Fall of Western Rome: Antonine Plague, Little Ice Age and a Frozen Rhine

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The Western Roman Empire ended in 476 without a battle: Odoacer deposed the teenage emperor Romulus Augustulus at Ravenna, and the Senate shipped the imperial insignia to Constantinople. Edward Gibbon blamed barbarians and Christianity, but historians now speak of late antiquity and draw on tree rings, ice cores and cave stalagmites. The Roman Climatic Optimum, about 200 BCE to 150 CE, produced the grain surplus and tax base that paid for the army; from the mid second century the climate turned colder and drier, ending in the Late Antique Little Ice Age. Roman roads and shipping lanes carried the Antonine Plague, likely smallpox, and the Plague of Cyprian, while malaria thrived around elite estates with fountains and water features.

Senatorial aristocrats escaped taxation with private armies called bucellarii and bribed assessors, while peasants traded land and freedom for protection and became coloni. A law of Constantine ordered molten lead poured down the throats of servants who aided an elopement. In 376 Gothic refugees fleeing the Huns were extorted by commanders such as Lupicinus, and at Adrianople in 378 two-thirds of the eastern field army died along with Emperor Valens. Rome turned to foederati, whole tribes paid by treaty. The Rhine froze in 406, Alaric sacked Rome in 410, and the Vandals took Carthage in 439, cutting off the West's grain and taxes. The East, shielded by geography and the Theodosian Walls, lasted until 1453.

• Gibbon published The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the late 18th century.
• Starving Goths were forced to trade their children into slavery for dog meat.
• Valens's body was never recovered after Adrianople.
• Alaric had fought for Rome as an allied commander before the Western government repeatedly failed to pay him.
• St. Jerome, writing from Bethlehem, lamented that the whole world perished in one city.