Fall of the Western Roman Empire

In the summer of 476, soldiers in Italy, many of them from Germanic-speaking groups serving in the Roman army, demanded land to settle on. Their commander, the patrician Orestes, refused. The soldiers turned to one of their officers, Odoacer, who promised to give them land. They proclaimed him king on 23 August 476. Odoacer defeated Orestes, who was executed near Placentia (modern Piacenza) later that month, and then took Ravenna, the seat of the western imperial court.

Orestes’ young son, Romulus Augustulus, had been placed on the throne by his father in October 475. On 4 September 476 Odoacer deposed him. Instead of killing the boy, he gave him a pension and sent him to live at the Castellum Lucullanum, a villa-fortress near Naples. His name, combining Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome, and Augustus, the first emperor, has seemed to later writers like a sign that the story had come full circle.

Odoacer then did something unusual. He did not make himself or anyone else emperor. Instead, the Roman Senate sent the imperial insignia to Constantinople, telling the eastern emperor Zeno that one emperor was enough for both halves of the world, and asking that Odoacer be allowed to govern Italy. Zeno gave an ambiguous reply, reminding them that Julius Nepos, an earlier western emperor driven out by Orestes, was still alive in Dalmatia.

For centuries afterwards, 476 was treated as the end of the Western Roman Empire. The sixth-century chronicler Marcellinus Comes, writing in Constantinople, already presented the deposition of Augustulus as the end of the western empire. But many people living in 476 may hardly have noticed: Roman officials, the Senate and the courts in Italy continued to work, and Odoacer governed through them.

At its height in the second century CE, the Roman Empire stretched from northern Britain to the Euphrates River and from the Rhine and Danube to the Sahara. It held perhaps 50 to 70 million people, linked by roads, sea routes, one army, Roman law, and the Latin and Greek languages.

In the third century the empire went through a severe crisis: many emperors were murdered, the Persian Sasanian Empire defeated Roman armies, and invaders crossed the frontiers. The emperor Diocletian (284–305) reorganized the empire, dividing power among several rulers and greatly increasing the army and the bureaucracy. His successor Constantine (306–337) adopted Christianity and founded Constantinople as a new capital in the east.

After the death of Theodosius I in 395, the empire was permanently divided between his two sons: Arcadius in the east, ruling from Constantinople, and Honorius in the west. It was still considered one empire with two emperors, but the two halves increasingly went their own ways. The eastern half was richer and more urban, and better protected by geography; the western half had longer frontiers and a weaker tax base.

By 400, the western capital was no longer Rome, but first Milan and then, from 402, Ravenna, a city protected by marshes near the Adriatic. The city of Rome remained a symbol of the empire and the seat of the Senate and of the bishop of Rome, the pope.

Romans. The western emperors in this period were often weak or very young, and real power was held by generals called magister militum (master of soldiers). Among the most important were Stilicho (d. 408), himself of Vandal descent, Flavius Aetius (d. 454), who fought the Huns, and Ricimer (d. 472), who made and unmade several emperors. Roman landowners, bishops and city councils also played a large role in how regions responded to crisis.

Goths. The Goths lived north of the Danube and Black Sea. The Visigoths, as they are usually called, entered the empire in 376, sacked Rome in 410 and later created a kingdom in Gaul and Spain. The Ostrogoths, under Theoderic, conquered Italy from Odoacer in 489–493.

Vandals, Alans and Suebi crossed the Rhine around 406 and moved through Gaul into Spain. In 429 the Vandals, led by Geiseric, crossed to North Africa and took Carthage in 439, depriving the western empire of its richest provinces. Franks and Burgundians settled in Gaul, and Angles, Saxons and Jutes in Britain after Roman forces left in the early fifth century.

Huns. The Huns, nomadic horsemen from the steppes, arrived north of the Black Sea around 370. Their movement pushed other groups toward the Roman frontier, and under Attila in the 440s and early 450s they raided both halves of the empire. After Attila’s death in 453 their empire quickly fell apart.

376–382: the Goths enter the empire. Fleeing the Huns, large numbers of Goths asked to cross the Danube and were admitted by the eastern emperor Valens. Mistreated and exploited by Roman officials, they rebelled. On 9 August 378, at Adrianople in Thrace, they destroyed a Roman army and killed Valens. In 382 Theodosius I made a treaty allowing them to settle as a semi-autonomous group within the empire, a new and risky arrangement.

406–410: the frontier breaks and Rome is sacked. Around the end of 406 Vandals, Alans and Suebi crossed the Rhine into Gaul, and usurpers rose in Britain and Gaul. In Italy, Stilicho was executed in 408, and Roman soldiers massacred the families of barbarian troops in Italian cities, driving many of those soldiers to join the Gothic leader Alaric. After failed negotiations, Alaric’s Goths sacked Rome on 24 August 410, the first capture of the city by a foreign enemy in about 800 years.

