Fall of the Western Roman Empire

On 4 September 476 the German commander Odoacer deposed the boy emperor Romulus Augustulus and did not replace him, an event conventionally taken as the end of the western Roman empire and of antiquity in the west. The boy was spared and sent to a villa in Campania; Odoacer took the imperial insignia to Constantinople and ruled Italy as a king under the eastern emperor. The empire had been losing provinces for a generation: Africa went to the Vandals in 439, the north was crossed by Attila, and the Britons had asked Rome to withdraw in 407. Roman armies were now manned by federate troops who served their own commanders, and the treasure that paid them had gone. Yet Roman law, the Latin language, the Senate and the Christian church continued under Gothic and later Lombard kings, and the eastern empire in Constantinople survived until 1453. Historians once treated 476 as a decisive break; most now see a long transformation in which the forms of Rome outlived its government, and the date itself was only noticed by historians centuries afterwards. The date has been debated ever since, and Gibbon's famous history of the decline made it a byword for collapse.