Historiography of the fall of the Western Roman Empire Historiography of the fall of the Western Roman Empire The causes and mechanisms of the Fall of the Western Roman Empire are a historical theme that was introduced by historian Edward Gibbon in his 1776 book "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". He started an ongoing historiographical discussion about what caused the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, and the reduced power of the remaining Eastern Empire, in the 4th–5th centuries. Gibbon was not the first to speculate on why the Empire collapsed, but he was the first to give a well-researched and well-referenced account.
The Fall of the Roman Empire (film) historical events. However, in the long-established view of Roman history, Marcus Aurelius is considered as the last of the Five Good Emperors whose time is considered the best of Roman imperial history. Commodus is generally considered to have fallen far below the standard set by his father and the four earlier Emperors, and his reign is considered as the beginning of the decline - though that would still take several centuries. In the winter of 180 A.D., the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius fights to keep Germanic tribes from invading his northern territories on the Danube frontier (a war which in