Fall of the Western Roman Empire (476): Romulus Augustulus

The fall of the Western Roman Empire is traditionally dated to 4 September AD 476, when the Germanic general Odoacer deposed the young emperor Romulus Augustulus at Ravenna and did not appoint a successor. Odoacer sent the imperial regalia to Constantinople and ruled Italy as a king. The event itself was quiet, but it became the conventional end of ancient Rome in the West and the start of the European Middle Ages, and the question of why Rome fell remains one of history’s great debates.

Background: a century of crisis

By the late 4th century the Western half of the empire was under heavy strain. The arrival of the Huns on the steppe around 370 drove Goths into the empire, and in 378 they destroyed a Roman army at Adrianople. After 395 the empire was permanently governed by two courts (see Division of the Roman Empire), and the West had to rely mainly on its own resources.

Those resources shrank quickly. Vandals, Alans and Suebi crossed the Rhine in 406. Britain slipped out of Roman control around 410, the same year Alaric’s Goths sacked Rome (see Sack of Rome). Visigoths, Burgundians and Franks settled in Gaul, and the Suebi in Spain.

The decisive blow was the Vandal capture of Carthage in 439, which took away Rome’s richest provinces in North Africa and much of its tax revenue. With less money, the government could pay fewer soldiers, and it relied increasingly on barbarian federates who fought under their own leaders.

Generals and puppet emperors

From the early 5th century real power in the West lay with military strongmen rather than emperors. Stilicho dominated until 408 and Aetius from the 430s until 454. Aetius held off the Huns at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains in 451 but was murdered by Valentinian III in 454, and Valentinian was killed in turn in 455.

That year the Vandals of Gaiseric sacked Rome again, plundering it for two weeks. In the following 21 years, nine emperors reigned in the West. The general Ricimer, of Suebian and Visigothic descent, made and unmade several of them until his death in 472.

By the 470s the Western government controlled little beyond Italy and parts of the Alpine and Dalmatian regions. Gaul and Spain were held mainly by the Visigothic, Burgundian and Frankish kingdoms, and Africa by the Vandals.

The last emperors

In June 474 Julius Nepos, a general from Dalmatia backed by the Eastern court, became Western emperor. He appointed Orestes as his commander-in-chief. Orestes was a Roman from Pannonia who had once served as a secretary to Attila the Hun.

In August 475 Orestes turned the army against Nepos, who fled from Ravenna to Dalmatia on 28 August 475. On 31 October 475 Orestes proclaimed his own son, Romulus, emperor. The boy was probably in his early teens. His contemporaries nicknamed him “Augustulus”, meaning “little Augustus”, a mocking play on his imperial title.

The Eastern court refused to recognise him. In Constantinople, Nepos was still regarded as the lawful Western emperor.

Odoacer’s revolt and the deposition

The army in Italy by now consisted largely of soldiers from Germanic peoples such as the Heruli, Sciri, Rugii and Turcilingi. In 476 they demanded land in Italy, reportedly one-third of it, as federates elsewhere had received. Orestes refused.

The troops turned to one of their officers, Odoacer, who promised them the land. They proclaimed him king on 23 August 476. Orestes fled to Ticinum (Pavia), was captured and executed at Placentia (Piacenza) on 28 August. His brother Paul was killed near Ravenna on 4 September, and Odoacer entered the city.

Odoacer spared Romulus Augustulus, according to the Anonymus Valesianus because of his youth and good looks. He deposed him and sent him to live with relatives at the Castellum Lucullanum, a villa near Naples, with an annual income of 6,000 solidi.

The message to Constantinople

Odoacer did not make himself emperor, nor did he appoint a puppet. Instead the Roman Senate, at his direction, sent an embassy to the Eastern emperor Zeno with the imperial insignia. According to the historian Malchus, the envoys declared that one emperor was enough for both halves and asked Zeno to give Odoacer the rank of patrician and the government of Italy.

Zeno’s answer was cautious. He told them that they should take back their lawful emperor, Nepos, but addressed Odoacer as patrician. Odoacer struck coins in the name of Nepos and later of Zeno and kept the Roman administration and Senate in place.

Julius Nepos continued to claim the title in Dalmatia until he was murdered on 9 May 480. Odoacer then annexed Dalmatia. From that point no one claimed to be emperor in the West.

