Fall of the Western Roman Empire
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The Decline of the Roman Empire, also called the Fall of the Roman Empire, or the Fall of Rome, is a historical term of periodization for the end of the Western Roman Empire. Edward Gibbon, in his famous study The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), was the first to use this terminology, but he was neither the first nor the last to speculate on why and when the Empire collapsed. It remains one of the greatest historical questions, and has a tradition rich in scholarly interest. In 1984, German professor Alexander Demandt published a collection of 210 theories on why Rome fell.<ref>Alexander Demandt: 210 Theories, from Crooked Timber weblog entry August 25 2003. Retrieved June 2005.</ref>
The traditional date of the fall of the Roman Empire is September 4, 476 when Romulus Augustus, the de jure Emperor of the Western Roman Empire was deposed by Odoacer. Many historians question this date, noting that the Eastern Roman Empire continued until the Fall of Constantinople in 29 May 1453. Some other notable dates are the death of Theodosius I in 395 (the last time the Roman Empire was politically unified), the crossing of the Rhine in 406 by Germanic tribes after the withdrawal of the legions in order to defend Italy against Alaric I, and the death of Stilicho in 408, followed by the disintegration of the western legions. Many scholars maintain that rather than a "fall", the changes can more accurately be described as a complex transformation.<ref>Template:Cite book </ref> Over time many theories have been proposed on why the Empire fell, or whether indeed it fell at all.
