Vasily Vasilievsky and Ivan Grevs on the causes of the fall of the Western Roman Empire (based on little-known sources)

Abstract

The use of little-known sources in this paper, such as student competition work by Ivan Grevs and the scientist’s sketches on the study of Roman land ownership, preserved only in manuscript, makes it possible to add a number of touches to his and Vasily Vasilevsky’s concept of the causes of the Fall of the Western Roman Empire. The authors of the paper tried to show that I. Grevs developed the idea of small farms as the cause of the fundamental instability of the economy of the Roman Empire, which was first used by his teacher V. Vasilevsky. The main thesis of I. Grevs was that if latifundia appeared, it was only the personal property of the emperor, which could then be maintained for some time by the nobility appropriating these possessions. Thus, contemporaries correctly considered I. Grevs to be a supporter of the C. Rodbertus and K. Bücher economic theory on the features of traditional economics, but this theory did not exhaust his views. From this point of view it is possible to say that I. Grevs initially proceeded from the thesis that the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West was a natural result of the economic models that existed in the World of late Antiquity of the Mediterranean.

Keywords

• ivan grevs
• vasily vasilievsky
• roman empire
• economic theory of rodbertus and bücher