When did the Roman Empire fall (your thoughts)?

[sonic]

It's not as if the Battle of Adrianopolis was a complete disaster. Yes, two thirds of Valens army was lost, but that would only have amounted to something like 16,000 men at the most, and the Western army was largely intact. No, there must have been another factor and if we could only identify what that factor was then we could start to see waht actually casused the Western Empire to collapse.

For an unknown reason everybody remembers the disaster that was the Battle of Adrianople as the 'last major defeat of the Roman army'.

After Adrianople there were two major defeats for the Western army. In 388 Theodosius defeated the West in a hard-fought civil war at the Battle of the Save, during the course of which large numbers of Western troops were lost. As if that wasn't enough, in 394 there was another civil war during which even more Western troops were killed at the Battle of the Frigidus. These two major defeats for the West was the major cause of the West's manpower shortages.