Fall of Rome

For five hundred years the Roman Empire was the largest, richest, most durable state the western world had ever seen — a machine of roads and legions and law that ran from the moors of Britain to the sands of Arabia. And then, across a single tumultuous century, the western half of it came apart in the hands of its own generals and the peoples it could no longer keep out. In the year 476 a Germani...