La storia del venerdì: the Roman Empire's crisis

The Roman Empire's crisis happened between the III and the VII century a.C. The stop to the conquest wars brought a stop also in the supply of slaves, while a climate cooling was the reason for harvests decrease, famines and plagues spread, starting a demographic crisis. It is estimated that in the year 700 a.C. the population of the Western part of the Empire was down to 27 million of people against the 67 of the year 200. Other estimations put the data at 19/20 million. The cities depopulated, and so some rural areas, with consequences on the commerce: the long distance commerce disappeared progressively and a new local economy appeared, still based on the latifundium but aiming to the self-sufficiency. Social disparities increased; barbarian populations were let settling inside the Empire's borders to recover the most depopulated regions.

The economic and demographic crisis coincided with the biggest expansion of the Empire, which organisation had required some military and bureaucratic reforms implemented by Diocletian between 293 and 301 a.C. and then strengthen by his successor Constantine. Such reforms, even if necessary, had made bureaucracy and army hypertrophic and expensive and funded by a sharp tax increase. Population decrease, tax evasion, loss to the exchequer of whole regions now inhabited by barbarians lead to the tax system collapse and at the end of all those services provided with public money: road maintenance, aqueducts, public schools, bureaucracy, and army stopped working and the Empire in the pars Occidentis fell.

The immigration policy of the Empire failed definitively when the Visigoths, escaping the Unns, were let passing the Danube in the 375. After a short time, the rebelled and defeated the Imperial army at Adrianopolis on the 378, where Emperor Valens found his death. Since that time the borders weakened and broke in Winter of the 406-407.

The new populations, always in the minority respect to the Romans populations, interacted with them in very different ways: some opted for subjugations (Vandals), others avoided any mixture (Ostrogoths), others accepted the Catholicism, which was the State religion since the 380, and integrated with the local populations. Faster was the integration, longer lasted the new politic reality born, like the Franks Kingdom of King Clovis, who converted from paganism in 496.

In the V century, the Empire in the West was just a concept: the Roman-barbarians kingdoms acknowledged the Emperor's authority just formally. And in the 476, the Roman general Odoacer overthrew the last Emperor Romulus Augustulus and created a personal domain which will fall before the end of the century by hands of the Ostrogoths. The illiteracy became substantial among the laypeople and especially among the aristocracy. It was the beginning of the Church monopoly of culture which would have lasted until the XI century.

Instead, in the pars Orientis, backed by the strongest economy, less damaged by the climate change, the Empire tackled the barbaric migrations and lasted, even if reduced in size and with mixed fortunes until the Turkish conquest of Byzantium in 1453.