418–454: loss of provinces and the age of Aetius. The Visigoths were settled in Aquitaine in southwestern Gaul in 418. Britain was effectively abandoned. The Vandal conquest of Africa (429–439) was perhaps the most damaging loss, cutting off grain and tax revenue. Aetius held Gaul together with the help of allied groups and in 451, with Visigoths, Franks and others, fought Attila’s army to a standstill on the Catalaunian Plains. In 452 Attila invaded Italy but withdrew. In 454 Emperor Valentinian III murdered Aetius; he was himself assassinated the next year.

455–476: the end of the western court. In 455 the Vandals sacked Rome again, for two weeks. For the next two decades a series of short-lived emperors reigned, several of them raised and removed by Ricimer. Attempts to recover Africa, including a huge joint eastern and western expedition in 468, failed. In 474 the East installed Julius Nepos, but in 475 his general Orestes drove him out and proclaimed his own son Romulus. In 476 Odoacer deposed Romulus. Nepos, recognized by Zeno, continued to claim the western throne from Dalmatia until his murder in 480, which some historians take as the real end of the western line of emperors.

The question of why the Western Roman Empire fell is one of the most debated in all of history. The German historian Alexander Demandt famously collected some 210 explanations that have been proposed over the centuries. Most modern historians agree that there was no single cause, but they weigh the factors differently.

External pressure. One school emphasizes the arrival of the Huns and the movement of many peoples into the empire, which the West could not absorb or defeat, together with the long rivalry with Sasanian Persia that tied down eastern resources. Peter Heather, for example, has argued that the western empire was brought down mainly by outside forces set in motion by the Huns.

Internal weakness. Others stress civil wars, usurpations and the rivalry between generals; the heavy burden of taxation and the loss of revenue from provinces seized by others; the greater exposure and poorer resources of the West compared with the East; and the growing reliance on allied barbarian troops (foederati) whose loyalty was to their own leaders.

Environment and disease. Recent research has added climate and epidemics to the picture. Historians such as Kyle Harper have argued that a shift to less favourable climate and a series of pandemics from the second century onwards weakened the empire over the long term, though the size of this effect is debated.

Older explanations, such as moral decadence, the rise of Christianity (stressed by Edward Gibbon) or lead poisoning, are now generally rejected or seen as at most minor factors. The fact that the eastern empire, which was just as Christian, survived is often cited against simple religious explanations.

Odoacer ruled Italy until 493. In 489 the eastern emperor Zeno encouraged Theoderic, king of the Ostrogoths, to invade Italy. After years of war and a long siege of Ravenna, Theoderic took the city in 493 and killed Odoacer with his own hands at a banquet. Theoderic’s Ostrogothic kingdom (493–553) kept much of the Roman administration and Senate, and Roman scholars such as Boethius and Cassiodorus served at his court.

Across the former western provinces, new kingdoms were founded by Visigoths in Spain, Franks in Gaul, Burgundians in the Rhône valley, Vandals in Africa, and various groups in Britain. Their kings usually ruled a population that was overwhelmingly Roman and used Roman law, Latin documents and the church to govern. The Frankish king Clovis, baptized as a Catholic Christian around 500, founded the kingdom from which France and Germany would later emerge.

The eastern Roman Empire continued, calling itself simply “Roman”. Under Justinian I (527–565), its armies reconquered North Africa from the Vandals (533–534) and, after a devastating war lasting until 554, Italy from the Ostrogoths. But in 568 the Lombards invaded Italy, and the eastern empire could not hold most of the West. It survived, with its capital at Constantinople, until 1453.

In 800 the pope crowned the Frankish king Charlemagne as emperor in Rome, reviving the title of Roman emperor in the West. This showed that the idea of Rome remained powerful long after the western empire itself had ended.

For many people, the fifth century was a time of violence, fear and loss. Cities were besieged and sacked; farms were burned; people were killed, enslaved or held for ransom. Contemporary writers describe the horror of the sack of Rome in 410; Jerome, in Bethlehem, wrote that the city which had captured the whole world had itself been captured. Refugees from Italy fled to Africa and the East.

Victims were not only Romans. The Gothic refugees of 376 were starved and exploited by Roman officials, and the historian Ammianus Marcellinus reports that some were forced to sell their own children into slavery for food. In 408 Roman troops in Italy massacred the wives and children of barbarian soldiers. Enslavement, the forced movement of people and the destruction of communities affected all groups.

