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I've gotten into several debates recently about what the causes were of the structural weakness inside of the Empire that rendered it unable to withstand the migrations of the 5th Century. It seems to be generally concurred that a stronger Roman state had survived objectively greater crises before (see: Crisis of the III Century), and could have done so again, but for various internal weaknesses in the army, government, and civil service.

So, what were ultimately the causes of those weaknesses?

I've seen it argued that the Christianization of the Empire was what rendered it unable to survive, making the argument that Christians were less willing to fight for the Empire or otherwise. However, I don't buy this for several reasons. Firstly, the East--the most heavily Christian part of the Empire--survived much, much longer. Secondly, the Barbarians who set up successor kingdoms (rather than transitory peoples like the Huns) were almost always Christian, with the exception (the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes) colonizing an extremely peripheral province that Rome made essentially no effort to defend in the V century.

I would instead make the argument that the genuine cause of this institutional collapse was climate change leading to economic decline. It has been found by modern scholarship that there was a major cool period between roughly the Fifth and Eighth centuries CE. This may have played a role in precipitating the Migrations, but also hindered the economic prosperity of the Empire as agriculture became less productive. To counter this, later emperors began introducing the Colonate and other early forms of serfdom, both binding Citizens to the land (and thus preventing them from being soldiers) and reducing their stake in the Empire to the point where they didn't really care if it was a Roman or Barbarian ruling them, or in some cases actually preferred Barbarian rule to escape hereditary obligations. Ultimately, this stress was one the Empire could not handle.

(On a side note, I think that this points to what was exceptional about the Roman state and what gave it its longevity, it's ability to for much of its history give the ordinary citizen a stake in the continued prosperity of the Empire without falling too much into mob factionalism and short-term goals. I'm not saying that it was a model society, nor that democracy would be unsustainable either then or now, but rather that the Roman model was very well suited for an extremely large and diverse empire. Once this broke down, at least in the West, the Empire collapsed).

So, what do you all think was the primary cause, if any, of the Imperial collapse?
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