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Late Antiquity
Constitutional Failure
Caesar Augustus had bequeathed to the Empire a simple but insoluble problem: how to choose an emperor. We can see that various approaches were tried, but none proved able to survive a serious crisis. After the crisis of the third century, Diocletian created an entirely new system that both worked and did not work. As he'd designed it, the system of the Tetrarchy fell apart in the first generation after his death. The more general principle of Augusti and Caesari, though, persisted for some time, as did the fundamental division between an eastern and western half of the Empire.
In areas where the imperial presence was weak, the vacuum of power was marked. Tax collection, justice, the army, all these were curtailed or vanished altogether. The Empire needed an emperor, plain and simple, and where the Empire was unable to maintain that, there the Empire faded away. The Roman tradition was to let each municipality rule itself, so long as it paid taxes and generally ceded ultimate authority to Rome. But when the imperial tax collectors stopped coming around, and the Roman legion went home, the local communities were on their own.
This is what I mean by a constitutional failure. The Roman system never integrated communities into itself. Some communities Romanized themselves, true, but there was nothing in the Roman system of government that assured this would happen. As central Roman authority withdrew, or became sporadic, or was simply driven out, we see local governments coming up with a myriad of responses on their own.