The Fall of the Western Roman Empire: How Rome Died

On 4 September 476 CE, a Germanic chieftain named Odoacer, the commander of the foederati — barbarian soldiers in Roman service — deposed a teenage emperor named Romulus Augustulus and sent the imperial regalia to Constantinople. The event was almost bloodless. Romulus, the son of a previous emperor, was sent into comfortable retirement with a generous pension. Odoacer ruled Italy as king of the foederati, acknowledging the authority of the eastern emperor in Constantinople. The Western Roman Empire had ended.

The fall of the Western Roman Empire is one of the most debated events in history. It was a slow, complex, and contingent process, not a single catastrophe. The empire had been weakened by a century of invasion, civil war, plague, and economic crisis. The final collapse came not because the Romans were conquered in a great battle, but because the political structure of the Western Empire had simply ceased to function. The provinces had been overrun, the army had been defeated, the currency had collapsed, and the imperial government had lost the ability to raise taxes or recruit soldiers. The Eastern Roman Empire, ruled from Constantinople, survived the crisis and endured for almost another thousand years, until the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. It is the fate of the Western Empire that this article will trace.

Theodosius and the Division of the Empire

The crisis of the fifth century had its roots in the fourth, and most immediately in the reign of the last emperor to rule a united Roman Empire, Theodosius I. Theodosius, a Spaniard from a military family, had become emperor of the East in 379 CE and emperor of the West in 394 CE. He was a Christian zealot who had ordered the massacre of several thousand civilians in Thessalonica in 390 CE as punishment for the murder of a Roman official. He was also a competent administrator who had campaigned successfully against the Sassanids and the Visigoths.

Theodosius died of disease in Milan on 17 January 395 CE. He was only 48 years old. On his deathbed, he divided the empire between his two sons: Honorius, then 10 years old, received the Western Empire, and Arcadius, 17, received the Eastern Empire. The division was meant to be temporary — both brothers ruled as co-augusti — but it became permanent. Theodosius’s successors never reunited the empire, and the eastern and western halves drifted further apart in language, in institutions, and in self-conception. The Western Empire, less wealthy, less urbanized, and more exposed to invasion, would not survive the fifth century.

Alaric and the Sack of Rome (410 CE)

The first great shock came in 410 CE, when the Visigoths under their king Alaric I sacked the city of Rome. The event was an earthquake in the ancient world. For eight centuries, since the Gauls had threatened the city in 390 BCE, no foreign enemy had entered Rome. Now a barbarian king had occupied it for three days, plundering its wealth and terrifying its inhabitants.

The Visigoths were a Germanic people who had crossed the Danube into the empire in 376 CE, fleeing before the Huns, a nomadic people from the steppes of Central Asia. The Romans had allowed them to settle in the empire as allies, but the settlement had gone badly. The Visigoths had revolted, killed the emperor Valens at the Battle of Adrianople in 378 CE — one of the worst defeats in Roman history — and spent the next three decades wandering the Balkans and the Greek provinces.

Alaric, who had been elected king in 395 CE, was a brilliant leader who wanted to give his people a homeland and a king of their own. He marched into Italy in 401 CE and again in 408 CE. Twice the Western Roman government was forced to negotiate with him. In 410, after the new emperor Honorius failed to deliver the promised territory, Alaric marched on Rome. The city fell on 24 August 410, and for three days the Visigoths looted it. They spared the Christian churches and the lives of the inhabitants, but they took the wealth of the city and carried off Galla Placidia, the emperor’s half-sister, as a hostage.

The sack of Rome was a shock to Roman self-confidence, but it was not, in itself, the end of the empire. Italy and the city of Rome itself were recovered within a few years. What it demonstrated, however, was that the Western Roman government was no longer capable of defending its own heartland. The Visigoths, after sacking Rome, wandered into Gaul and Spain, where they eventually settled and established a kingdom that would outlast the empire by three centuries.

The Vandals and the Sack of Rome (455 CE)

The next great shock came in 455 CE, when the Vandals under their king Genseric sailed from North Africa and sacked Rome for a second time. The Vandals were a Germanic people who had crossed the Rhine in 406 CE, wandered through Gaul and Spain, and in 429 CE crossed into North Africa under Roman pressure. In Africa they had carved out a powerful kingdom, and in 439 they captured Carthage, the richest city of the western Mediterranean, and made it their capital. From Carthage they controlled the sea lanes of the western Mediterranean and raided the coasts of Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, and Spain.

In 455 CE, the Western emperor Valentinian III was murdered in Rome by two of his own generals. The widow of the murdered emperor, Licinia Eudoxia, reportedly invited Genseric to come to Rome to avenge the murder. Genseric sailed from Carthage with a large fleet. He occupied the port of Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber, and on 16 June 455 the Vandals entered Rome. The sack lasted fourteen days, and was far more thorough than Alaric’s had been. The Vandals stripped the city of its remaining treasures, including the menorah and other sacred objects that Titus had brought from the Temple of Jerusalem in 70 CE. The relics were eventually taken to Carthage, and later returned to Rome by the Byzantine general Belisarius in 534 CE.

The sack of 455 marked the nadir of Roman dignity. The Western Empire was now a hollow shell, dependent on the goodwill of the Germanic peoples who occupied its provinces.

