Western Roman Empire
The Western Roman Empire did not fall in a single dramatic moment. On the 4th of September 476, a Germanic military leader named Odoacer deposed a teenage emperor named Romulus Augustulus in the city of Ravenna. Barely anyone noticed. No great mourning spread across the Mediterranean world. No clocks were stopped. Contemporary Romans did not even consider the empire to have split into two separate states; to them, it was one polity administered by two courts for practical reasons. Yet that quiet deposition in a marshy northern Italian city would later be declared by the 18th-century British historian Edward Gibbon as the definitive end of the ancient world. How did an empire stretching from the British coast to the Euphrates come to end with a shrug? And what exactly ended on that September day, if anything at all? The story reaches back through civil wars and plagues and the ambitious men who tried to hold an impossible structure together. It moves through the reign of a nine-year-old boy emperor, a catastrophic battle in the Balkans, a general murdered by his own emperor, and a pope who talked a king out of burning Rome. What came after was neither simple collapse nor simple continuation, but something far stranger.
In 43 BC, the territories of the Roman Republic were divided among the three members of the Second Triumvirate. Mark Antony received the eastern provinces, lands once conquered by Alexander the Great, where Greek culture and the Greek language served as the common tongue. Octavian took the western provinces: Italia, Gaul, Hispania, and eventually Africa. These were lands where Latin dominated and Celtic tribes such as the Gauls and Celtiberians remained culturally powerful. That original cultural and linguistic divide between a Greek-speaking East and a Latin-speaking West never fully dissolved, even as the Empire formally integrated. Communications and transportation made it worse. News of an invasion or rebellion in a distant province could take a very long time to travel by ship or mounted postal service to Rome and for orders to return. Provincial governors therefore held effective autonomy, commanding armies and collecting taxes largely on their own judgment. As the Empire expanded, two strategic frontiers pulled military attention in opposite directions. Behind the Rhine and Danube rivers, Germanic tribes pressed from the north and west. The first emperor, Augustus, had attempted to conquer them but pulled back after the catastrophic defeat at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. Meanwhile, the Parthian Empire in the East remained too powerful to subdue permanently. Even after successful wars by emperors such as Trajan and Septimius Severus, conquered eastern territories were ultimately abandoned to preserve a fragile peace. Controlling both frontiers at once during wartime proved nearly impossible. When an emperor was near the eastern border, ambitious generals in the West rebelled. The reverse was equally true.
The assassination of Emperor Alexander Severus by his own troops in March 235 opened a fifty-year catastrophe. Civil wars, barbarian invasions, peasant rebellions, plague, and a rapid succession of usurping generals consumed the empire. Philip the Arab, Trebonianus Gallus, and Aemilianus all seized the throne through military revolt, and each was removed the same way. During this Crisis of the Third Century, the idea of formally dividing the empire gained traction. Emperor Valerian and his son Gallienus split governance between them, Valerian ruling from the East and Gallienus from the West. When Valerian was captured by the Sassanids at the Battle of Edessa, Gallienus was left to manage alone. His infant son Saloninus and the praetorian prefect Silvanus were stationed in Colonia Agrippina, modern Cologne, to hold the loyalty of local legions. The regional governor Postumus rebelled anyway, and his assault on the city resulted in the deaths of both. From that chaos emerged an independent breakaway state historians call the Gallic Empire, centered on Augusta Treverorum, modern Trier, and stretching across Gaul, Hispania, and Britannia. It maintained its own senate and was more interested in repelling Germanic incursions than in fighting Rome. Emperor Diocletian drew the institutional lesson from all of this. In 286 he elevated his colleague Maximian to the rank of Augustus and gave him control of the West. Seven years later, in 293, he added two subordinate caesars, Galerius and Constantius Chlorus. This system, the First Tetrarchy, distributed power across four capitals: Mediolanum in the West, Trier in the northwest, Sirmium in the eastern Balkans, and Nicomedia in Asia Minor. The administrative east-west split was now formally built into the state.
