I'm halfway through "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"'s 8 volumes right now. Their decline took a few centuries and there were tons of reasons why.
But so far imo the largest reason for the decline was the emergence of christianity within the Empire. That led to a lot of christians wanting to spread the gospel or whatever one wants to call it. So they let in hoardes of Germanic barbarians from the north while having unreliable lines of communication to the west and east. This led to internal strife and power struggles over the course of a hundred fifty or so years. Overbloated government didn't help at all either. Then at some point most of their citizens had no allegiance to Rome and sorta just stopped paying taxes and the Legions had become spread thin so they didn't have a way to project power to ensure that farther regions of the empire paid their taxes. Decadence of the bureaucratic and middle class didn't help either.
Sooo many reasons but the US is following along many of those as we speak. Scary shit.
The fuck it was due to the Christians. Funny how Rome could be conquered by satanic Arians and have that blamed on the Christians. But these Arians started Catholicism, so I suppose to the winner goes the spoils.
I'm halfway through "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"'s 8 volumes right now. Their decline took a few centuries and there were tons of reasons why.
But so far imo the largest reason for the decline was the emergence of christianity within the Empire. That led to a lot of christians wanting to spread the gospel or whatever one wants to call it. So they let in hoardes of Germanic barbarians from the north while having unreliable lines of communication to the west and east. This led to internal strife and power struggles over the course of a hundred fifty or so years. Overbloated government didn't help at all either. Then at some point most of their citizens had no allegiance to Rome and sorta just stopped paying taxes and the Legions had become spread thin so they didn't have a way to project power to ensure that farther regions of the empire paid their taxes. Decadence of the bureaucratic and middle class didn't help either.
Sooo many reasons but the US is following along many of those as we speak. Scary shit.
The fuck it was due to the Christians. Funny how Rome could be conquered by satanic Arians and have that blamed on the Christians. But these Arians started Catholicism, so I suppose to the winner goes the spoils.