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Western Roman Empire Timeline - Ancient History Encyclopedia

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Dark ages

In September 476 AD, the last Roman emperor of the west, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed by a Germanic prince called Odovacar, who had won control of the remnants of the Roman army of Italy. He then sent the western imperial regalia to Constantinople.

The Roman empire in western Europe - a centralised superstate which had been in existence for 500 years - had ceased to exist, its single emperor replaced by upwards of a dozen kings and princes.

The vast majority of these rulers, like Odovacar himself , were non-Roman in origin. Their power was based on the control of military forces which were the direct descendents of recent immigrants into the Roman world, whether Anglo-Saxons in Britain, Goths in southern Gaul and Spain, or Vandals in North Africa.

What difference did this political revolution make to real life in the former western Empire?

For many 19th and earler 20th century commentators, the fall of Rome marked the death knell of education and literacy, sophisticated architecture, advanced economic interaction, and, not least, the rule of written law.

The 'dark ages' which followed were dark not only because written sources were few and far between, but because life became nasty, brutish and short.

Other commentators, who were more focused on the slavery and entrenched social hierarchies that were also part of the Roman world, didn't really disagree with these observations.

But they saw the 'dark ages' as a more necessary evil - Rome had to fall to destroy large-scale slavery and make possible, eventually, a world which valued all human beings more equally.

On either view, the end of empire was a major event in human history.

Massive inequality

The 1960s, however, were famously a time when all established certainties were challenged, and this applied to ancient history no less than to sexuality.

The eastern half of the Roman empire not only survived the collapse of its western partner in the third quarter of the fifth century, but went on to thrive in the sixth.

Under Justinian I (527 - 565 AD), it was still constructing hugely impressive public monuments, such as the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, and had reconquered Italy, North Africa, and parts of Spain.

At the same time, there still lived in the west many individuals, who continued to describe themselves as Romans, and many of the successor states, it was correctly pointed out, were still operating using recognisably Roman institutions and justifying themselves ideologically with reference to canonical Roman values.

Consequently, by the late 1990s the word 'transformation' had come into vogue. No one denied that many things changed between 350 and 600 AD, but it became fashionable to see these changes as much more the result of long-term evolution than of a violent imperial collapse.

These revisionist arguments have some real substance. There really was little change at one deep level - the life of the peasant producers who made up perhaps 90% of the population.

I am still staggered by feats of Roman engineering, blown away by the beauty of some the buildings Romans lived in, and delighted by the sophistication of the empire's literary and political culture.

But these cultural glories were limited to a tiny privileged elite - those who owned enough land to count as gentry landowners. They represented maybe 3% of the whole population. Its structures were probably unspeakable vile to pretty much everyone else.

As late as 383 AD, captive barbarians were being fed to wild animals in the Colosseum, and its criminal law dealt ruthlessly with anyone seeking to remedy the highly unequal distribution of property.

In 650 AD, as in 350 AD, peasants were still labouring away in the much the same way to feed themselves and to produce the surplus which funded everything else.

Roman culture

In judging these effects, it is important to recognise two separate dimensions of 'Roman-ness' - 'Roman' in the sense of the central state, and 'Roman' in the sense of characteristic patterns of life prevailing within its borders.

At the state level, the empire was not just replaced by mini versions of itself, even where Roman landowners survived. Within two generations of 476 AD, a new and weaker type of state structure had emerged right across the former Roman west.

The old empire had employed two key levers of central power - large-scale taxation, two-thirds of which was then spent on maintaining the second lever, a large professional army.

This high-tax, high-spend structure meant that the Roman state both intruded itself bureaucratically into localities to raise taxation, and was also able, if necessary, to compel obedience to its demands by employing the army, which the taxation supported.

The new states of post-Roman Europe were much weaker affairs. Even where other less important Roman institutions survived, the new kings had only much-diminished revenue rights and their armies were composed of semi-professional contingents of local landowners.

On the level of local 'Roman-ness' too, the revolution could not have been more profound. The characteristic patterns of local Roman life were in fact intimately linked to the existence of the central Roman state, and, as the nature of state structures changed in the post-Roman world, so too did local life.

The Roman city, for instance, was the basic unit of local administration through which taxation was raised. As central tax raising powers disappeared, so too did the need to keep the city, and by 700 AD it was history.

Many of the more advanced elements of the Roman economy, such as specialised production and long-distance trade, quickly disappeared too.

The Roman state had subsidised large-scale transport structures for its own purposes, but these had also been used by traders. As this command economy collapsed, so did much of the trade dependent upon it.