Honorius, the younger son of Theodosius I, was declared co-emperor on the 23rd of January 393, at the age of nine. Two years later, on the death of his father, he inherited the western throne at the age of ten. He could not rule effectively and was placed under the tutelage of the half-Roman, half-barbarian general Flavius Stilicho. The western capital, initially at Mediolanum, was moved to Ravenna in 401 when the Visigothic king Alaric I entered Italy. Ravenna, surrounded by marshes and connected to the imperial fleet, was easy to defend. It was harder, however, to project military power from there into the Italian interior. Stilicho managed to defeat Alaric twice, but in doing so stripped the Rhine frontier of troops. In 406, the Vandals, Alans, and Suebi crossed the unguarded Rhine in large numbers. Honorius then allowed himself to be convinced that Stilicho was plotting against him and had his most capable general arrested and executed in 408. The soldiers who had served under Stilicho, their families now massacred at court order, defected to Alaric in massive numbers. Alaric returned to Italy, met little resistance, and when negotiations with Honorius collapsed in 410, his forces sacked Rome. The city was not the capital of even the western half of the empire anymore, but its symbolic weight was immense. It was the first time Rome had fallen to a foreign enemy since the Gallic invasions of the 4th century BC. The Eastern emperor Theodosius II declared three days of mourning in Constantinople. Britain, meanwhile, had been effectively abandoned by the empire by 410, leaving its Romanized population vulnerable to raids by Picts, then Saxons, Angli, and Jutes, who began settling permanently from around 440 onward.
Aetius rose to the rank of magister militum after a violent struggle with court rivals, relying heavily on Hunnic allies he had cultivated. With their help he stabilized the western military situation somewhat, fighting the Visigoths in Gaul in 437 and 438. Meanwhile, the Vandals under King Gaiseric crossed from Spain into North Africa in 429, halted briefly in Numidia in 435, and then captured Carthage on the 19th of October 439, establishing the Vandal Kingdom. By the 400s, Italy and Rome itself depended on taxes and food from those African provinces. The loss triggered an immediate economic crisis. The Hunnic king Attila united his people in 444 and turned against the western empire that had once cultivated him as an ally. In 449, Honoria, the sister of Emperor Valentinian III, offered Attila half the western empire if he would rescue her from a forced marriage. Attila secured peace with the eastern court and crossed the Rhine in early 451. Aetius gathered a coalition of Roman and Germanic forces, including Visigoths and Burgundians, and stopped Attila from taking the city of Aurelianum. At the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains the coalition defeated the Hunnic forces, though Attila escaped. He invaded Italy the following year. With Aetius lacking sufficient forces to attack, Valentinian sent Pope Leo I and two senators to negotiate. A plague among Attila's troops, the threat of famine, and news that the eastern emperor Marcian had launched an attack on the Hunnic homelands along the Danube combined to force a withdrawal. When Attila died unexpectedly in 453, the resulting power struggle among his sons ended the threat. Valentinian himself then killed Aetius directly at court, drawing his sword and striking the unarmed general on the head. Valentinian was killed the following year on the 16th of March by supporters of the dead general.
Majorian was the last Western emperor to attempt the reconquest of the empire through his own military force. After deposing the Visigoth-backed emperor Avitus, and with the eastern emperor Leo I not immediately appointing a successor, Majorian was proclaimed emperor by the army. He substantially rebuilt the western military, recruiting Gepids, Ostrogoths, Rugii, Burgundians, Huns, and other peoples as barbarian mercenaries and constructing two fleets. He won a decisive battle against the Visigoths at Arelate and forced them back to foederati status. He then defeated the Burgundians and recaptured the rebel city of Lugdunum. Having reasserted control over Gaul, he turned toward the Vandals in Africa. Throughout 459, he campaigned against the Suebi in northwestern Hispania to secure a base for an African invasion. The Vandal king Gaiseric, fearing a Roman landing in Mauretania, devastated parts of his own kingdom to deny the Romans a landing point and negotiated for peace, which Majorian rejected. Before Majorian could use his assembled fleet at Carthaginiensis, it was destroyed, allegedly by traitors paid by the Vandals. Without his fleet, the African campaign was abandoned. Majorian disbanded his mercenary forces and headed back toward Rome, stopping at Arelate. His own general Ricimer, who had gathered aristocratic opposition against him, arrested him there in 461. Five days of beatings followed. Majorian was then beheaded near the river Iria. Ricimer, who could not take the throne himself due to his barbarian heritage, ruled the West as a shadow emperor for years afterward through a succession of puppet emperors who held titles but no real power.
