Did the Roman empire fall

The usual answer is that the Roman Empire fell in 476 AD because of migrating Germanic tribes that took over. I think the answer is much more complicated that that.

The Roman Empire did not fall in 476, the date usually given, and people of most of the empire were unaware of that year's being any different than any other. What happened in 476 was that Romulus Augustulus, the emperor of the West Roman Empire, was forced to abdicate by King Odoacer, when the King had demanded land in the heart of Italy. The emperor refused, so the King invaded and ended the Western Empire. In the mean time, the Empire in the East was renamed the Byzantine Empire and continued until 1453 AD.

The West Roman Empire had been in a state of increasing anarchy for decades under the pressure of Germanic tribes who migrated into the area, settled, and set up their own kingdoms, nominally within the Roman Empire. The Kingdom of the Franks was recognized as a kingdom within the Empire in 376.

My own feeling is that the West Roman Empire fell because of a combination of factors, among the most important of which is that the Roman soldiers were poorly paid in peacetime, and could only make a lot of money by looting areas taken from enemies. This caused the Roman Empire to expand greatly in the late republican days and the early periods of the empire (such as the reign of Trajan), but when the borders were established along the Rhine and Danube, and in the deserts of North Africa, there was not much left to conquer but Persia, which was logistically really difficult to take.

Not long after this time, the Roman Empire underwent the so called Crisis of the Third Century, in which the armies of the empire turned on each other, established their own local emperors, and made their livings by looting internally. Once that mess was firmly cleaned up, it had become necessary to recruit German soldiers to man the army. Diocletian and Constantine stopped the internal conflicts, but the damage was done. Citizens did not want to be in the army any more, and the military, in the West, was completely Germanic.

With the establishment of a weak emperor, the Germanic Generals who had risen from the ranks established puppets for themselves, and the Germanic tribes that wanted to come into the empire and settle were not effectively opposed.