Fall of the Western Roman Empire

The event

By the late fifth century, the Western Roman Empire had been fragmenting for decades under pressure from Germanic peoples migrating and settling within its former borders, economic decline, and repeated internal political instability. In 476, the Germanic military commander Odoacer, leading a mixed force of Germanic soldiers within the Roman army, deposed the teenage emperor Romulus Augustulus and, rather than installing another puppet emperor, sent the imperial regalia to the Eastern emperor Zeno in Constantinople, effectively declaring the Western imperial office vacant.

Historians have long debated how significant a break 476 actually represents, since Roman administrative, cultural, and religious structures persisted in modified forms across much of the former Western Empire's territory for generations, and the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire continued to consider itself the legitimate Roman state for another thousand years. Nonetheless, 476 remains the conventional marker historians use for the end of ancient Roman political authority in the West.

For the church, the collapse of centralized Roman political authority in the West had complex consequences. In the short term it created instability and insecurity, but over subsequent centuries it also elevated the practical civil and social authority of bishops, particularly the Bishop of Rome, who increasingly served as intermediaries between Germanic kings and local populations in the absence of effective imperial government.

Augustine's City of God, written decades earlier partly in response to the shock of the Visigothic sack of Rome in 410, had already anticipated and theologically prepared many Western Christians for the idea that the earthly fate of the Roman state, however significant, was ultimately distinct from and subordinate to the fate of the church and the "City of God" it represented.

Other witnesses

• various Byzantine and Western chronicle sources of the late fifth century

Further reading

• Christian History Magazine 94: Building the City of God in a Crumbling World — free full issue