A teenage emperor whose two names were both mocking diminutives, deposed and pensioned off to Campania
Romulus Augustulus — 'little Augustus' — deposed at Ravenna on 4 September 476.
History · Ancient world
The Fall of the Western Roman Empire
AD 476 (conventional date)
The end of antiquity in the West
The long unravelling of Roman authority in the western Mediterranean, conventionally dated to 476 when a Germanic commander deposed the last emperor in Italy and sent the imperial regalia east to Constantinople rather than appoint a successor. The eastern half continued for almost another thousand years.
How to spot them
- ▸Clue patterns: a boy emperor with a diminutive name, imperial regalia sent to Constantinople, a date in 476
- ▸Its most famous historian was an eighteenth-century MP who began in six volumes
- ▸The city itself had been sacked twice before the conventional end date
- ▸Contemporaries in Italy barely noticed the moment historians chose
What happened
A Germanic general who took Italy but declined the purple, sending the regalia east instead
Odoacer, who ruled as king of Italy and acknowledged the emperor Zeno in Constantinople.
A Visigothic king who took the city in 410, the first to fall to a foreign enemy in 800 years
Alaric I; the sack prompted Augustine to begin The City of God.
A second sack, in 455, by a people whose name became a word for wanton destruction
The Vandals under Genseric (Gaiseric).
A catastrophic defeat in 378 at which an emperor was killed by Gothic cavalry
Adrianople, where Valens died.
Six volumes published between 1776 and 1789 by a member of Parliament for Liskeard
Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
The capital that was not Rome — a marsh-protected port on the Adriatic used from 402
Ravenna.
Quick-fire facts
- •The conventional date is 4 September 476, when Odoacer deposed the emperor Romulus Augustulus at Ravenna.
- •Odoacer sent the imperial insignia to the eastern emperor Zeno and ruled Italy as king rather than emperor.
- •Julius Nepos, deposed in 475, was still recognised in the East as western emperor until his murder in 480.
- •Rome was sacked by Alaric I and the Visigoths in 410 and by Genseric and the Vandals in 455.
- •The Battle of Adrianople in 378, at which the emperor Valens was killed by the Goths, is often seen as the turning point.
- •The empire was permanently divided on the death of Theodosius I in 395 between his sons Arcadius and Honorius.
- •Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire appeared in six volumes from 1776 to 1789.
- •The eastern (Byzantine) empire survived until the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
- •Henri Pirenne argued the real break came later, with the Arab conquests closing the Mediterranean — the 'Pirenne thesis'.
- •Augustine of Hippo began The City of God in response to pagan claims that the 410 sack was Christianity's fault.
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Sources
- Peter Heather — The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History
- Bryan Ward-Perkins — The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Ancient Rome: The fall of the Western Empire