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 age currently are, and that is because we
have access to platforms like the one provided by the sponsor of this video Blinkist. Blinkist is all about preserving and sharing
knowledge by making it easily digestible even for the busiest among us. It takes the most interesting and relevant
non-fictional books and turns them into 15-minute audios – blinks. More than 3000 titles are already available
which means that you can learn on the go, learn fast, and always improve your knowledge,
no matter how time-constrained you are. Blinkist titles range from Entrepreneurship
to Philosophy, from Psychology to Politics, but most importantly for us, there are 100s
of historical books that you can listen to! Imagine learning the most important facts
of 4 books in just 1 hour! We recommend Why Don’t We Learn from History
by Basil Liddell Hart, so you can learn from history and The Origins of Political Order
by Francis Fukuyama to see how diverse political and social environments allowed Europe to
develop many different political systems! New titles are added all the time! Support our channel and your growth - get
yourself premium access to knowledge - the first 100 people to go to blinkist.com/kingsandgenerals
are going to get unlimited access for 1 week to try it out. 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 and have pressed the bell button to see the
next video in the series. Please, consider liking, commenting, and sharing
- it helps immensely. Our videos would be impossible without our
kind patrons and youtube channel members, whose ranks you can join via the links in
the description to know our schedule, get early access to our videos, access our discord,
and much more. This is the Kings and Generals channel, and
we will catch you on the next one.
