Practice question · Select all that apply
Which were real symptoms of the third-century crisis?
Hints
- The symptoms were political, monetary and epidemic.
- One listed option involves an enemy destroyed centuries earlier.
Show the answer
- A. Silver coinage debased until prices exploded
- C. Plague and simultaneous wars on three frontiers
- D. Roughly twenty-six emperors in fifty years, mostly killed by their own troops
Why
The empire nearly died of a feedback loop: each murdered emperor raised soldiers’ pay to buy loyalty, paid for it by debasing coins, and the inflation helped motivate the next murder.
Practise The Roman Empire and its Fall
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on The Roman Empire and its Fall
- A German scholar once catalogued every reason ever proposed for Rome’s fall, lead pipes, Christianity, taxes,…
- Sort each claim: does it belong to the decline narrative or the transformation narrative?
- Foederati were peoples settled inside the empire by treaty to fight for Rome. Why does that arrangement…
- The Roman Empire continued in the east for nearly a thousand years after 476.
- The Roman Empire had a standing army of perhaps 350,000 for fifty million people and no police. How was such…
- Order the empire’s long arc.
- Complete the historiographical map.