ABSTRACT
The restored Roman Empire of the fourth century had disintegrated during the fifth and sixth. Since the time of Montesquieu and Edward Gibbon, many modern thinkers' attempts to find a specific explanation for Rome's fall. In general, the economy of the late antique Roman world declined in the fifth and sixth centuries, sooner and more steeply in the West than in the East and more in some ways than in others. In the West, the Germanic successor kings tried at first to maintain Imperial-style fiscal and monetary systems. The economic trends of the fifth and sixth centuries accompanied major social and demographic changes. Although the urban population of the Roman Empire as a whole was probably never much more than 10 percent, the classical Greco-Roman city gave Roman civilization its unique character. Many developments in late Imperial Christianity involved heresies and schisms such as Arianism, monophysitism.