The Huns and Attila

The most terrifying of the barbarian peoples were the Huns, the nomadic horsemen of the Eurasian steppes who had set in motion the great migrations of the late fourth and early fifth centuries. The Huns were a steppe people, related to the Xiongnu of Central Asia, who had migrated westward in the fourth century and established a great empire stretching from the Volga to the Rhine. Their ruler Attila (r. 434–453) was the most powerful of the barbarian kings of the fifth century, and the Romans treated him as a serious threat.

In 451 CE, Attila invaded Gaul with a vast army. He sacked a number of cities, but he was stopped at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains (or Châlons) by a Roman-Visigothic alliance under the Roman general Flavius Aetius, the last great general of the Western Empire. It was one of the most important battles of the century. The battle did not destroy the Huns, but it did break Attila’s invasion of Gaul. In 452, Attila invaded Italy, sacked a number of cities in the north, and threatened Rome. Pope Leo I met Attila at the river Mincio and persuaded him to withdraw, allegedly by promising tribute and by threatening him with the vengeance of the Visigoths and the Eastern Roman Empire.

Attila died in 453 CE, on the night of his marriage to a Germanic princess. His empire, which had been held together by his personal authority, collapsed almost immediately. His sons fought each other for the succession, and the subject peoples of the Hunnic Empire revolted. The Huns ceased to be a serious threat to the empire, but the damage they had done to the Roman world could not be undone. The migrations they had set in motion had already broken the Western Empire beyond repair.

The Loss of the Western Provinces

In the third quarter of the fifth century, the Western Empire lost its remaining provinces to a combination of barbarian invasion, settlement, and imperial abdication. The Vandals held North Africa and the western Mediterranean. The Visigoths held Spain and southern Gaul. The Franks under Clovis had established a kingdom in northern Gaul, and the Burgundians held the southeast. The Anglo-Saxons were migrating into Britain, reducing Roman Britain to a few rump states in the west and south. In 476, Italy itself passed to Odoacer.

By the end of the fifth century, the Western Roman Empire was no more. The provinces were ruled by Germanic kings who acknowledged, in varying degrees, the authority of the emperor in Constantinople. The Roman administration had collapsed, the Latin literacy of the western provinces was declining, and the cities were shrinking. The ancient world was coming to an end. The Middle Ages were beginning.

Why Did the Western Roman Empire Fall?

The fall of the Western Roman Empire is one of the great questions of history, and there is no single answer. The most influential modern explanations include:

The barbarian invasions. The movement of the Huns across the steppe set off a chain reaction of migrations that broke the Roman frontiers. The Germanic peoples who had been pushed westward by the Huns were too numerous and too well-organized to be assimilated into the empire in the way that earlier barbarian groups had been. The empire could not defend itself against this new threat.
The internal crisis of the empire. The Western Empire had been weakened by a century of civil war, economic crisis, and political instability. The succession of child emperors and usurpers had destroyed the legitimacy of the imperial government. The army, increasingly recruited from Germanic foederati, was no longer a reliable instrument of Roman policy.
The economic decline. The empire of the fifth century was poorer, less urbanized, and less integrated than the empire of the second. Trade had declined, the cities had shrunk, and the tax base had collapsed. The imperial government could no longer afford the army or the bureaucracy that had held the empire together.
The religious transformation. The Christianization of the empire may have weakened the military and civic spirit of the Roman elite. The church offered an alternative center of authority and an alternative set of loyalties. Bishops, not magistrates, increasingly ran the cities of the Western Empire. The Vestal Virgins and the old Roman priesthoods had lost their state funding; the Christian Church had taken their place.
The division of the empire. The permanent division of the empire in 395 CE was a disaster for the West. The wealthy and more capable Eastern Empire was unable or unwilling to commit the resources needed to save the West. Italy, the Balkans, and the western provinces were too far from Constantinople to be defended.
The barbarian kingdoms as alternatives. The Germanic peoples who established kingdoms in the Western Empire were not simply destroyers. They were often trying to preserve and continue the Roman way of life. Theoderic the Ostrogoth, who ruled Italy from 493 to 526, saw himself as a Roman ruler, used Roman law and Roman administrators, and tried to maintain the empire’s institutions. The fall of the Western Empire was, in this sense, not so much a destruction as a transformation: Roman culture continued under Germanic kings.

For a deeper look at the broader question, see What Caused the Fall of Rome?.

The Survival of the East

The story did not end in 476. The Eastern Roman Empire, ruled from Constantinople, survived the crisis. In the sixth century, the emperor Justinian launched a great campaign to reconquer the western provinces. His general Belisarius reconquered North Africa from the Vandals in 534 and Italy from the Ostrogoths by 540. For a brief period, much of the old Western Empire was back under Roman rule. But the conquests were not permanent: the Lombards invaded Italy in 568, the Slavs settled the Balkans, and the Persians under the Sassanids renewed their war against the East.

The Eastern Roman Empire — which historians now call the Byzantine Empire, although its citizens always called themselves Romans — survived the seventh-century Arab conquests, the Iconoclast controversy, and the constant pressure of the new Islamic caliphate. It was the wealthiest and most sophisticated state in the Mediterranean world until the eleventh century, when it began a long, slow decline. Constantinople finally fell to the Ottoman Turks on 29 May 1453, when the last Roman emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, died fighting on the walls. With him, the Roman state, in one form or another, had lasted for 2,204 years from the legendary foundation by Romulus.

For the broader context, see the complete history of the Roman Empire, the crisis of the third century, and the founding of Rome.