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 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Christianity and then of the Roman State Church, and the history of Europe, and discusses the decline of the Roman Empire among other things. Gibbon’s work remains a great literary achievement and a very readable introduction to the period, but considerable progress has since been made in history and archaeology, and his interpretations no longer represent current academic knowledge or thought. Gibbon offers an explanation for the fall of the Roman Empire, a task made difficult by a lack of comprehensive written sources, though he was not the only historian to attempt it. According to Gibbon, the Roman Empire succumbed