At the same time, many regions adapted. In southern Gaul, Spain and Italy, Roman landowners and bishops negotiated with new rulers, kept their estates and served in their governments. Bishops often became local leaders, organizing defence, ransoming captives and feeding the poor. Writers such as the priest Salvian of Marseille even argued that some Romans preferred to live under barbarian rule rather than endure the injustice and heavy taxes of Roman officials.

Archaeology shows great regional differences. In Britain, Roman towns, villas and coin use disappeared within a few decades after 400. In parts of Italy, Spain and southern Gaul, change was slower. In the eastern Mediterranean, the fifth and early sixth centuries were in many places a time of prosperity.

The idea of the “fall of Rome” has been told differently depending on who is telling it. For Renaissance humanists, the end of the western empire marked the beginning of a “dark” middle age between the glory of antiquity and their own revival of classical learning. Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789) made the theme famous in English, describing it as “the triumph of barbarism and religion”.

In nineteenth-century Germany, nationalist historians often celebrated the Germanic peoples as vigorous heirs who renewed a tired empire, while in France and Italy the period was sometimes seen as a tragedy of invasion or as the origin of national kingdoms such as that of Clovis. Such interpretations reveal more about modern national identities than about the fifth century; modern scholars stress that the “Germanic peoples” were diverse groups whose identities were formed largely within the Roman world.

From the perspective of the eastern Mediterranean, there was no fall in 476: the Roman Empire continued in Constantinople, and Greek-speaking Byzantines called themselves Romans until 1453, and in some senses long after. In North Africa, the Vandal conquest, the Byzantine reconquest and the later Arab conquest form a separate story, in which Berber (Amazigh) kingdoms also played a major role.

The fall of Rome has also been used as a warning in political debates, from the eighteenth century to today, with commentators comparing modern states to Rome in decline. Historians generally caution that such comparisons simplify a complex and very different past.

Transformation. In the 1970s Peter Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity (1971) helped create the field of “late antiquity” (roughly 200–700 CE), which emphasized religious and cultural creativity and continuity rather than decline. Walter Goffart’s Barbarians and Romans (1980) argued that some barbarian groups were settled through relatively orderly arrangements, based on shares of tax revenue or land, rather than by violent conquest. A large European research programme of the 1990s, “The Transformation of the Roman World”, took this approach further.

Return of decline. In 2005 two influential books challenged this view. Bryan Ward-Perkins’s The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization used archaeological evidence, such as a sharp decline in the quality and distribution of pottery, the size of buildings and even the size of cattle, to argue that the end of Roman rule in the West brought a real collapse in economic complexity and living standards. Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History emphasized military and political pressure from outside, driven by the Huns.

Identity and ethnicity. Scholars influenced by the “Vienna school” of Herwig Wolfram and Walter Pohl have studied ethnogenesis, the idea that groups such as the Goths or Franks were not ancient fixed peoples but political communities formed and re-formed around leaders and traditions. Guy Halsall, in Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376–568 (2007), argued that the crisis of the western empire was largely internal, and that barbarian groups were drawn into Roman politics rather than breaking in from outside. How large the migrating groups were, and how they related to the Roman population, remain open questions.

Periodization. Many historians now see 476 as a symbolic rather than decisive date. Some prefer 410, 455, 480 or even the Lombard invasion of 568 as markers, while others argue that different regions experienced the end of Roman rule at very different times, from about 410 in Britain to the sixth century or later in parts of the Mediterranean.

Narrative sources. No single contemporary history covers the whole fifth century in the West. Ammianus Marcellinus’s history, written in Latin in the late fourth century, ends with the Battle of Adrianople. For the early fifth century, historians rely on later Greek writers such as Zosimus, who used the lost history of Olympiodorus, and on the fragments of Priscus, who visited Attila’s court. The Christian writer Orosius wrote a history against the pagans in the 410s at Augustine’s suggestion.

Sixth-century accounts. The events of 476 are known mainly from later sources: the chronicle of Marcellinus Comes, the so-called Anonymus Valesianus, Jordanes’s Getica (written in Constantinople around 551), and Procopius’s Wars. These writers had their own purposes, such as justifying Justinian’s reconquest of Italy by presenting the West as lost, which affects how they describe the end of the western empire.

Other texts. Law codes, especially the Theodosian Code (438), letters of bishops and aristocrats such as Sidonius Apollinaris in Gaul, sermons, saints’ lives and chronicles such as that of Hydatius in Spain give local views of the crisis. Augustine’s City of God and Salvian’s On the Government of God show how Christians interpreted the disasters.

Archaeology and science. Excavations of towns, villas, forts and cemeteries, studies of coins and pottery, and more recently analysis of ancient DNA, ice cores, tree rings and pollen, have transformed the debate by giving evidence independent of written sources. They show great regional differences and allow historians to measure economic change, but they also raise new problems of interpretation, for example whether a change in burial customs or artefacts reflects migration or simply new fashions.