Cultural patterns were also transformed beyond recognition. Roman elites learned to read and write classical Latin to highly-advanced levels through a lengthy and expensive private education, because it qualified them for careers in the extensive Roman bureaucracy.

The end of taxation meant that these careers disappeared in the post-Roman west, and elite parents quickly realised that spending so much money on learning Latin was now a waste of time. As a result, advanced literacy was confined to churchmen for the next 500 years.

Militarisation

Everywhere you look, the fall of the Rome let loose profound change. At the heart of it all, where change at state and local level intertwined, lay the militarisation of elite landowners.

The end of the Roman empire generated many states where previously there had been one, and another casualty of 476 AD was thus the Pax Romana. Warfare became endemic to the former Roman west.

In this situation, successor state kings needed military service above all, and quickly mobilised Roman landowners with contingents of their retainers to fight alongside the descendents of their migrant warbands.

But taxation had always been justified in the Roman period by the fact that it paid for defence. When successor state kings made local Roman landowners turn out for battle, not only was it a nasty shock, but it was also the ultimate double whammy.

Having to pay taxation and fight was massively unpopular - witness the stringing up of the Roman grandee Parthenius, employed by the Frankish king Chilperic as his chief tax collector in 574 AD. Kings quickly realised that they could gain much popularity by canceling tax obligations.

In the short term, they could do so since they no longer needed the money for a professional army. But in the longer term, it was precisely this process which created the new Europe of powerful local landowners and relatively powerless states, which lacked both tax revenues and professional armies, and generated the cultural change, since literacy was now so marginal to secular elite life.

It also brings us back to the peasantry. One striking feature of post-Roman archaeology is the substantial decline it demonstrates in overall population. Even if peasants don't fight, they are not immune to the effects of warfare, and declining economic opportunity also hit their capacities to make a living. Though probably not really aware of it, they too had benefited from the Pax Romana.

Dark age Europe was born out of the violent destruction of the Roman empire, as the battlefield replaced the bureau at the heart of elite life, but its ramifications were felt at every social level.

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In September 476 AD, the last Roman emperor of the west, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed by a Germanic prince called Odovacar, who had won control of the remnants of the Roman army of Italy. He then sent the western imperial regalia to Constantinople.

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Rome may have fallen hundreds of years ago, but much of the civilization the Romans built still dots the landscape today. One team of scientists recently unearthed a different kind of Roman artifact that may hold a strange clue to the empire's downfall.

A study of tree rings recently published in the journal Science provides evidence of climate shifts that, perhaps not coincidentally, occurred from A.D. 250 to 550, a period better known as the fall of the Roman Empire.

Ulf Buentgen and his team of researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research collected tree-ring data from ancient wood found in medieval castles and Roman ruins. They created a detailed history of climate change over the past 2.5 millennia and found the data point to the end of the Roman Empire as a period of exceptional climate change.

Michael Mann, professor of meteorology at Penn State, was not a member of the research team, but explains how the information found in tree rings changes what we know of the last centuries of Roman imperialism.

"They were able to tease out two pieces of information from these trees," Mann explains. "They can get some idea of how warm the summers were, and how wet the sort of late-spring/early summer was."

That's because trees create a new ring each year. A big ring occurs in times of good climate, and a small ring occurs in years of drought or extreme temperatures. Wood samples from this time period show a climate flip-flopping unpredictably, which would have been bad for the Roman Empire.

"Like any large civilization - including the civilization we have today - it was highly dependent on predictability of natural resources," Mann says. "It was very heavily adapted to the climate conditions that had persisted for centuries."

But while the tree rings show variability, there is no data for why these climate changes occurred. Global warming contributes to modern climate change, but Rome fell from power long before industrialization.

"Presumably it was some combination of these external natural factors like solar variability and volcanic eruptions, and just the pure sort of chaotic variability of the climate system," Mann speculates.

This new research may not establish cause-and-effect, but it does contribute another factor to explain Rome's fall. It also creates another clue for scientists sleuthing their way into an uncertain climate future.

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Climate Change Linked To The Fall Of The Roman Empire

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Rome may have fallen hundreds of years ago, but much of the civilization the Romans built still dots the landscape today. One team of scientists recently unearthed a different kind of Roman artifact that may hold a surprising clue to the empire's downfall.

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Is This Our Moment of Decline? Lessons From Rome Before the Fall

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Are we Rome? If so, is the end nigh? Mike Duncan was often asked these questions while writing his History of Rome podcast and his new book.