Odoacer’s Italy

For Italians, daily life changed little in 476. Odoacer ruled from Ravenna as king (rex), worked with the Senate and Roman officials and kept Roman law. His soldiers received land, probably through a reallocation of estates or of the tax revenue from them.

In 488 Zeno encouraged Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, to invade Italy. After a four-year war, Theodoric took Ravenna and killed Odoacer with his own hands on 15 March 493, founding the Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy (see Theodoric the Great).

Why 476?

At the time, 476 did not look like the end of an empire. Roman law, cities, the Senate and the Church carried on, and most people still thought of themselves as living in a Roman world.

The date gained significance later. In the 6th century the Eastern chronicler Marcellinus Comes, writing in Constantinople, recorded that the Western Empire of the Romans perished with Augustulus. Writers in the East, who wanted to justify Justinian’s wars to reconquer Italy and Africa, found this view useful. Later historians, especially in the Renaissance and Enlightenment, made 476 the dividing line between antiquity and the Middle Ages.

Other dates have been proposed for the end of Roman rule in the West, among them 410, 455, 480, and 486, when the Frankish king Clovis defeated Syagrius, the last Roman ruler in northern Gaul.

Why did Rome fall? The great debate

Few historical questions have produced more answers. The German historian Alexander Demandt collected 210 explanations offered over the centuries. The main schools of thought include:

• Internal decline. Edward Gibbon, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789), blamed the empire’s size, the loss of civic virtue, reliance on mercenaries and, controversially, Christianity.
• External pressure. Historians such as Peter Heather argue that the Huns set off migrations that the West could not absorb, and that the loss of Africa in 439 fatally reduced its tax base.
• Transformation, not fall. From the 1970s scholars following Peter Brown described late antiquity as a time of change and continuity, in which Roman institutions merged with new Germanic kingdoms.
• Real collapse. Archaeologists such as Bryan Ward-Perkins counter that the material evidence shows a dramatic fall in living standards, trade, building and literacy in the West after about 400.

Most historians now see a combination of factors. External invasions struck an empire weakened by civil wars, fiscal pressure and political instability, while the wealthier and better-protected East survived.

Myths and facts

Myth: Rome fell in a single day. The deposition of 476 was the end of a long process. Much of the West had already passed under barbarian kings decades earlier.

Myth: the barbarians destroyed Roman civilisation at once. Odoacer and Theodoric kept Roman law, officials and the Senate. Roman culture, Latin and the Church survived and shaped medieval Europe.

Myth: the whole Roman Empire ended in 476. The Eastern Empire continued for nearly a thousand years, until the Fall of Constantinople in 1453.

Myth: lead poisoning or a single cause explains everything. Single-cause theories, from lead pipes to climate to moral decay, have little support among specialists, who stress multiple interacting causes.

Key people

• Romulus Augustulus (born c. 460s): emperor from October 475 to September 476.
• Orestes (died 476): his father, a former secretary of Attila and commander of the army.
• Odoacer (c. 433–493): soldier who deposed Romulus and ruled Italy as king from 476 to 493.
• Julius Nepos (died 480): Western emperor 474–475, recognised by Constantinople until his death.
• Zeno (died 491): Eastern emperor who received the imperial insignia.

Timeline

• 395: The empire is permanently divided between two courts.
• 410: Alaric’s Goths sack Rome.
• 439, 19 October: The Vandals capture Carthage.
• 455, June: The Vandals sack Rome.
• 474: Julius Nepos becomes Western emperor.
• 475, 28 August: Orestes drives Nepos from Ravenna.
• 475, 31 October: Romulus Augustulus is proclaimed emperor.
• 476, 23 August: The army proclaims Odoacer king.
• 476, 4 September: Odoacer takes Ravenna and deposes Romulus Augustulus.
• 480, 9 May: Julius Nepos is murdered in Dalmatia.
• 493, 15 March: Theodoric kills Odoacer at Ravenna.

Why it matters

The deposition of Romulus Augustulus ended the line of Roman emperors in the West that had begun with Augustus five centuries earlier. Whether seen as a collapse or a transformation, the fall of the Western Empire opened the way to the kingdoms from which medieval and modern Europe developed, and the question of how a great power can decline continues to fascinate historians and readers alike.