The historiography of the "fall of the Roman empire" is, by some margin, the most-litigated question in Western history. Edward Gibbon (1776) blamed Christianity and the loss of civic virtue. The British colonial school of the late nineteenth century blamed racial decline. The Marxist school of the twentieth century blamed economic collapse and class struggle. The post-war school (Walter Goffart, Peter Brown, Peter Heather, Bryan Ward-Perkins) has produced a substantial revisionist literature emphasising the accommodating, gradual, and partially negotiated character of the transition. The current scholarly consensus is closer to "transformation" than to "fall" — although Ward-Perkins, in particular, has insisted that the change involved a real and measurable decline in material standard of living, in fiscal capacity, in long-distance trade, and in cultural sophistication, and that the term "decline" should not be abandoned for a falsely irenic alternative.
This chapter sketches the events that produced the disappearance of the western imperial office in 476 and the political reality on the ground in its place. It does not enter the historiographical debate, except to note that any narrative on this subject is a synthesis of contested interpretations.
The Hunnic pressure
The cascade of events that ended in 476 begins in the steppes north of the Black Sea in the early 370s. The Huns — a nomadic confederation of disputed ethnogenesis, conventionally connected to the Xiongnu of Chinese sources but probably not in a simple way — moved west across the Pontic steppe in the early 370s, defeating and subjugating first the Alans and then, around 375, the Ostrogothic kingdom of Ermanaric north of the Black Sea. The Tervingi (a major Visigothic confederation under King Fritigern) and the Greuthungi (an Ostrogothic group) fled the Hunnic pressure south, reaching the Danube frontier in the summer of 376 with perhaps 200,000 people including non-combatants. They asked the eastern emperor Valens for permission to cross into Roman territory and to settle as foederati. Valens granted permission.
The Roman provincial officials charged with managing the settlement failed at it. The Visigoths were not properly provisioned, their leaders were insulted at official banquets, their members were forced to sell their children into slavery for food. By the summer of 377 the Visigoths were in armed revolt, raiding the Balkan provinces. The decisive engagement was at Adrianople (modern Edirne in European Turkey) on the 9th of August 378, where Valens's army was destroyed; the emperor himself was killed in the rout. It was, as the previous chapter noted, the worst Roman military defeat in five centuries.
The pattern set in 376–378 — large barbarian groups entering Roman territory under pressure from further east, negotiating accommodation with reduced or untrustworthy local authority, escalating into armed conflict, settling as semi-autonomous kingdoms within the empire — would repeat with the Vandals, the Burgundians, the Suevi, the Alans, the Franks, and the Lombards over the next two centuries.
The crossing of the Rhine
The defining event for the western empire was the crossing of the frozen Rhine on the 31st of December 406 by a confederation of Vandals, Alans, Suevi, and (probably) Burgundians, who had been pushed west again by Hunnic and Gothic pressure. The Rhine frontier had been the keystone of the Augustan defensive system for four centuries. Once it was breached, the western imperial authority had no defensible interior line. The Vandals and Alans crossed Gaul over the next three years, reaching Spain in 409 and crossing to Africa in 429. The Burgundians and Suevi remained in Gaul and Iberia. The Visigoths, who had been settled in southern Gaul as foederati after the sack of Rome in 410, expanded into Spain after 416 and would, by the 470s, control most of the Iberian peninsula. The Franks, who had been settled along the lower Rhine as foederati from the third century, expanded into northern Gaul throughout the fifth century and would, under Clovis (481–511), absorb the residual Roman administration of Gaul into the new Frankish kingdom.
The Vandal capture of Africa
The single most important strategic loss for the western empire was the Vandal capture of the North African provinces, especially the rich grain-producing province of Africa Proconsularis (modern Tunisia), completed by the Vandal king Geiseric with the fall of Carthage on the 19th of October 439. The fiscal consequences were severe. The grain supply of Rome had depended on the African provinces for centuries; the wealth of the African senatorial aristocracy was the single largest tax base in the western empire. The Vandal kingdom of Africa, formally independent under Geiseric and his successors, kept the grain trade running but kept the tax revenue for itself. The western imperial budget, after 439, could not support an army adequate to recover the African provinces; the failed expedition under Majorian in 460 and the larger failed expedition of 468 (an eastern-led joint operation) confirmed the impossibility. The Vandals would also, in 455, sack Rome itself — a more thorough and damaging operation than Alaric's, providing the English language with the word "vandalism." The Vandal kingdom of Africa would last until 533, when it was reconquered by Belisarius for the eastern emperor Justinian — by which time the western empire had been dead for fifty-seven years.
The end of the western office
The succession of western emperors after the murder of Majorian in 461 is, even by the relaxed standards of late-Roman imperial chronology, a melancholy list. Libius Severus (461–465), Anthemius (467–472), Olybrius (472), Glycerius (473–474), Julius Nepos (474–475), Romulus Augustulus (475–476). Most of them held the office for less than two years; most were appointed by the Germanic military commander Ricimer or his successor Gundobad, who was the substantive ruler of what remained of imperial Italy. The actual territory under western imperial control by 475 was reduced to Italy, parts of Dalmatia, and a thin strip of southern Gaul; everything else was in Germanic-kingdom hands.
The deposition of Romulus Augustulus by Odoacer on the 4th of September 476 was therefore, in the immediate strategic context, a small administrative event. Odoacer was the commander of the Germanic federate forces in Italy. Romulus Augustulus had been a child puppet emperor for ten months. Odoacer chose, rather than appoint another puppet, to abolish the office in Italy and to govern as the Germanic king of an Italian state that he insisted was still part of the empire. He sent the imperial regalia — the diadem, the purple robe — to the eastern emperor Zeno at Constantinople. He kept Romulus's father imprisoned but did not kill the boy himself; the last Roman emperor in the West was allowed to retire to a country estate in Campania, where he was still alive (and receiving an imperial pension from Constantinople, with grim irony) several years later. The legitimate western emperor in exile, Julius Nepos, was still alive in Dalmatia and continued to be recognised as emperor by the eastern court until his assassination in 480; it is sometimes argued that 480 is the more historically accurate date for the end of the western imperial office.
What remained
The Roman Senate continued to meet in the city of Rome for another century, on the same site, under the protection of Odoacer and (after 493) the Ostrogothic king Theodoric. The Roman law was the operative civil law of the Germanic kingdoms — the Visigoths and Burgundians, in particular, issued Latin codifications of Roman law for their Roman subjects in the early sixth century. The Catholic church continued to administer most of the residual civic infrastructure of the cities. The Latin language continued to evolve into what would, a few centuries later, become French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian. The classical literary corpus was, mostly, preserved in monastic libraries. The decline was real but partial. The barbarian kingdoms thought of themselves as Roman successor states, and in important institutional respects they were.
The Roman empire, as a continuous state, however, was not in any of them. It was at Constantinople, and the next chapter follows it there.
End of Chapter VII