Why did hardly anyone notice the fall of Rome in 476?

No siege, no sack

Picture the city of Rome in September 476. No army at the walls, no fires, no looting. The events that ended the western empire happened somewhere else. The court of 476 sat at Ravenna, behind the marshes of the Adriatic coast, the western capital since 402.

The trouble began in the barracks. The soldiers of the field army in Italy, mostly Germanic recruits, demanded a third of the land, as allies had received elsewhere. The general Orestes, who had put his teenage son on the throne, refused. Their officer Odoacer promised it, and they proclaimed him king. A chronicle written in Italy in the next century, the Anonymus Valesianus, sums up what followed in a few lines. Odoacer killed Orestes at Placentia, today’s Piacenza, and his brother Paul in the pine woods outside Classe, Ravenna’s port. He entered Ravenna, deposed the boy and spared him, the chronicler says, for his youth and because he was handsome. Nobody fought for Romulus Augustulus.

An empire already hollow

For most people in the West, 476 was not even the year things changed. Britain had been left to defend itself around 410. Visigoths ruled Spain and southwest Gaul, Franks and Burgundians much of the rest, and the Vandals had held Africa, with its grain and its taxes, since 439. By 476 a western emperor’s orders counted in Italy and little else.

The office itself had worn thin. Since the murder of Valentinian III in 455, nine emperors had come and gone in twenty-one years, most of them made and unmade by generals such as Ricimer. A Roman of the 470s had seen emperors deposed before. One more disappearing from Ravenna was news, not a catastrophe.

The shock had come earlier

The fall that people did notice came in 410, when Alaric’s Goths sacked Rome for three days, the first time a foreign enemy had taken the city in about eight hundred years. In Bethlehem, the scholar Jerome heard the news.

My voice sticks in my throat; and, as I dictate, sobs choke my utterance. The City which had taken the whole world was itself taken.

Augustine began The City of God in reply, and in 455 the Vandals plundered Rome again, for two weeks. After those blows, a change of management at Ravenna drew no such tears. No lament like Jerome’s survives for 476.

What changed in Italy, and what didn’t

• The emperor. Odoacer called himself king, not emperor, and sent the imperial regalia to Constantinople: one emperor was enough for both halves. The eastern emperor, Zeno, had only just won back his own throne from a usurper that summer. Across the Adriatic, in Dalmatia, the previous western emperor, Julius Nepos, kept the title until 480.
• The state. The Senate still met in Rome. Consuls were still named each year. Roman law still ruled the courts, Roman officials still collected the taxes, and Odoacer minted coins in Zeno’s name.
• Daily life. For a farmer in Tuscany or a baker in Rome, the change was close to invisible.

Even the next regime kept the old forms. Theoderic the Ostrogoth killed Odoacer in 493 and ruled Italy for thirty-three years with Roman ministers. The senator Boethius served him as consul in 510, then wrote The Consolation of Philosophy in prison before his execution around 524.

Who decided 476 was the end?

The date was fixed later, and far away. Around 518 Marcellinus Comes, a chronicler in Constantinople, wrote under the year 476 that the western empire of the Roman people perished with this Augustulus. Jordanes copied him in 551, and much later historians and schoolbooks made 476 the line between antiquity and the Middle Ages. Many historians now place Italy’s real catastrophe sixty years on, when Justinian’s armies fought the Goths for Italy from 535 to 554 and Rome itself changed hands again and again. In 476 Roman life in Italy simply went on, under new management.