476 anno domini, the year of the fall of Rome, is one of the most well-known and most discussed
dates of European history, and yet probably one of the most overestimated and misunderstood
ones for what it has come to represent.
Rivers of ink have been devoted to why the Roman Empire fell, and if it actually did.
While the historiographical question on if and why it happened continues to be debated
to this day and certainly merits attention, we will not tackle the topic in this video.
Instead, we will try to discern how the men and women living in those times saw the changing
of their institutions and culture, focusing specifically on the year 476, and we will
attempt to ask the question: in the eyes of a Roman citizen, did the Empire of Rome fall
in 476?
The Roman citizens were much less knowledgeable and informed than the people of the modern
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To put the year 476 and its events into context, we will first briefly summarize the high and
lows of the Empire in its later years.
The Imperium began with two prosperous centuries which saw the Roman state reach its greatest
territorial extent and achieve relative internal peace after the civil wars of the first century
BC.
The first cracks in the system came following the end of the Severian dynasty, which opened
the crisis of the third century.
It lasted 50 years and saw decimating plagues, a high rate of replacement of Emperors, and
the fracture of the Roman territorial integrity both to the west and to the east.
After a resurgence under Diocletian and the Constantine family, the Romans suffered a
devastating defeat at Adrianople in 378, and soon after the Empire was definitely split
in two among the sons of Theodosius – Arcadius and Honorius.
From this point the western half slowly began to fracture, first losing Britannia in 410
and then being reduced piece by piece to just the Italian Peninsula and a few neighbouring
regions, as people from the Barbaricum were pushed over the limes by the Huns.
In the second half of the fifth century, the political structure in Italy was plagued by
a number of weak emperors, who were either puppets of Germanic commanders or men sent
by the Eastern Roman Empire who had little sway over the locals.
The presence of Germanic nobles and officers so close to the halls of power should not
be surprising, as the Roman armies had incorporated more and more of their kin and the barbarians
had become a considerable number of the soldiers, thus being integrated into the society, like
the generals Stilicho and Etius.
By the year 475, the commander of the troops in Italy Orestes deposed the emperor Julius
Nepos, who fled to Dalmatia, and elevated to the Ravennese throne his son Romulus Augustulus.
The following year Orestes was defeated and executed by Odoacer, commander of the Germanic
foederati who had not been paid by the new regime.
Odoacer then ended the string of weak emperors by deposing Romulus Augustulus and possibly
having Nepos assassinated in 480.
He also sent the imperial regalia to Constantinople thus proclaiming there was only one emperor.
Odoacer would rule Italy as King of the Germans living there and acting as a self-appointed
regent for the Eastern Emperors.
His rule ended in 489 when the Gothic prince Theoderic invaded Italy with his people and
established control after four years of war, founding the Kingdom of the Ostrogoths.
So how was the dissolution of the Empire felt by the citizens of the Roman Empire?
That’s a hard question to answer and a few factors have to be taken into consideration:
the geographic location was certainly important, as different parts of the state were lost
at different times and under different conditions, such as Brittany, which was abandoned in 410
during a succession crisis and was never reabsorbed into the Empire, while the whole of Gaul was
occupied by Germanic people in less than 10 years: different events could be catastrophic
in one area while being barely noticeable in others.
The social position also made a difference: It is hard to know if the average peasant
noticed any change in the state, because we do not have any testimonies from them, but
we could assume that the daily life of a farmer did not change much unless they were victims
of attacks.
On the other hand, the Roman landowners and aristocracy that survived the invasions felt
a change, as now they had to come to terms with the new Germanic kings while the central
Roman State disappeared in the periphery.
Lastly, the settlement of some Germanic people was a slow integration in some parts of the
empire and this could happen over generations, so even if some change did happen, it was
possibly hardly felt, while in other regions it was much more traumatic.
We can discern the mood of some inhabitants of the Empire if we look at some ecclesiastical
writers, who were less interested in the political situation and instead narrate the lives and
miracles of the saints of the time.
