What led to the downfall of the Roman Empire?
https://www.dw.com/en/what-led-to-the-downfall-of-the-roman-empire/a-62670728
Niall Ferguson, Western Civilisation: Decline – or Fall?
The Roman Empire did not decline and fall over a millennium, as Gibbon's monumental work seemed to suggest.
Akvedukten vid Zaghouan
Only in art and lore was Rome suddenly sacked by barbarians who appeared out of nowhere
https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2021/08/only-in-art-and-lore-was-rome-suddenly.html
Here comes Kyle Harper, professor of classics at Oklahoma university, with a delicious new theory.
It wasn’t just lusty emperors and barbarian vandals who brought down the Empire, he says. It was climate change, solar cycles, volcanoes and rampaging plague that conspired to destroy the biggest imperial project the world has ever seen.
The weather deteriorated in 150–400 AD — the ‘Roman Transitional Period’ — and hit temperature lows in the ‘Late Antique Little Ice Age’, from 450–700 AD, when the Empire fell apart.
The worst aspects of climate change, Harper maintains, hit the Empire just as it was blighted by its most serious bouts of disease. In 165 AD, the Antonine plague, probably caused by smallpox, struck.
In 249 AD, an unknown type of pathogen followed. Then, in 541 AD, the first great pandemic of Yersinia pestis, which causes bubonic plague, arrived and lingered for more than two centuries.
Even the least of these catastrophes, the Antonine plague, killed 7,000,000, according to Harper’s methodical calculations. Compare this to the bloodiest day in Roman military history, the Battle of Adrianople in 378 AD, between the Eastern Romans and Goths, when 20,000 died.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/-while-rome-freezes
Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) Hardcover – October 12, 2021 by Kyle Harper
https://www.amazon.com/Plagues-upon-Earth-Princeton-Economic/dp/069119212X
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 2.0
https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2019/12/decline-and-fall-of-roman-empire-20.html
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