Rose and the Fall of The Roman Empire

So let's start at the start of where things went wrong for real
With Augustus
Augustus did nothing wrong per se
In fact he was amazing
But there was a problem
A major problem
All of his chosen successors kept dying
So he was unable to set up a legitimate line of succession before his death
And he couldn't just name one of his sons Emperor because Rome still detested monarchy and he had to work around things
So Emperors were crowned not by a succession law, but by whoever had the backing of the army
This was the first big mistake
As you can imagine the army didn't always back the same dude, so civil war happened
A lot
Praetorians were already pretty established by that point
But anywho
So Rome had civil wars and stuff, but they were offset by being able to expand and loot neighbors like crazy
Eventually we come to the reign of the 5 Good Emperors
AKA "Kicking the bucket down the road"
They were good for the time
But not for the long-term
(Except Marcus Aurelius)
But
Marcus Aurelius was the last of them
Because he appointed his terrible son Commodus to be his successor, who had full backing of the army because
A: Marcus Aurelius was tite as hell so
B: They trusted in his choice of succession
Commodus is the start of where things actually start to go wrong yes
Dude was massively corrupt and crazy, I could write a ton about him but the bottom line is
He really sucked hard and got assassinated
Which then caused a succession crisis and more civil wars and Emperors were brought in and assassinated like it was going out of style
The Year of the Five Emper-
Yeah what KKRP's talking about
Big ol' upheaval
Anywho
After all this crazyness Rome was kinda spent for a while
Barbarian incursions happened but nothing too unmanageable at first
But worst of all
By far worst of all
Were Persians
Rome had been at war with Persia for as long as they had shared a border
But some of these new Emperors decided that they would be the ones to take it out
Many LARP'd as Alexander, imagining a Rome that stretched all the way to India
One of them, le angry Roman disdain for plebs man, literally brought back phalanx and hoplite formation
700 years out of date
He was assassinated by one of his soldiers after taking a piss
Just to give you an idea of how well that went
Point is
Rome threw itself at Persia hardcore
Manpower drained
Continuously
Enough to still fight against Persia
But not enough to man the border with Germania and outer Dacia
Which didn't used to be a problem
But then they started getting more
Pushy
Rome reached its maximal extent under Trajan after conquering (and genociding the everloving hell out of) the Dacians
And capturing Mesopotamia from the Persians
But that didn't last long
Migrations from out east were forcing Germanic tribes to push more and more into Roman territory seeking refuge
Rome's solution was to take these peoples and hire them as mercenaries, since its manpower was so low
A plague hit around this time too, making the situation all the more dire
It turns out that tribal mercenaries suck compared to lifelong-trained Roman soldiers
Especially when it comes to fighting the same tribes they came from
And especially when it comes to communications
Also the Germanic tribes were using increasingly advanced weapons and tactics
Knowledge had finally diffused out of Rome and the Germanics weren't the same backwards barbarians they used to be
They had full chainmail, powerful axes, advanced tactics, and so on
This wouldn't have been a problem for Rome in theory
Were it not for the plague
The lack of men
And a series of ludicrously incompetent Emperors
Some of whom were children
Long story short
Rome gets sacked in 410
Then lives on for 66 years as a rump state
Before being sacked again
All the while its old holdings being ravaged by barbarians
The Eastern Roman Empire holds on for quite a while longer though
Like a full 1000 years longer
Justinian even reconquered all of Italy, North Africa, parts of southern France, and about 1/4 of Iberia
(Mentioned that Persia is close to the East Roman Empire)
This was the big problem for Eastern Rome
At first
They kept fighting the Persians
This exhausted both the ERE and Persia for 200 or so years
Until DING DING DING SURPRISE
RIGHT AFTER YOUR WORST PLAGUE IN YOUR HISTORY AND BLOODIEST WAR EVER
WITH NO MANPOWER LEFT AND YOUR EMPIRES IN TATTERS
HERE COMES ISLAM
So Islam exploded out
Conquered all of Persia and most of the ERE
Almost captured Constantinople itself but they were repelled
Then it was a long, slow, slow, slowwwwwww decline
Bulgarian incursions
Islamic incursions
The 4th Crusade
Turks
Islamized Persians
More Turks
Civil wars
Oh did I mention Turks again
Finally what undid them was the Turks
The last vestige of Rome was a rump state in southern Crimea composed mainly of Greeks, Tartars, and Goths all living together in a weird Tengri-Roman-Greco-Germanic hybrid state
IIRC it fell in 1476
1000 years after the fall of the city of Rome