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.
Structural history of the Roman military off deep in the enemy's rear. Simultaneously, barbarian troops in Rome's pay came to be "in a condition of almost perpetual turbulence and revolt" from 409 onwards. In 476 these troops finally unseated the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire. The Eastern Roman forces continued to defend the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire until its fall in 1453. The former Oxford University historian Adrian Goldsworthy has argued that the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire in the West should not be blamed on barbarization of the late Roman Army, but on its recurrent civil wars, which led to