“The middle classes had been the mainstay of municipal life (…) now they too were weakened by economic decline and fiscal exploitation. Every property owner was subject to rising taxes to support an expanding bureaucracy whose chief function was the collection of taxes. Corruption consumed much of the taxes paid; a thousand laws sought to discourage, detect, or punish the malversation of governmental revenue or property. Many collectors over-taxed the simple, and kept the change; in recompense they might erase the tax burdens of the rich for a consideration.”
—Socrates of Constantinople, Ecclesiastical History, c. 439CE
“Italy was forced to depend upon its own human and material resources; and these had been dangerously reduced by family limitation, famine, epidemics, taxation, waste, and war. Industry had never flourished in the parasitic peninsula; now that its markets were being lost in the East and Gaul, it could no longer support the urban population that had eked out doles by laboring in shops and homes. The collegia or guilds suffered from inability to sell their votes in a monarchy where voting was rare. Internal trade fell off, highway brigandage grew; and the once great roads, though still better than any before the nineteenth century, were crumbling into disrepair.”
–Will Durant, describing Rome in 409CE
Under these conditions, the average peasant found themselves unable to pay their taxes–the very taxes which were supposed to fund (among other things) protection from raiding parties and highwaymen. Many fled to “barbarian” Germany, Gaul, and even north Africa under such duress.
Others chose to take the protection of local aristocracy in exchange for ownership of their land, including a percentage of their produce and labor. Thus feudalism was born, shortly after Alaric’s first incursions into Italy in 401. The the Dark Ages had begun in Europe, even before the last gasp of the Western Empire.
There’s an old saw about “those who cannot remember the past,” but I think the parallels are pretty obvious.