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I have the impression that the historiography of the Roman Empire in recent decades has emphasized military defeat as the cause of the western empire's collapse rather than the older explanations of internal decadence (corruption and power seeking by the elites, agricultural decline, tax exhaustion, etc). In other words, from about the 3rd-4th century on, Rome "fell" because it was infiltrated and overwhelmed by its Germanic enemies. Does anyone have ideas about how the western empire could have survived into, say, the late middle ages like the eastern empire? How could the Romans have more effectively mobilized their resources to keep the barbarians from entering the gates?
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