From them, we get different points of view on the social situation, and it is interesting
to see how some authors underline the transformation which occurred with the arrival of the barbarians,
affirming a point of rupture, while others minimize their presence, speaking about a
continuation of life and norms.
Of the latter we have as an example the Life of Saint Germanus of Auxerre described by
Constantius of Lyon: while narrating the good deeds completed by the bishop in an invaded
Gaul, we can read a society where the Germanic and Alanic peoples are participating in daily
life, and are not the cause of all evils.
On the other side of the coin, we have Sidonius Apollinaris, Roman aristocrat and bishop of
Auvergne where he led the Roman resistance against the Visigoths.
He thought that the situation in Gaul was polarized between a barbaric invader and a
dying Roman culture.
A strong supporter of the old Roman norms that he had been educated in, he felt that
they were constantly in danger from the Germanic people.
In his mind, the only remedy to this decadence was to escape to the monasteries, where the
Romans could conserve their culture.
Having now painted a general picture of those years, let us now look at what the contemporaries
thought about the deposition of the last Roman Emperor, Romulus Augustulus.
One of our most important source of those years is the Anonymus Valesianus, an author
of whom we have two texts which describe the events from the age of Constantine to the
end of the reign of Theodoric, mentions the deposition of 476 commenting that the young
Emperor was allowed to live in exile in Naples with a pension.
The event is not described with any hint of importance, and he certainly does not talk
about the end of an Empire or of the Roman world.
As far as the Italian-Romans were concerned, the empire as a political institution continued
to exist.
In fact, the Sack of Rome perpetrated by Alaric’s Visigoths in 410 had a much greater effect
on the writers of the time, prompting the Christian philosopher and bishop Saint Agostinus
to write his most important work The City of God, to defend the Christian faith from
attacks coming from pagans who saw Christianity as the cause of the weakness of Rome.
The bishop of Milan Saint Ambrose, contemporary of Augustinus, underlines the dark times they
were living in and the decline of the empire, not of the church, something that the historian
Ammianus Marcellinus rebuked, writing that the Empire had always bumped back.
Two interesting figures who wrote a few years later about the events were Ennodius and Cassiodorus.
Both of them lived under the reign of the first Ostrogothic king of Italy, and both
of them were supporters of Theodoric, so it is important to underline that they had the
interest to depict the king in a favorable light, attempting to consolidate his legitimacy
in the eyes of the Roman-Italians and the Eastern Empire.
Ennodius was a clergyman from Gaul who moved to northern Italy very young, where he would
become bishop of Pavia and Papal envoy.
He gives us an interesting insight into the mind of an aristocratic Gallo-Roman with connections
both in Italy and in Gaul.
Receiving the education of a Roman aristocrat, based on the memories of the past splendours,
Ennodius was disenchanted with the situation of the “Empire of Italy”: the deposition
of Romulus was just a substitution of one weak ruler for another, in a state that had
been long declining, but it was not the culmination of this decline.
His views on the Germanic people are mixed, as we can see in his biography of his predecessor
Epiphanius, bishop of Pavia.
Here he depicts in much better light the barbarian Ricimer, a Gothic commander in Italy, than
his counterpart Emperor Anthemius, who had been sent by the Eastern Empire.
Later the opposite happens when the rivals are Emperor Nepos and the Visigoth king Euric,
so although he viewed the Romans and the Barbarians differently, he didn’t have a strong bias
in favour of one or the other.
When Odoacer takes control of Italy, Ennodius makes no mention of Romulus Augustulus, describing
Orestes as a Roman patrician defeated by the foederati.
Odoacer is shown as just another ruler of a declining state, like his Imperial predecessor,
and only when Theodoric becomes king does the situation improve again.
Cassiodorus was an Italian statesman and historian who worked for Theoderic and reached high
political positions under the Ostrogoth's reign, from around 505 to 535.
He was born around 485, so a decade after the deposition of the last western emperor,
and he wrote a “History of the Goths” now lost to us with the intent of integrating
the Gothic world into the Roman.
