The short answer that most people learn is 476 AD. That is the year a Germanic chieftain named Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus, the last emperor to rule in the West, and sent the imperial insignia to Constantinople rather than appointing a replacement. It is a tidy date. It is also, in important ways, misleading.
Rome did not fall the way a tree falls. There was no single crack, no moment when the whole structure came down at once. What happened was a centuries-long unravelling, and large parts of what we call the Roman Empire kept going, in recognizable form, for another thousand years after 476.
476 AD is a convention
Romulus Augustulus was, at the time of his deposition, a teenager who had been emperor for less than a year. His father, a general named Orestes, had installed him. When Odoacer's forces defeated Orestes and took Romulus out of power, they did not declare the end of Rome. They wrote to the Eastern emperor in Constantinople and said, in effect, that one emperor was enough for the whole empire and the West would be governed from there.
The Eastern emperor at the time, Zeno, already recognized a different claimant as the legitimate Western emperor anyway. From a strictly legal standpoint, the continuity of Roman imperial authority was unbroken. The 476 date was popularized largely by Edward Gibbon in the 18th century because it was a convenient stopping point for a narrative about decline, and it stuck.
The Eastern Empire survived until 1453
The empire that continued from Constantinople, which we call the Byzantine Empire (a name its inhabitants never used for themselves), was Roman in law, language, administration, and self-understanding. They called themselves Romans. They spoke Greek, which had always been the dominant language in the eastern half, but their legal code, their imperial titles, and their city's self-image were entirely Roman in origin.
Constantinople fell to the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II on May 29, 1453. That is probably the more honest endpoint for the Roman Empire, if you need one. It is just a lot less convenient to teach.
What actually eroded the West
The western provinces did not simply lose a war. They wore down over a very long time. Several things happened more or less at once, and they made each other worse.
The borders were enormous and expensive to defend. At its height under Trajan in the early 2nd century AD, the empire stretched from Scotland to Mesopotamia. Holding that perimeter required a professional army of perhaps 300,000 to 400,000 men, and by the 3rd century the cost was becoming unmanageable.
To pay those costs, the government debased the currency. The silver content of Roman coins fell steadily through the 3rd century. By around 270 AD, the antoninianus, which was supposed to be a silver coin, was essentially bronze with a silver wash. The result was inflation that made economic planning nearly impossible.
Political instability made everything worse. In what historians call the Crisis of the Third Century, roughly 235 to 284 AD, the empire went through approximately 50 emperors in 50 years. Most of them were generals who seized power and were then killed by other generals. Several provinces broke away entirely for stretches of time. The Gallic Empire and the Palmyrene Empire both operated as independent states before being reabsorbed. The empire held together, but it was badly damaged.
410 AD: the psychological shock
The Visigoths under Alaric sacked Rome in 410 AD. They were inside the city for three days. In military terms, it was not catastrophic: much of the damage was contained, and the Visigoths left. But the shock to Roman self-understanding was enormous. The city of Rome had not been sacked by a foreign enemy in 800 years, since the Gauls in 390 BC. St. Augustine began writing The City of God partly in response to the event. The idea that Rome was eternal, that the city at the center of the world could not fall, turned out to be wrong.
The Vandals sacked Rome again in 455 AD, more thoroughly this time. By then, the Western emperors were mostly figureheads controlled by their own generals. The idea of a functioning Western Roman state was already threadbare.
Decline or transformation?
Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published from 1776 onward, remains one of the great works of historical writing in English. His answer to the question was essentially moral and political: internal weakness made the empire vulnerable to outside pressure, and Christianity shifted Roman culture away from civic and military virtues. Modern historians have pushed back hard on parts of this, particularly on the role of Christianity.
Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire (2006) puts the emphasis back on external pressure, particularly the Huns, who pushed the Goths and other peoples into Roman territory and set off a chain of migrations the empire could not manage. Bryan Ward-Perkins's The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (2005) argues against the fashionable revisionist view that the "fall" was really just a peaceful cultural transformation. Ward-Perkins points to hard archaeological evidence: pottery quality, literacy rates, the size of buildings, all declined sharply in the former western provinces after the 5th century. Something real was lost.
The honest answer is that both things are true. There was a real collapse in living standards and institutional capacity in the West. There was also a genuine continuation and transformation in the East. The Roman Empire did not fall so much as it changed shape, shed a half, and carried on for another millennium in a different form. You can find out more about some of the popular myths that surround Roman history, and browse individual stories in the Fact Archive.
Sources: Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1789); Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire (Macmillan, 2006); Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford University Press, 2005).
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