When did the roman empire fall and when did the dark ages begin?

Answer 1

It is believed that the Roman Empire had stopped his own existence 4 September 476 year, when ROMUL August disclaim of throne

Dominant term to denote period since the fall Western Roman empire to Renaissance was made by Petrarca concept «dark century", which in the contemporary historiography means more narrow span of time (VI-VIII century).

Answer 2

The Roman Empire started a long, slow decline about 300 years before the West Roman Empire fell. The reason for this was largely that it was constantly at war. If the Romans were not fighting the German tribes along the Rhine or Danube rivers or the Persians in the East, they were usually having a civil war of some sort. Constant warfare exhausted the empire in many ways, with cities destroyed, crops ruined, and sometimes so many people killed in one area or another, that foreigners were invited to settle to populate them. The armies became more and more full of foreign soldiers, who had no loyalty to the empire itself.

The Dark Ages, which are possibly better called the Early Middle Ages, began with the ending of the authority of emperors of the West Roman Empire. They were times when there was a lot of work being done establishing new kingdoms in the territories that had been in the empire. But they were also times when people did not write much down, and so they have been called Dark because we have few records of what was happening.

There were reasons for the lack of literacy, based on the traditions of the Germanic tribes that took over the territory of the West Roman Empire. They had traditions of oral, rather than written, learning. Germanic law was administered by judges who memorized it, rather than read it, and the people might even have disrespected scholars who could not memorize everything. For a while, only the Church and a very few schools, such as the Medical School at Salerno, maintained written learning in Latin.