Dying Symptoms Of The Roman Empire/edit

Dying Symptoms Of The Roman Empire

https://listverse.com/2016/10/13/10-dying-symptoms-of-the-roman-empire/

Currency Debasement.

Another side effect of inflation was the hoarding of coins. Unlike the debased coins, the “good coins” were kept as long as possible. Archaeologists have found many coin hoards from the late Roman Empire, a sign of economic uncertainty

 AD 68–69 period is known in Roman history as “The Year of the Four Emperors,” which may be considered a premonition of the countless episodes of imperial instability and double-crossing that would later affect the Roman emperors.

political turmoil of this period is reflected in the writings of Tacitus. His introduction to this period of Roman history (Histories 1.2) reads: “The history on which I am entering is that of a period rich in disasters, terrible with battles, torn by civil struggles, horrible even in peace and four emperors killed by the sword.”

early Roman Empire, the Roman army was supported with the booty of conquest. Each new region that was conquered by the Romans brought new land, new slaves to be sold, new taxpayers, and other forms of wealth.

When the Roman Empire reached its maximum size, the army activity became largely defensive. There was no booty conquest to support the soldiers, and the army had to be supported by taxes.Once the guarantor of Roman growth and prosperity, the army gradually and ironically became a necessary evil that drained the wealth of the Roman people. The increasing tax pressure required to run the army forced many members of the Roman middle class into poverty

Barbarian pressure was not a new thing in Rome. What was different this time was the almost complete incompetence of the Roman army to successfully repulse the invaders as they had many times in the past.

the power of the army increased, the Praetorian Guard occasionally got involved in the process of appointing new emperors, usually favoring those who favored them.

they were able to literally make and unmake Roman emperors. In many cases, the Praetorian Guard simply murdered these emperors.

A pretender to the throne would promise to pay a substantial reward if he became emperor. The sooner the acting emperor “finished” his government, the better for the Praetorian Guard’s pockets.

Emperor succession became truly messy during the late history of the Western Roman Empire. Many emperors died by the sword of their own bodyguards, 

The backbone of the Roman economy was agriculture. It has been estimated that more than 90 percent of the late empire’s population were rural poor and endured a precarious existence/

implied an imbalance between the rural and the urban. 

Cities were sometimes seen as “predators” on the labor of peasants leading to the exhaustion of the land. 

Its borders were so big that they required a considerable army presence to keep them safe. But above all, it was no longer possible to control this vast realm from the city of Rome.

A Roman emperor being deposed by a military leader was nothing new in Rome. The novelty was that nobody else was named emperor after Romulus Augustulus’s deposition and that Odoacer was crowned as king of Italy.

the Roman Empire was a shadow of its former self. Even the capital of the Western Empire had been moved from Rome to Ravenna. The Roman West was no longer an empire. It had dissolved into several smaller political units (kingdoms and city-states).