The eastern half of the empire was just as Christian and didn’t collapse for another thousand years, so you can’t really point to Christianity as the cause.
I don’t know why people obsess over finding a cause for the fall of Rome when it was one of the world’s longest lasting empires. We should be more interested in how it endured for over a millennia (nearly two thousand years if you count the Republic) whereas most continent-spanning empires fell apart in a handful of centuries or even decades.
That's actually quite a good remark. The most compelling theory I have read on the fall of the western part of the empire was that a mode of production based a land based elite that relied on slavery came to have a lot of limitations. The war machine kept it going as new land could be given to fighting soldiers (that would become less of a threat when settled) and fueled the economy with ever more slave.
When Rome invaded the hellenistic region, there was already an established economy that relied a lot less on big domains worked by slaves and that region managed to keep it that way. Thus when the slave mode of production came to a dead end, it was the part of the empire that relied massively on it that collapsed.
Another interesting point was that the adoption of Christianity made the elite even bigger with the whole Church apparatus now living the life and putting even more pressure on the system.
> mode of production based a land based elite that relied on slavery came to have a lot of limitations
This whole theory came from the 60s where Marxist historiography was very popular and really is not based on much.
It just basically taking the Marxism 101 and plastering it over the historical empire and the source base for it is a few political speeches.
Modern history that looks this can almost universally not verify many of these claims based on the sources used. Making incredibly complex economic argument to analyses a society where we have almost 0 visibility on economic data is quite a tall order.
By the time the empire was at maximum size, the Roman citizenship was very broad and while large scale slave agriculture was still a thing the majority of the empire was not large scale slave agriculture. Certainty far less so then it was in late Republic where the amount of slaves compared to the amount of citizenship was far higher.
The reality is that by 300-400 century Roman was a pretty advanced economy that had a very significant private sector, banking, a mix of all kinds of agricultural system and a huge amount of trade. Modern research suggest analyzing Rome as some elite land based economy is a really bad idea.
> Another interesting point was that the adoption of Christianity made the elite even bigger with the whole Church apparatus now living the life and putting even more pressure on the system.
This fails to account for the fact that Paganism also had many state sponsored position and that the state spent a lot on religious festivals. Both in Rome and all over the empire.
Also, it has to be considered that Christianity only became relevant by the point where the problems of the Western empire were already very apparent and the constant civil wars of the 300rd century caused massive problems.
In effect, Christianity is really more the result of the Roman instability then the cause.
Ooops I must have found it too compelling only because it aligned with my worldview (and was well written). Thanks for taking the time to assess those arguments.
I don’t know why people obsess over finding a cause for the fall of Rome when it was one of the world’s longest lasting empires. We should be more interested in how it endured for over a millennia (nearly two thousand years if you count the Republic) whereas most continent-spanning empires fell apart in a handful of centuries or even decades.