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Kids learn about the decline and fall of Ancient Rome. The western Roman Empire fell in 476 AD.

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Nathan Pilkington is a lecturer in the department of history at Columbia University.

The rise of Donald Trump supposedly heralds the decline of the American idea, according to many of his critics, who've taken the opportunity to compare this moment to the fall of Rome's republic in 31 B.C. or its empire in the 5th century A.D. Any historian is happy when their period of study comes into vogue, but these requiems leave a false impression of Roman antiquity and the causes of its greatest crises.

Myth No. 1

America is going throughwhat republican Rome did.

These comparisons are common. Former Supreme Court justice David Souter has said that embracing an all-powerful figure who promises to solve the nation's problems is "how the Roman republic fell." Augustus, Rome's first emperor, ended democracy "because he promised that he would solve problems that were not being solved," Souter said in the 2012 quote, which resurfaced during this fall's campaign. Along those same lines, a Huffington Post headline claimed: "Rome Had Caesar. America Has Trump. The People Were and Are Desperate."

But such comparisons are light on scholarship. Simply put, most experts believe there is little to compare. Yes, the United States has seen a rise in populism, but it hasn't experienced a microgram of the violence that accompanied the fall of the Roman republic. The end came only after numerous civil wars over offices and honor , decades of gang violence in the capital, and waves of sanctioned political murder. By that measure, Trump is no Caesar.

Myth No. 2

The republic collapsed because of class conﬂict.

In a recent article in the Week, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry claimed that "what historians now refer to as the crisis of the Roman Republic had a deeper, class-based component." And as in Rome, he wrote, in modern-day America "there is definitely a patrician class and a plebeian class" that are "at loggerheads." In the Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky also found an analogue for America's turbulence under Trump in Rome's past: "The patricians and the plebeians had clashed for decades," he wrote. "It was a class struggle pure and simple."

But the struggle between patricians and plebeians took place more than 250 years before the republic's collapse. During an early republican period known to historians as the Conflict of the Orders , between 494 and 287 B.C., plebeians won the right to have their own magistrates - the tribunes - and to hold their own assembly to make laws for the entire Roman state. Patricians were excluded from this assembly but bound by its laws. Plebeians also gained election to the consulship, the highest office in Rome. After 366 B.C., normally one of the two consuls was a plebian.

Patricians and plebeians were not "classes" in the modern sense of the term. According to Roman myth, the patricians were descended from the original senators appointed by Rome's founder, Romulus, to assist him in decision-making. Patrician status was inherited, and plebians made up the rest of society. After the Conflict of the Orders, many plebeians became wealthy and powerful, while certain patrician families saw their fortunes decline and disappeared from history. Pompey the Great, for all his riches and power, was a plebeian from an area colonized in the 3rd century B.C. Emperor Augustus was born a plebeian; it was only when he was adopted by Julius Caesar in his will that he became a patrician.

Myth No. 3

The empire collapsed because of widespread lead poisoning.

Professor Jerome Nriagu offered this theory in 1983 , and its popularity is rising again because of recent investigations of lead contamination in Rome's harbor. A 2014 article in Science wondered, "Did Lead Poisoning Bring Down Ancient Rome?," concluding that it quite possibly played a role; astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson suggested in an episode of "Cosmos" that lead had a hand in the decline of the empire. Supposedly lead shrunk the population by poisoning the water, leaving the empire weakened and vulnerable.

It's just not true. The argument is predicated on the belief that most Romans used lead pipes to deliver water, lead cauldrons to boil wine, lead as a sweetener and lead in makeup. But the majority of Romans were rural farmers who lived at or barely above subsistence levels; they drank from local or personal wells and lacked the means to regularly indulge in makeup and sweetened wine.

Even if the city of Rome did have fairly high levels of lead in its public water system, which some recent skeletal evidence may support, it represented only one-sixtieth of the population of the empire. Lead contamination was never widespread enough to cause fertility problems, mass poisoning or other debilitating illnesses on a sufficient scale to diminish the Roman population and leave it powerless against invading armies.

Myth No. 4

The empire collapsed because of barbarian invasions.

In a recent Huffington Post article, political scientist Joseph Nye compared the decay of America to the fall of the Roman Empire, fretting that "an absolute decline in [Rome's] society, economy and institutions . . . left it unable to protect itself from hordes of invading barbarian tribes." Likewise, a Utah State University guide to Rome claims that "barbarian forces overran western Europe, spelling the end of an era."