What remains from him is a watered-down Chronicle of events and other fragments, but once again
Romulus Augustulus’ deposition is not mentioned; we can also still discern his opinions on
Odoacer and his arrival to power, which are similar to Ennodius’.
He is presented as a usurper of the Western Empire, ineffective and corrupt, not unlike
many others before him: his act of sending the imperial insignia to Constantinople is
strange for Cassiodorus, but he does not interpret them as the end of the institutions nor that
the Eastern Roman empire now rules the west.
When the Ostrogoths entered Italy and established themselves at Ravenna, the Western Roman Empire
returned partially to its splendour after a century of decline, although greatly resized.
So, while it is important to remember that the author mentioned up till now certainly
had the interest to portray Theoderic as the legitimate ruler of Italy, we cannot ignore
how little emphasis is put on the year 476.
Certainly, the Empire and the Roman world were in decline in the west, but it had been
so for nearly a century and the arrival of a barbarian governor as Odoacer made little
difference in the minds of the Romans: while a usurper in the eyes of many, he was still
the head of what remained of the Empire of Italy, and that idea had not died.
But what did the eastern writers think about the topic?
Some authors like their western counterparts barely mention it.
The historian Zosimus wrote around the year 510 about the decadence of Rome and the role
of the Chrisitan faith in its decline: while his work is incomplete, it was probably meant
to end at the Sack of Rome and he never alludes to the year 476.
However, it did not take long for the writers of the time to mention the horror that the
deposition of Romulus symbolized, or rather the disappearance of the Emperors in the Western
half of the Roman empire.
The historian Marcellinus Comes of Dalmatia, who wrote his Chronicle around the year 519,
puts emphasis on the victory of Odoacer, as does the historian of gothic origins but of
byzantine sympathises Jordanes, who wrote around 551 the Getica, a history of the Goths
possibly inspired by Cassiodorus’ lost work.
When talking about the events of 476, both of them have the exact same comment: “The
Western Roman Empire, of which title was first taken by August Octavian in the year 709 from
the founding of Rome, died with this Augustulus”.
The historian Martin Wes has put forward the conjecture that both of them quoted the Roman
aristocrat Memmius Symmachus, consul under Odoacer and an important figure in Rome until
he and his son-in-law and philosopher Boetius were executed at the order of Theodoric in
the latter part of his reign.
Should this hypothesis be correct, it would indicate that some parts of the Roman aristocracy
opposed the new royal power in Italy and did not look with a good eye to the transition
from Roman emperors to Germanic Kings such as Odoacer or the Amalians, the family of
Theodoric.
However, just like the previous authors, we have to remember that Marcellinus and Jordanes
possibly had an agenda when writing about these events.
The Eastern Empire barely tolerated the reigns of Germanic people in the west and once they
had the stability and the resources, Emperor Justinian began the reconquest of the regions,
first attacking the Vandals in 533 and two years late beginning the Gothic war for the
reconquest of Italy, which lasted nearly 20 years.
Because of this, it was important for the Emperor to paint the occupation of Italy by
the Goths as illegitimate, both to justify the heavy costs of the war and to bring on
his side the local Italian population.
The historian Procopius does not note it either, but he was hostile to the Justinian regime
and was sometimes sympathetic with the Goths, so he might also have had a reason not to
mention it.
Later lesser-known Greek authors like Evagrius would continue to acknowledge the year 476
as the end of the Western Roman Empire.
So in the end, did the Western Roman Empire fall 476 in the eyes of its citizens?
We would argue that no it did not: the situation of the Roman government had been in a constant
state of flux for decades and the arrival of a Barbarian King who nominally reigned
under the name of the Empire was not a reason to believe that the Roman institution had
disappeared.
It is only later when Justinian began his conquest of Italy when our historical sources
begin to underline the importance of the year 476.
We are planning to talk about Justinian in our future videos, so make sure you are subscribed
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