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.
Legacy of the Roman Empire those colonies were connected by another important legacy of the Roman Empire: the Roman roads. Indeed, the empire comprised more than of roads, of which over were stone-paved. The courses (and sometimes the surfaces) of many Roman roads survived for millennia. Many are overlaid by modern roads, like the Via Emilia in northern Italy. The road networks from the empire's territorial peak in 117CE are closely linked to cities having greater modern-day economic activity, particularly in European areas since they did not abandon wheeled vehicles in the latter half of the first millenium. In the mid-18th century, Roman architecture inspired