The Late Empire & the Fall of Rome

1. The Successors of Constantine (AD 337–395)

After Constantine’s death his sons divided the empire, and the fourth century witnessed a series of rulers — his sons (Constantine II, Constans, Constantius II), the pagan emperor Julian ("the Apostate," r. 361–363), who briefly sought to restore the old religion but died on campaign against Persia, and his successors Jovian, Valentinian I and Valens. The empire remained Christian, and the religious unity the emperors sought could not halt the political and military decline. Under Valens, in AD 378, a catastrophe unfolded: the Goths, fleeing the Huns (a fierce nomadic people riding out of the Asian steppes), had been admitted into the empire to settle, but were mistreated and rose in revolt. Valens met them in battle at Adrianople (9 August 378) and was defeated and killed — the first Roman emperor to die in battle against barbarians, and a defeat long regarded as a turning point. It forced the empire to make peace with the Goths, settling them within the empire as foederati (allies) — an ominous precedent, for it placed armed, self-governing barbarian peoples inside the Roman world (World History Encyclopedia, "Battle of Adrianople," worldhistory.org/Battle_of_Adrianople/).

Theodosius I (r. 379–395), the last emperor to rule a united empire, restored order and made Christianity the official religion of the state (the Edict of Thessalonica, AD 380), closing the pagan temples. On his death in AD 395 he divided the empire between his two sons: Arcadius in the east (capital Constantinople) and Honorius in the west (capital, from 402, at Ravenna). The division, never fully reversed, set the stage for the separate fates of east and west (World History Encyclopedia, "Theodosius I," worldhistory.org/Theodosius_I/).

2. The Great Invasions and the Sack of Rome (AD 410)

The western empire now faced the full force of the barbarian migrations — the movements of Germanic and other peoples (Goths, Vandals, Suebi, Alans, Burgundians, Franks, Angles and Saxons) driven and displaced by the Huns and by their own hunger for land. In AD 406 a great wave of barbarians crossed the frozen Rhine into Gaul, beginning the permanent loss of the western provinces. In AD 407 the Roman legions withdrew from Britain to defend the continent. Most fatefully, the Visigoths under their king Alaric, allied but then turned on Rome, marched into Italy, and on 24 August AD 410 sacked the city of Rome itself — the first time in 800 years that Rome had fallen to an enemy. Though Alaric spared the churches and much of the city (he was a Christian), the psychological blow was enormous: the city that had seemed eternal was taken. St. Augustine wrote his City of God in response, and pagans blamed the abandonment of the old gods while Christians saw God’s judgement. Rome was no longer the seat of government (the emperor lived at Ravenna), but its capture sent shockwaves through the ancient world (World History Encyclopedia, "Sack of Rome," worldhistory.org/Sack_of_Rome/).

3. The Huns and Attila (AD 434–453)

The greatest terror of the age was Attila the Hun (r. c. 434–453), the "Scourge of God," whose nomadic Hunnic empire devastated Europe. Attila first extorted tribute from the eastern empire, then turned west, invading Gaul in AD 451, where he was finally checked at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains (near Châlons) by the combined Roman army under the great general Flavius Aetius and the Visigoths. Attila next invaded Italy in AD 452, ravaging the north (the city of Aquileia was destroyed, Venice’s refugees reputedly founding the city), and it is said that he withdrew partly under the moral persuasion of Pope Leo I. Attila’s sudden death in AD 453 dissolved his empire, but the damage was done: the western provinces had been devastated, and the fragile western empire was exhausted (World History Encyclopedia, "Attila the Hun," worldhistory.org/Attila_the_Hun/).

4. The Final Collapse of the West (AD 455–476)

The western empire reeled from one blow to the next. In AD 455 the Vandals under their king Gaiseric, who had made themselves masters of North Africa (capturing Carthage in 439) and built a naval power, sailed to Rome and sacked the city — a sack so thorough that the word "vandalism" is derived from them. The west’s emperors became puppets of barbarian generals and warlords: the powerful Ricimer and then Orestes made and unmade emperors at will. In AD 476 the Germanic general Odoacer, commander of the barbarian troops in Italy, deposed the boy-emperor Romulus Augustulus — ironically named for the founder Romulus and the first emperor Augustus. Rather than naming a successor, Odoacer sent the imperial regalia to the eastern emperor Zeno and ruled Italy as its king. With the deposition of Romulus Augustulus, the Western Roman Empire came to an end; the traditional date 476 marks "the fall of Rome" (World History Encyclopedia, "Fall of the Western Roman Empire," worldhistory.org/Western_Roman_Empire/).

5. Why Did Rome Fall?

The fall of the western Roman Empire is one of the great questions of history — debated ever since the English historian Edward Gibbon published his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788). No single cause explains it; rather, a combination of factors progressively weakened a state too large to defend and too rigid to adapt:

• Barbarian pressure and migration — the relentless invasions and settlements of peoples who exhausted the frontiers and eventually occupied the provinces and the throne itself.
• Civil war and usurpation — repeated rebellions and army-acclaimed emperors who drained the empire of strength fighting each other.
• Economic decline — the burden of taxation, inflation, and the decay of trade and cities, aggravated by plague and the loss of productive provinces.
• Over-extension and military strain — an empire too vast to defend against simultaneous pressures on every front, with a shrinking tax base and an army increasingly recruited from, and led by, barbarians.
• Internal decay and loss of civic spirit — the concentration of power and wealth, the corruption of administration, and the erosion of the patriotic citizen ideal that had once sustained the Republic.
• The rise of Christianity — a factor much debated (Gibbon blamed it for sapping martial vigour), though modern scholars largely reject this as a primary cause, noting that the eastern, equally Christian, empire survived.

