That’s true, but the notion that the Western Augustus being retired to a villa at the behest of the Eastern Augustus, who felt that Imperial affairs in Italy could be handled by the King of the Ostrogoths and Patrician of the Romans, Odovacer, on behalf of the Empire constituted the “fall” of an Empire is an absurdity inflicted on the world by Gibbon, who wanted to dispossess the Christian Roman Empire of its Romanity.
No one noticed the “fall of Rome” at the time (they noticed the sack of Rome decades earlier by the Vandals, they noticed the sack of the monastic communities of Scetis by the Maziques (Berbers), but the “fall of Rome” — a non-event).
It is as absurd to say the Roman Empire fell in the fifth century as it would be to say “America fell” in the 21st if some event in the next two decades detached the East coast from control of the United States (maybe the “red states” decide to boot out the “blue”), but our federal republic continued with its capital moved to, say Wichita, until 3115.
Rarely can a single historical event be pinpointed as ‘the cause’ of something, be it the so-called Fall of Rome, the Renaissance, The American Civil War or World War I. It’s usually a combination of things, places, people and plain old bad luck..............