How did the roman empire suffer in its final years?

Answer 1

The western part of the Roman Empire fell under the weight of the invasions by the Germanic peoples.

In 406 the Vandals, Sueves Aland and Burgundians from central Europe crossed the frozen River Rhine and begun their invasion of Gaul. The Alemanni from southern Germany took advantage of this to take over part of north-eastern Gaul (Alsace) and Switzerland (apart from the canton Ticino, south of the Alps).

The Germanic peoples carved up the western part of the Roman Empire and established their own kingdoms in its former lands.

The Vandals, Alans and Sueves reached Spain in 409. The Sueves formed a kingdom in the northwest of this peninsula. The Vandals and Alans moved on to northwest Africa in 429 because the Visigoths were expanding into Spain. The formed the kingdom of the Vandals there. Their kingdom ended in 534 when they were defeated by the "Byzantine" Romans who took it over. The Burgundians formed a kingdom in eastern France.

The Visigoths, who had been allowed to settle in the eastern part of the empire by the Romans, moved to south-western Gaul and established their own kingdom there. By the late 400s their kingdom expanded into most of southern Gaul and most of Hispania, except for the kingdom of the Sueves in the northwest of the peninsula and small areas of the Basques and Cantabrians. However, the Franks were pushing into southern France. In 507 the Visigoths were defeated and lost their possessions in Gaul to the Franks.

The Franks, who had been allowed to settle in Holland south of the river Rhine and Belgium by the Romans, expanded into northern France. In 486 they took over the Domain of Soissons, a rump Roman state in central Gaul. In 496 they defeated the Alemanni and took over their territories which also included part of southern Germany. In 507 they expelled the Visigoths from southern Gaul. They defeated the Burgundians in 532 and annexed their kingdom in 534. Thus they took over the whole of Gaul except for Provence and Brittany.

. The eastern part of the Roman Empire was not affected by these invasions and continued to exist for nearly 1,000 years. Historians have coined the term Byzantine Empire to indicate the eastern part of the Roman Empire after the fall of the western part. The Romans did not use this term. They called it Roman Empire or Romania (which referred to this empire, not the modern country).

The term Byzantine is derived from Byzantium, the Greek city which was redeveloped, turned into the imperial capital of the eastern part of the Roman Empire and renamed Constantinople by the emperor Constantine the Great in 330. It is used to indicate the fact that not long after the fall of the western part, this empire became centred on Greece and Greek in character after it lost most of its non-Greek territories. Greek replaced Latin as the official language of this empire in 620, some 150 years after the fall of the west.