking tax base, rising army costs, there was a loss of key provinces, especially North Africa, reliance on contracted barbarian troops as they immigrated more and more into the Western Roman Empire, cascading invasions, migrations amplified by Hun pressure, and then the East-West split. The richer East survives, the West can't stabilize under that split.
The crux of the matter is that barbarian armies, so armies from outside the empire, put increasing pressure on it during the 5th century. And for whatever reason, when the Roman state failed to sort of suppress one of them and say, settled them here, or allowed them to have here, or couldn't stop them and they took over a province like the Vandals did in North Africa, this created this kind of vicious cycle because then the Roman state lost access to the resources from those provinces, that is the taxes, and without those resources, they couldn't, you know, maintain, mobilize, pay for their armies. Then they had fewer armies to handle the next wave of barbarians that came in. The previous barbarians who settled kind of declared their kind of independence. They also could not be put down, and so this created a vicious cycle that just continued in that way. It's not rocket science, actually. I mean, you can see it playing out. Yeah.
Now, who these groups are, where they came from, why did they cross — those are different questions, right? But from the Roman standpoint, that's how it was experienced. These are armies that can defeat a Roman field army, right, in battle. And sometimes they do. And they then settle and take over territories, and then you lose the revenues, and so you can't recruit your own armies, and so anyway, that's the kind of cycle. The East tried to help. Occasionally, they would send forces, but they were also subject to some of the same pressures. Because remember, the Goths crossed the Danube for the first time in a major way in 376. Then you have the Battle of Adrianople a couple years later, where like one and a half field armies is just annihilated, and the emperor Valens dies, and the Goths are just like kind of loose in the Balkans. And there was then a long war with them, four years. It results in a kind of truce, where neither side wins, and the Romans for the first time accept the presence of this quasi-independent Gothic army in the territory of the empire. This is unprecedented, as I said, and it creates a lot of tensions and dysfunctions. Okay.
So, why does the East survive and the West does not, right? So, there's lots of reasons that we can give here, but one of them is the geography that we were talking about earlier. In other words, without a fleet, which they don't have, the Goths can't cross over from Thrace or the western Balkans to Asia Minor and go plunder some of the more prosperous provinces. So, they're stuck in the Balkans. They're gradually pushed kind of in toward the western Balkans, which is like the worst part you know at the time, like you want to be in. And eventually they just decide, well, you know, it's kind of nicer in Naples. And so they go to Italy, right? Just because there's just a lot more resources there for them. And that's one way that the East just kind of manages to — it doesn't do this deliberately, but the geography kind of pushes these invaders to the west.