What is beyond dispute is the scale of the transformation: the western half of the empire dissolved into a patchwork of Germanic kingdoms (the Visigoths in Spain and Gaul, the Vandals in Africa, the Ostrogoths in Italy, the Franks in Gaul), and the Mediterranean unity of the Roman world vanished. The eastern half, however — Greek-speaking, Christian, centred on Constantinople — endured for another millennium as the Byzantine Empire, carrying Roman law, government and Christian civilisation into the Middle Ages. And even in the fallen west, the legacy of Rome — its language, law, institutions, cities, roads and idea of a single civilisation — shaped everything that followed. In a very real sense, the Roman Empire never wholly vanished; it was transformed (World History Encyclopedia, "Fall of the Western Roman Empire," worldhistory.org/Western_Roman_Empire/).

5b. The Barbarian Settlements and the Rise of the Germanic Kingdoms

The "barbarian invasions" were not always sudden raids; many were slow movements of peoples who first served the empire as allies, then came to dominate it. The Visigoths, admitted into the empire as refugees from the Huns in 376 and settled as foederati after Adrianople, revolted, sacked Rome (410), and finally settled in Aquitaine (south-western Gaul) by treaty (419), later expanding into Spain to found the Visigothic kingdom. The Burgundians settled in the valleys of eastern Gaul; the Franks, Germanic peoples on the Rhine, expanded into northern Gaul under their kings (of whom Clovis, converted to Christianity c. 496, founded the Merovingian dynasty, the ancestor of France). The Angles and Saxons crossed the North Sea to Britain, where, after the Roman withdrawal (409/410), they gradually took over the island from the Britons. The Vandals, after wandering through Gaul and Spain, crossed to North Africa (429), where under Gaiseric they took Carthage (439) and built a naval power that sacked Rome in 455. And the Ostrogoths, led by Theodoric, entered Italy (489–493), killed Odoacer, and established the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy, its capital at Ravenna — ruling as the heirs (in name) of the western emperors. Out of the wreck of the western empire — by settlement, invasion and intermarriage — arose the kingdoms of the medieval west: the "barbarian" peoples became, in time, the nations of modern Europe, heirs no less than the Byzantines to the Roman inheritance (World History Encyclopedia, "Fall of the Western Roman Empire," worldhistory.org/Western_Roman_Empire/).

5c. The City of Rome and the Popes

Although the political western empire fell in 476, the city of Rome itself did not cease to be the centre of the world’s greatest institution — the Papacy. The bishop of Rome, as successor of the Apostle Peter and the "first among equals" of the bishops, had long claimed a primacy of honour; and as the western emperors weakened and vanished, the popes became the de facto rulers of the city and the guardians of its moral authority in the west. Leo I (440–461) had already, by tradition, turned back Attila the Hun from Italy in 452 and comforted the city during the Vandal sack of 455. His successors — Gelasius I (492–496), who asserted the independence and superiority of spiritual over secular power, and the later bishops of Rome — built the papacy into the spiritual and increasingly the temporal authority of Latin Christendom. When in 800 the Frankish king Charlemagne was crowned "Emperor of the Romans" by Pope Leo III in St. Peter’s, the papacy had effectively transferred the crown of the Roman empire to the new rulers of the west — the origin of the Holy Roman Empire and a direct line of descent, however transformed, from ancient Rome. Through the church that kept its seat on the ruins of the imperial city, Rome’s authority, its law, its Latin and its memory of empire passed unbroken into the Middle Ages and the modern papacy (World History Encyclopedia, "Leo I," worldhistory.org/Leo_I/).

5d. The Legacy of the Fall — Rome’s Enduring Shadow

The "fall" of the western Roman Empire, for all its drama, was not the end of Rome — of its law, its language, its religion or its idea. The eastern (Byzantine) empire preserved Roman law (codified by Justinian), Greek learning and Christian orthodoxy for a thousand years. In the west, the Latin language evolved into the Romance languages and remained the language of the church, the law and scholarship; Roman law (through the Justinian Code, recovered in the 12th century) became the foundation of the civil law of Europe; the church, with its Roman hierarchy, carried Roman order into the barbarian kingdoms; the memory of the Roman Empire powered political dreams — Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Emperors, and even the claim of later national monarchs to Roman descent — for over a millennium; and the very words — "Rome," "Roman," "empire," "republic," "senate," "law," "citizen," "civilisation" — remained the vocabulary of politics and culture. Every European power, from Byzantium to the Franks, from the Papacy to the modern republics of Italy, France and the United States, has claimed the inheritance of Rome. The fall of 476 was thus a transformation, not an extinction: Rome died, in the west, only to be reborn in a thousand forms that still shape the modern world (World History Encyclopedia, "Roman Empire," worldhistory.org/Roman_Empire/).

6. Selected Sources & Further Reading

The fall of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay.— Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire