I like Maiorianus as a channel. I discovered it while I was on vacation and binged most of the videos released to this point. This last video is pretty good obviously.
There is also a video emphasizing that the real "collapse of Rome" for the city of Rome anyway, was during the period between 530-600, not 476.
I like this channel too. It covers a very interesting topic: the transition from the late antiquity to the early middle ages.
In the videos, we saw that people living in the italian peninsula in 476 didn't see that date as the end of the Western Roman Empire. Odoacer was just seen as the new western roman emperor. He was germanic, but the germanic people were very integrated. The narrative that the Western Roman Empire fell in 476 was built in the Byzan... ops Eastern Roman Empire in ~500, in order to justify the reconquer mission of Justinian.
The city of Rome started to loose population and wealth in 320, when Constantine created Constantinople, and when there were the 3 sacks in the 5th century. The richest families left the city. In 476, the city of Rome was already impoverished, there were between 100K and 200K inhabitants, much smaller than the peak of 1M but still one of the world's biggest cities in that time. The most splendorous building lost the statues in the sacks, but the buildings themselves were not destroyed. The aqueducts were still in use, people were still drinking water from them, the bath houses were still in use. The Colosseum was empty since 400, but there were still chariot races in the Circus Maximus. The city was like that until 530. Only after the Gothic Wars, the ancient city was almost all destroyed, and Rome became a small medieval village, with no more than 30K inhabitants.
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