Collapse of Roman Empire

The Crisis of the Third Century (also "Military Anarchy" or "Imperial Crisis") (A.D. 235-284) was a period in which the Roman Empire nearly collapsed under the combined pressures of invasion, civil war, plague, and economic depression. The Crisis began with the assassination of Emperor Alexander Severus at the hands of his own troops, initiating a fifty-year period in which 20-25 claimants to the title of Emperor, mostly prominent Roman army generals, assumed imperial power over all or part of the Empire.

Internally, the empire faced hyperinflation caused by years of coinage devaluation. This had started earlier under the Severan emperors who enlarged the army by one quarter and doubled the legionaries' base pay. As each of the short-lived emperors took power they needed ways to raise money quickly to pay the military's "accession bonus" and the easiest way to do so was by simply cutting the silver in coins and adding less valuable metals like bronze or copper.

This had the predictable effect of causing runaway inflation and by the time Diocletian came to power, the old coinage of the Roman Empire had nearly collapsed. Some taxes were collected in kind and values were often notional in bullion or bronze coinage. Real values continued to be figured in gold coinage, but the nearly pure silver coin, the denarius, used for 300 years, was gone (1 pound of gold = 40 gold aurei = 1000 denarii = 4000 sestertii).

Over the previous century, several bouts of inflation had added to the hardships of millions of Roman citizens across the Empire. The economic crisis was largely due to the policies of successive 3rd-century emperors, who in an effort to pay the hugely increased number of soldiers and public officials on whom the empire's security and their own power depended, had minted coins with a face value far greater than their underlying value in gold or silver. While under the first Roman emperor Augustus, around 20 BC, a denarius had been virtually pure silver, 200 years later, it was only 50 per cent silver. By the time Diocletian became emperor in AD 284, the silver content of a denarius was half a per cent.

A steady debasement of the coinage during the 3d century had undermined all public confidence in the monetary system. Diocletian instituted a complete currency reform, and a uniform currency for the whole empire was devised. It appears, though the details are obscure, that this reform