Who was the last Roman emperor?

Which Rome, and whose rules?

The question has more than one right answer because after 395 the Roman Empire had two halves, and because Romans themselves disagreed about who was lawfully emperor. The story of how the West ended in 476 is a long one of its own. Here the question is simply who held the title last. There are three serious candidates.

Romulus Augustulus, the textbook answer

He was a teenager when his father, the general Orestes, put him on the throne at Ravenna in October 475. His coins call him Romulus Augustus, the names of Rome’s founder and its first emperor; the nickname Augustulus, “little Augustus,” came from others. He reigned for ten months, and the power was his father’s.

Constantinople never accepted him. To the eastern emperor Zeno he was a rebel’s son on a throne that belonged to someone else. Odoacer spared him for his youth, says the Anonymus Valesianus, and sent him to live with relatives in Campania on a pension of 6,000 solidi a year, at the Castle of Lucullus near Naples. A letter of King Theoderic to a certain Romulus, written around 507, may mean he was still alive thirty years later (Cassiodorus, Variae 3.35). The date 476 stuck because chroniclers in Constantinople, beginning with Marcellinus Comes around 518, made his fall the end of the western empire.

Julius Nepos, the lawyer’s answer

Ask a Roman jurist in 477 and you would have heard another name. Julius Nepos, nephew of the general who ruled Dalmatia, on the Adriatic, became western emperor in 474 with Constantinople’s backing. He deposed the previous emperor, Glycerius, and had him made a bishop. Then, in August 475, his own commander Orestes marched on Ravenna. Nepos fled by sea to Dalmatia, and Orestes crowned his son.

Nepos never gave up the title, and the East never withdrew its recognition. When envoys from Italy reached Zeno after 476, the emperor answered, says the historian Malchus, that they had received two emperors from the East, killed one and driven out the other, and should take Nepos back. Odoacer did not. Nepos held his corner of Dalmatia, near Salona, beside today’s Split in Croatia, until his own men murdered him in 480. After him, no one was ever again named emperor of the West. By the strict rules of the day, Nepos was the last emperor of the West.

Constantine XI, the last of all

The eastern half never stopped calling itself the Roman Empire, so its line of emperors ran on from Constantinople for almost a thousand years after 476 (why the name Byzantine came later). The last was Constantine XI Palaiologos, born in 1405, a son of Emperor Manuel II and a Serbian princess, Helena Dragaš. He had ruled in the Peloponnese, in southern Greece, as a despot, and was proclaimed emperor there, at Mystras, in January 1449.

He had no children. When the army of Mehmed II broke into the city on May 29, 1453, he died fighting at the walls (the siege). Greek folklore would not let him go. In the legend of the Marble Emperor, an angel turns him to stone and hides him in a cave beneath the Golden Gate, where he sleeps until the day he wakes to take back the city.

Who else claimed the title?

Plenty of rulers wanted the name after 1453. A rival line of Greek emperors at Trebizond, on the Black Sea, lasted until 1461. In the West, the Holy Roman Empire, heir to the title Charlemagne received in 800, ended only on August 6, 1806, when Francis II laid down the crown under pressure from Napoleon. In Moscow, Ivan III married Constantine XI’s niece, Sophia Palaiologina, in 1472, and Russian monks began to call their city the Third Rome. Its rulers took the title tsar, from Caesar. None of them governed the Roman state. Constantine XI did, to the last day.