A List of Years That Rome Fell, Ranked

Comparing and contrasting the merits of the arguments behind various dates for the end of the Roman Empire

Historians have used the word “fall” to describe what happened to the Roman Empire for time immemorial. Empires have certainly fallen in the past, but the story of what happened to Rome after the peak of its territorial expanse in A.D. 117 makes things difficult to pin down depending on our definitions of what a fall is, what an empire is, and what Rome…