Historiography of the fall of the Western Roman Empire

The causes and mechanisms of the fall of the Western Roman Empire are a historical theme that was introduced by historian Edward Gibbon in his 1776 book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Though Gibbon was not the first to speculate on why the empire collapsed, he was the first to give a well-researched and well-referenced account of the event, and started an ongoing historiographical discussion about what caused the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

Source: Wikipedia — Historiography of the fall of the Western Roman Empire (CC BY-SA 4.0)