The "Fall of Rome" usually refers to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century A.D. But historians don't agree about the exact date, nor about its causes. And some historians argue that the Roman Empire lasted until it fell in the East, centuries later.
At its height around A.D. 100, the Roman Empire stretched from modern Britain, France and much of Germany in the northwest to Egypt, Israel and Jordan in the southeast, and from what are now Morocco and Spain to Romania, Armenia and Iraq. Later emperors divided it into more manageable pieces, resulting in the Western and Eastern Roman Empires. But by the end of the fifth century A.D., the Western Roman Empire, from Britain to Italy, had collapsed and been replaced by a patchwork of "barbarian" kingdoms.
"Part fell to invaders, and part disintegrated," Bryan Ward-Perkins(opens in new tab), a historian at the University of Oxford and author of "The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization(opens in new tab)" (Oxford University Press, 2006), told Live Science in an email. "What difference this made to people on the ground is disputed."
