Rome nearly broke apart under twenty-six rival emperors
From 235 AD, after troops murdered Severus Alexander, the Roman Empire staggered through invasions, plague, and civil war. At least twenty-six men claimed the purple. Aurelian's reunification in the 270s marked the turn before Diocletian rebuilt the state.
The trouble had deep roots. After Marcus Aurelius died in 180, his son Commodus ruled corruptly until he was assassinated in 193, and the scramble that followed, the Year of the Five Emperors, put Septimius Severus on top. To keep the legions loyal Severus raised their pay and handed out large donatives, a habit his dynasty kept up; each round of loyalty cost more, and military spending swelled. Because the empire still pretended to be a republic, nobody had ever fixed a rule for choosing the next emperor.
The breaking point came in 235. Severus Alexander, more worried about the Sasanians than about German raiders, tried to buy peace on the Rhine, and his own soldiers killed him. Their pick, Maximinus, became the first barracks emperor, a general with no political experience, pedigree or hereditary claim whose power rested purely on the army. Around two dozen men were accepted as emperor over the next half century while Goths, Vandals, Carpians and Alamanni crossed the Rhine and Danube and Persia struck from the east.
Defensive war also starved the treasury, since there was no longer plunder from conquered lands, and civil wars drained manpower. Coinage was debased, trade networks collapsed, and the Plague of Cyprian added to the chaos. In 260 Gaul, Britain and Hispania broke away as the Gallic Empire, and in 267 Syria, Palestine and Egypt formed the Palmyrene Empire, leaving an Italian rump menaced on every side.
Recovery came from hard-bitten soldier emperors. Claudius II beat an invading Gothic army at Naissus in 268 or 269, and Aurelian, reigning from 270 to 275, crushed both breakaway states and reformed the currency. Diocletian's victory over Carinus in 285 and his overhaul of government ended the crisis, but many western cities never recovered. Historians increasingly treat these decades as the hinge between classical and late antiquity.
Source: Crisis of the Third Century