Yet Rome didn't succumb to a sudden influx of barbarians at the gate. Nor were Goths or other Germanic peoples " barbarian " in the modern sense of the term. They had regularly interacted with the Roman Empire for 200 years and, in many cases, were educated, trained and employed inside its perimeters before they succeeded in destroying imperial authority in Italy, France, the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa during the 5th century A.D. At various times over these two centuries, the tribes served in Roman armies.

Alaric, who famously led the Visigothic migration through the empire to the gates of Rome (395-410 A.D.), started his military career commanding Gothic troops serving in the Roman army. His primary opponent was Stilicho, a half-Roman, half-Vandal who commanded the armies of the western half of the empire. The eventual rout was no invasion of unknown "hordes," as Nye put it.

Myth No. 5

The empire collapsed because of Christianity.

In his monumental study " The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," Edward Gibbon famously proposed that Christianity sparked a decrease in civic duty and a corresponding unwillingness to sacrifice for the empire in its period of greatest stress, ultimately leading (along with barbarian invasions) to its collapse. Because of the widespread acclamation accorded to it, both at the time and by later generations, Gibbon's work has had unusual longevity.

But no modern scholar believes Gibbon's thesis, if only for the simple fact that a Christian Roman Empire in the east survived the Germanic migration and lived on as the Byzantine Empire for nearly another millennium. Gibbon was also aware of the fact that the Goths were Christian, but he chose to ignore this when assailing the Roman Empire for its adherence to a new faith. All parties at the end of the Roman Empire were Christian.

Thanks to Peter Brown's magnificent work " The World of Late Antiquity," most scholars now consider the collapse of the Western Roman Empire to be part of a larger process of transformation, not a decline and fall. Rome had become peripheral to the empire it created, whose center of political and economic life shifted to Constantinople, modern Istanbul, over the course of the 4th century A.D.
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Five myths about the decline and fall of Rome

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Nathan Pilkington is a lecturer in the department of history at Columbia University. The rise of Donald Trump supposedly heralds the decline of the American idea, according to many of his critics, who've taken the opportunity to compare this moment to the fall of Rome's republic in 31 B.C.

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1. Invasions by Barbarian tribes

The most straightforward theory for Western Rome's collapse pins the fall on a string of military losses sustained against outside forces. Rome had tangled with Germanic tribes for centuries, but by the 300s "barbarian" groups like the Goths had encroached beyond the Empire's borders. The Romans weathered a Germanic uprising in the late fourth century, but in 410 the Visigoth King Alaric successfully sacked the city of Rome.

The Empire spent the next several decades under constant threat before "the Eternal City" was raided again in 455, this time by the Vandals. Finally, in 476, the Germanic leader Odoacer staged a revolt and deposed Emperor Romulus Augustulus. From then on, no Roman emperor would ever again rule from a post in Italy, leading many to cite 476 as the year the Western Empire suffered its death blow.

2. Economic troubles and overreliance on slave labor

Even as Rome was under attack from outside forces, it was also crumbling from within thanks to a severe financial crisis. Constant wars and overspending had significantly lightened imperial coffers, and oppressive taxation and inflation had widened the gap between rich and poor. In the hope of avoiding the taxman, many members of the wealthy classes had even fled to the countryside and set up independent fiefdoms.

At the same time, the empire was rocked by a labor deficit. Rome's economy depended on slaves to till its fields and work as craftsmen, and its military might had traditionally provided a fresh influx of conquered peoples to put to work. But when expansion ground to a halt in the second century, Rome's supply of slaves and other war treasures began to dry up. A further blow came in the fifth century, when the Vandals claimed North Africa and began disrupting the empire's trade by prowling the Mediterranean as pirates. With its economy faltering and its commercial and agricultural production in decline, the Empire began to lose its grip on Europe.

3. The rise of the Eastern Empire

The fate of Western Rome was partially sealed in the late third century, when Emperor Diocletian divided the Empire into two halves-the Western Empire seated in the city of Milan, and the Eastern Empire in Byzantium, later known as Constantinople. The division made the empire more easily governable in the short term, but over time the two halves drifted apart. East and West failed to adequately work together to combat outside threats, and the two often squabbled over resources and military aid.

As the gulf widened, the largely Greek-speaking Eastern Empire grew in wealth while the Latin-speaking West descended into an economic crisis. Most importantly, the strength of the Eastern Empire served to divert Barbarian invasions to the West. Emperors like Constantine ensured that the city of Constantinople was fortified and well guarded, but Italy and the city of Rome-which only had symbolic value for many in the East-were left vulnerable. The Western political structure would finally disintegrate in the fifth century, but the Eastern Empire endured in some form for another thousand years before being overwhelmed by the Ottoman Empire in the 1400s.