On the 4th of September 476, Odoacer, leader of the Germanic foederati in Italy, captured Ravenna, killed the general Orestes, and deposed the boy emperor Romulus Augustus. This event attracted almost no contemporary comment. Romulus was considered a usurper by the eastern court in Constantinople, because the legal western emperor, Julius Nepos, was still alive and ruling in exile in Dalmatia. Odoacer himself recognized Nepos as emperor and minted coins in his name. The eastern emperor Zeno eventually granted Odoacer patrician status as a viceroy of Italy, while insisting he formally pay homage to Nepos. When Nepos was murdered by his own soldiers in 480, a plot some attribute to Odoacer or to the previously deposed emperor Glycerius, Zeno chose not to appoint a new western emperor. He instead abolished the juridical division of the imperial office entirely and declared himself the sole emperor of the Roman Empire. The position would never be divided again. Zeno thus became the first sole Roman emperor in 85 years. In Gaul, a rump state known as the Domain of Soissons, ruled by a man named Syagrius who called himself governor of a Roman province rather than an independent king, had also recognized Nepos as the legitimate emperor. It survived until 486, when the Franks under King Clovis I defeated Syagrius at the Battle of Soissons and conquered the domain. Some historians therefore place the real end of the Western Roman Empire in 480, with the death of Nepos and Zeno's formal abolition of the western court. Others point to the 6th century, when Justinian's wars dissolved the old administrative institutions of Italy.
Odoacer ruled Italy using the Roman administrative systems already in place and maintained visible continuities with the imperial past. The Roman Senate, whose authority had actually increased under his rule, managed in 498 to install Symmachus as pope despite opposition from both Theodoric of Italy and the eastern emperor Anastasius. Copper coins were issued for the first time since the mid-3rd century with the legend SC, standing for Senatus Consulto, by decree of the Senate. Under the Ostrogothic king Theoderic, who killed Odoacer in 493 after sharing a meal with him, Roman administrative positions continued to be staffed exclusively by Romans and the laws of the empire continued to govern the Roman population. Latin did not disappear. Vulgar Latin combined with Germanic and Celtic languages to produce modern Romance languages, and today more than 900 million people are native speakers of those languages worldwide. The Catholic Mass was spoken exclusively in Latin until 1969. Roman law, particularly the Corpus Juris Civilis collected under Justinian I, became the foundation of modern civil law, now operative in some form in about 150 countries. The Latin alphabet, expanded by the splitting of I into I and J and V into U, V, and in some languages W, became the basis for more alphabets than any other writing system in the world. When Pope Leo III crowned the Frankish king Charlemagne as Roman Emperor in 800, the eastern emperor Michael I refused to recognize him as a Roman Emperor, conceding only the lesser title of Emperor of the Franks. The last eastern emperor to attempt a reconquest in the West was Manuel I Komnenos, who invaded southern Italy in the 1150s, briefly dreamed of reuniting the churches separated since the schism of 1054, and was ultimately forced to withdraw.
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Common questions
When did the Western Roman Empire officially end?
By convention, the Western Roman Empire ended on the 4th of September 476, when the Germanic leader Odoacer deposed the emperor Romulus Augustus in Ravenna. However, the legal western emperor Julius Nepos continued to rule in exile until his murder in 480, and some historians mark that date, when the eastern emperor Zeno abolished the western court entirely, as the true end.
Why was the Western Roman Empire divided from the Eastern Roman Empire?
The empire's vast size made central governance from Rome impractical, and communications by ship or mounted postal service were slow. Emperor Diocletian institutionalized the east-west division in 286 by appointing a co-emperor to govern the western provinces, a system expanded into the four-emperor Tetrarchy in 293. After the death of Theodosius I in 395 the empire split permanently between his two sons.
Who was the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire?
The last emperor actually resident in Italy was Romulus Augustus, deposed by Odoacer on the 4th of September 476. However, Julius Nepos, who had been forced out of Italy in 475, was recognized as the legitimate western emperor by Constantinople and continued to rule in exile in Dalmatia until his assassination in 480.
What caused the fall of the Western Roman Empire?
The collapse resulted from a combination of factors: repeated civil wars and usurpations dating to the Crisis of the Third Century, barbarian invasions across the Rhine and Danube, the loss of the wealthy North African provinces to the Vandals in 439, economic decline, and the inability of the western court to fund a professional army. The wealthy senatorial elite refused to approve sufficient funding for defense while also barring their tenants from military service.
Who was Odoacer and what did he do after deposing Romulus Augustus?
Odoacer was the leader of the Germanic foederati in Italy. After deposing Romulus Augustus on the 4th of September 476, he proclaimed himself ruler of Italy and negotiated with the eastern emperor Zeno, who eventually granted him patrician status as viceroy. Odoacer minted coins in the name of Julius Nepos, maintained the Roman Senate, and governed using Roman administrative systems until Theoderic the Great of the Ostrogoths defeated him in 489 and killed him in 493.
What was the legacy of the Western Roman Empire on modern languages and law?
Latin evolved into the modern Romance languages, including Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian, spoken today by more than 900 million native speakers worldwide. Roman law, especially the Corpus Juris Civilis collected under Justinian I, forms the basis of civil law, which operates in some form in about 150 countries. The Latin alphabet became the foundation for more writing systems than any other script in the world.
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