When Did Rome Fall? Constantinople Picked the Date

By the time the barbarian commander Odoacer entered Ravenna in the late summer of 476, he had killed the emperor’s father near Piacenza and the emperor’s uncle in a pine grove outside the city. The emperor himself, a boy called Romulus, he let live.

The Anonymus Valesianus, the principal record of Romulus’s reign, says Odoacer spared him “in pity for his tender years”. Because the boy was handsome, Odoacer also gave him “an income of six thousand gold-pieces” and sent him to Campania, “to live there a free man with his relatives”.

That retirement is the conventional end of the Western Roman Empire. The first known history to call it the fall of Rome was written in Constantinople, about forty years later.

When did Rome fall?

The Western Roman Empire is conventionally said to have fallen in September 476, when Odoacer deposed the boy emperor Romulus Augustulus. The Roman Empire itself carried on in the east, ruled from Constantinople, until Ottoman forces under Sultan Mehmed II took the city on 29 May 1453.

The city of Rome had been sacked twice earlier in the same century, and the eastern half of the empire outlived the western by 977 years. As with the question of the first video game, the right date depends on which Rome you mean:

Which Rome	Date	What happened
The city	24 August 410	Sacked by Alaric’s Goths
The city	455	Sacked by Geiseric’s Vandals
The western empire, by convention	4 September 476 or soon after	Romulus Augustulus deposed by Odoacer
The western imperial title	480	Julius Nepos, still recognized by Constantinople, killed in Dalmatia
The Roman Empire	29 May 1453	Constantinople taken by Mehmed II

The sacked city belongs to 410 and 455

If 476 conjures barbarians sacking Rome, that scene played out in two earlier years. In 476 the boy was deposed in Ravenna, the city where his father had made him emperor ten months before.

The sack that shocked contemporaries came on 24 August 410, when Alaric’s Goths took Rome, the first time in about 800 years that the city had fallen to a foreign enemy. Jerome, who had studied in Rome and spent Sundays visiting its catacombs, wrote that “sobs choke my utterance” and that “the City which had taken the whole world was itself taken.” Augustine wrote The City of God in response.

In 455 the Vandals of King Geiseric sacked Rome again, so thoroughly, writes Anatoly Grablevsky in Antigone, that “the sack of 410 seemed mild by comparison”.

Italian sources of the period, Grablevsky adds, barely register 476, treating Odoacer as “merely the latest in a long line of barbarian rulers of the West”. The UC San Diego historian Edward J. Watts counts nine western emperors who had risen and fallen since 455, most of them overthrown by barbarian commanders like Odoacer.

Why the West gave way is a separate and crowded argument. Grablevsky’s candidate for the turning point is 468, when Vandal fireboats set a Roman armada alight off Cap Bon, near Carthage: “the last point at which the tide could have been turned”.

Odoacer sent the regalia to Constantinople

Odoacer did not make himself emperor. He took the title of king, and the chronicler Cassiodorus recorded that he “made use of neither the purple nor the imperial regalia”. The regalia went to the eastern emperor, Zeno.

The historian Malchus preserves the message the Roman Senate sent with its envoys. They told Zeno that the West had “no need of a separate empire” and that “a single common emperor would be sufficient for both territories”. They asked him to make Odoacer a patrician and hand him the government of Italy.

The last recognized western emperor lived until 480

Zeno’s reply, as Malchus records it, was pointed. The western Romans had received two men from the eastern empire and had “driven one out, Nepos, and killed the other, Anthemius”. While their emperor was still alive, they should take him back.

Julius Nepos had fled to Dalmatia in 475, when Orestes, Romulus’s father, marched on Ravenna, and he kept the imperial title. From 477 to 480 the mints of Milan and Ravenna, in Odoacer’s Italy, struck gold coins in the names of Nepos and Zeno.

His own supporters killed him in 480. Ralph Mathisen, writing in the Online Encyclopedia of Roman Emperors, concludes that Nepos “more rightly deserves the title ‘last western Roman emperor.’”

The empire that fell in 1453 still called itself Roman

In the east, the empire carried on. Apart from 1204 to 1261, when crusaders held the city, Constantinople stayed the seat of a Roman emperor until Sultan Mehmed II laid siege in April 1453 and took the city on 29 May. The last emperor, Constantine XI, fought in the final battle.

The city’s people called themselves Romans, Rhomaioi, to the end, and called their Greek language “Romaic”. The label “Byzantine” for the whole empire, Grablevsky notes, dates from the Renaissance and became standard only in the 19th century. Anthony Kaldellis built his 2019 book Romanland on the case that Roman was both their identity and their ethnicity.

A chronicler in Constantinople picked 476

Marcellinus Comes, an Illyrian writing a Latin chronicle in Constantinople, reached the year 476 and wrote: “The western Empire of the Roman people… perished with this Augustulus.” Watts calls the chronicle, which appeared in the late 510s, “the first historical work known to claim that Rome fell in 476”.

The boy’s names made him easy to cast as the last emperor. Romulus was the name of the city’s legendary founder, and Augustulus means “the little Augustus”, after the first emperor. Mathisen observes that with names like those, “it would have been difficult indeed to resist”.

In a 1983 paper, Brian Croke put the case in the title: “A.D. 476: The Manufacture of a Turning Point”. Marcellinus went on to serve the future emperor Justinian, and Watts argues the 476 story became a pretext for Justinian’s invasion of Italy in 535. Justinian’s own justification, in Procopius’s history of the war, was that the Goths had seized “Italy, which was ours”.

In Watts’s reading, the count ran from 476. When Justinian’s army entered Rome in December 536, Procopius wrote that “Rome became subject to the Romans again after a space of sixty years”, and Odoacer’s coup lay sixty years and three months in the past.

Romulus himself may have lived three decades past the date now given for the fall of Rome. The encyclopedia records a suggestion that he is the Romulus to whom the Ostrogothic king Theoderic wrote around 507 to 511, about a bequest to “a certain Romulus and his mother”.

If so, the man remembered as the last western emperor was still alive, and still sorting out the family money, not long before Marcellinus wrote him down as the end of Rome. Strictly FYI.