4. Overexpansion and military overspending

At its height, the Roman Empire stretched from the Atlantic Ocean all the way to the Euphrates River in the Middle East, but its grandeur may have also been its downfall. With such a vast territory to govern, the empire faced an administrative and logistical nightmare. Even with their excellent road systems, the Romans were unable to communicate quickly or effectively enough to manage their holdings.

Rome struggled to marshal enough troops and resources to defend its frontiers from local rebellions and outside attacks, and by the second century, the Emperor Hadrian was forced to build his famous wall in Britain just to keep the enemy at bay. As more and more funds were funneled into the military upkeep of the empire, technological advancement slowed and Rome's civil infrastructure fell into disrepair.

5. Government corruption and political instability

If Rome's sheer size made it difficult to govern, ineffective and inconsistent leadership only served to magnify the problem. Being the Roman emperor had always been a particularly dangerous job, but during the tumultuous second and third centuries it nearly became a death sentence. Civil war thrust the empire into chaos, and more than 20 men took the throne in the span of only 75 years, usually after the murder of their predecessor.

The Praetorian Guard-the emperor's personal bodyguards-assassinated and installed new sovereigns at will, and once even auctioned the spot off to the highest bidder. The political rot also extended to the Roman Senate, which failed to temper the excesses of the emperors due to its own widespread corruption and incompetence. As the situation worsened, civic pride waned and many Roman citizens lost trust in their leadership.

6. The arrival of the Huns and the migration of the Barbarian tribes

The Barbarian attacks on Rome partially stemmed from a mass migration caused by the Huns' invasion of Europe in the late fourth century. When these Eurasian warriors rampaged through northern Europe, they drove many Germanic tribes to the borders of the Roman Empire. The Romans grudgingly allowed members of the Visigoth tribe to cross south of the Danube and into the safety of Roman territory, but they treated them with extreme cruelty.

According to the historian Ammianus Marcellinus, Roman officials even forced the starving Goths to trade their children into slavery in exchange for dog meat. In brutalizing the Goths, the Romans created a dangerous enemy within their own borders. When the oppression became too much to bear, the Goths rose up in revolt and eventually routed a Roman army and killed the Eastern Emperor Valens during the Battle of Adrianople in A.D. 378. The shocked Romans negotiated a flimsy peace with the barbarians, but the truce unraveled in 410, when the Goth King Alaric moved west and sacked Rome. With the Western Empire weakened, Germanic tribes like the Vandals and the Saxons were able to surge across its borders and occupy Britain, Spain and North Africa.

7. Christianity and the loss of traditional values

The decline of Rome dovetailed with the spread of Christianity, and some have argued that the rise of a new faith helped contribute to the empire's fall. The Edict of Milan legalized Christianity in 313, and it later became the state religion in 380. These decrees ended centuries of persecution, but they may have also eroded the traditional Roman values system. Christianity displaced the polytheistic Roman religion, which viewed the emperor as having a divine status, and also shifted focus away from the glory of the state and onto a sole deity.

Meanwhile, popes and other church leaders took an increased role in political affairs, further complicating governance. The 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon was the most famous proponent of this theory, but his take has since been widely criticized. While the spread of Christianity may have played a small role in curbing Roman civic virtue, most scholars now argue that its influence paled in comparison to military, economic and administrative factors.

8. Weakening of the Roman legions

For most of its history, Rome's military was the envy of the ancient world. But during the decline, the makeup of the once mighty legions began to change. Unable to recruit enough soldiers from the Roman citizenry, emperors like Diocletian and Constantine began hiring foreign mercenaries to prop up their armies. The ranks of the legions eventually swelled with Germanic Goths and other barbarians, so much so that Romans began using the Latin word "barbarus" in place of "soldier."

While these Germanic soldiers of fortune proved to be fierce warriors, they also had little or no loyalty to the empire, and their power-hungry officers often turned against their Roman employers. In fact, many of the barbarians who sacked the city of Rome and brought down the Western Empire had earned their military stripes while serving in the Roman legions.

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Find out why one of history's most legendary empires finally came crashing down.

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After the last Severan died, Rome's government was very weak. Army leaders fought each other for nearly 50 years for the throne. Rome obtained 22 different emperors during that time. Although all...