History of the Roman Empire disputes about the supreme authority, this finally formalised a peaceful succession of the emperor: in each half a "Caesar" would rise up to replace the "Augustus" and select a new "Caesar". On May 1, 305, Diocletian and Maximian abdicated in favour of their "Caesars". Galerius named the two new "Caesars": his nephew Maximinus for himself, and Flavius Valerius Severus for Constantius. The arrangement worked well under Diocletian and Maximian and shortly thereafter. The internal tensions within the Roman government were less acute than they had been. In "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", Edward Gibbon notes that this
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