 In 476 these troops finally unseated the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire.The Eastern Roman forces continued to defend the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire until its fall in 1453.The former Oxford University historian Adrian Goldsworthy has argued that the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire in the West should not be blamed on barbarization of the late Roman Army, but on its recurrent civil wars, which led to its inability to repel or defeat invasions from outside its frontiers.