The fall of the western empire, 476

On 4 September 476 a general named Odoacer deposed the boy emperor Romulus Augustulus and did not bother to name a new one.

Two empires

By the late 4th century the Roman empire was usually run by two emperors, one in the east and one in the west, each with his own court and army. When Theodosius I died in 395, the empire passed to his two young sons, Arcadius in Constantinople and Honorius in the west, and it was never again ruled from one place. The east was richer, more urban and harder to attack, protected by the walls of Constantinople and the sea. The west had long land frontiers along the Rhine and the Danube and a smaller tax base. In 402 Honorius moved his court to Ravenna, a city behind marshes on the Adriatic coast.

Goths, Huns and Vandals

The trouble began far to the east. Around 376, Gothic peoples fleeing the Huns asked to cross the Danube into Roman territory. They were let in but badly treated, and they rebelled. In 378, at Adrianople, they destroyed an eastern Roman army and killed the emperor Valens. From then on, Gothic and other groups lived inside the empire as allies, rivals and sometimes rulers. In 410 the Visigoths under Alaric sacked Rome for three days, the first time the city had fallen to an enemy since the Gauls around 387 BCE. Augustine of Hippo began writing The City of God in response, partly to answer people who blamed the disaster on Christianity. In 439 the Vandals captured Carthage, cutting the west off from the grain and taxes of Africa, and in 455 they sacked Rome for two weeks. Attila’s Huns invaded Gaul and were stopped in 451; Attila died two years later.

476

By the 470s the western emperors were puppets of army commanders, most of them of Germanic origin. In 475 the general Orestes put his young son Romulus on the throne; people nicknamed him Augustulus, "little Augustus". The next year Odoacer, an officer leading troops of Germanic peoples, killed Orestes and deposed Romulus on 4 September 476. According to a later chronicle, Odoacer spared the boy, gave him a pension and sent him to live in Campania. Odoacer did not name a new emperor. He ruled Italy as king, kept the Senate and the Roman administration, and paid lip service to the emperor Zeno in Constantinople. In 493 Zeno’s ally Theoderic the Ostrogoth killed Odoacer and took Italy.

Fall or transformation?

Few people in 476 thought the world had ended. The date became a turning point later, when historians looked back. In the east the Roman empire carried on for nearly a thousand more years, until the Ottoman Turks took Constantinople in 1453; historians call this later stage the Byzantine empire, though its people called themselves Romans. Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published from 1776 to 1789, blamed in part the rise of Christianity and the loss of civic virtue. In the 20th century, historians such as Peter Brown described a long "late antiquity" of change rather than a sudden collapse. Others, including the archaeologist Bryan Ward-Perkins, answered that the evidence on the ground shows a real fall in living standards in the west: fewer coins, poorer pottery, smaller buildings and even smaller cattle. The population of the city of Rome itself dropped from several hundred thousand to a fraction of that.