When did the Roman Empire Fall?

_{The Course of Empire: Destruction, Thomas Cole, 1836}

It’s a simple question, right? Given the centrality of the legacy of the Roman Empire to Europe and the Mediterranean World over the last two thousand years, one would assume that we would have some kind of consensus as to when the actual state stopped existing. The English word “Emperor” is a direct derivative from the Latin Imperator, which originally meant “commander”, but came to be an Imperial title. The German equivalent title of “Kaiser“, and the Russian “Czar” both descend from Caesar, originally a reference to the dictator Gaius Julius Caesar, but later one of the key titles used by Roman Emperors. The very concept of Imperial rule in this half of the world has always been tied directly to Rome, and its legacy. But therein is the problem. Trying to untangle the knot of competing claims of succession and imperial inheritance that descend from Rome can leave one with at least half-a-dozen arguable end dates for the Empire, depending on how generously one wants to interpret the historical record.

This can be frustrating from the perspective of a historian trying to draw neat lines and chronologies around their subjects, but it also provides us with a fascinating little case study in the complexity of imperial decline and the durability of our Roman inheritance.

Let’s start by trying to nail down the timeline as firmly as we can. The exact founding date of the city of Rome remains unclear–Roman tradition placed it around 753 BCE, with several distinct founding myths, but archeological evidence suggests large-scale habitation as early as c. 1000 BCE. Originally a Kingdom, the monarchy was eventually abolished and replaced by an aristocratic Republic. Again, Roman tradition dates this to 509 BCE, with the overthrow of Tarquinius Superbus. While the details of this story are likely a much later invention, we can assume a degree of truth to the timing and broad outlines of the event. Over the next several centuries, the Roman Republic embarked on a steady campaign of expansion, going from the leading city of Latium to the dominant power of Italy to the hegemon of the Mediterranean world, following their victories over Carthage in the Punic Wars of 264–241 BCE, 218 to 201 BCE, and 149–146 BCE. By the time the Republic entered its death spiral, Rome controlled everything between the Pillars of Hercules and the Hellespont.

The story of the Roman Republic’s collapse is itself a long and complex one. Suffice it to say, Sulla‘s March on Rome in 88 BCE marks a turning point that the Republic never really recovers from, as a Roman general turns his legions against the Senate for the first (but far from the last) time. The decades following were marked by political instability and unrest, culminating finally in the Caesarian Civil War of 49-45 BCE, during which Julius Caesar had himself declared dictator-for-life. His assassination in 44 BCE did little to restore republican rule, instead ushering in the Second Triumvirate of 43–32 BCE, and a final series of civil wars, culminating in Augustus‘ victory and the establishment of the Principate in 27 BCE. Though the facade of Republican governance remained, Augustus and his heirs firmly established a tradition of autocratic rule that would continue for the rest of Roman history.

This early phase of the Roman Empire, in which the institutions of the Republic were maintained and Emperors tended to mask themselves behind a pretense of being merely “the first magistrate”, lasted until the outbreak of the Third Century Crisis in 235 AD, in which Rome collapsed into a multi-sided civil war, with twenty-six proclaimed emperors over the course of fifty years. The Crisis was brought to an end by 284 AD, with the reunification of Imperial authority and territory. We then enter the period known as the Dominate, in which monarchical authority was more and more emphasized, even as the Empire itself decayed. Though the Emperors Diocletian and Constantine helped stabilize the Empire, their reforms also marked the beginning of permanent division between East and West. Starting in the late fourth century, invasions by Germanic tribes became endemic in the West, and the Empire lost the ability to absorb or repeal them (the reasons for this decline are complex, but I think this essay is a good starting point). Imperial authority collapsed, delegated to foederati whose allegiance to the Emperor was nominal, at best. The city of Rome itself was sacked in 410 AD and 455 AD, and power increasingly fell into the hands of Barbarian generals. Finally, the end came.

In 476 AD, the Germanic general Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus, the last Western Roman Emperor, and proclaimed himself King of Italy. For the first time in a millennium, Roman authority on the Italian peninsula had been irrevocably broken. Cementing his new independent status, Odoacer literally had the imperial regalia packed up and mailed to Constantinople, fundamentally marking the moment of imperial transition. It is this date that is often used as as “the end” of the Roman Empire, and there’s good reason to. But! Odoacer sent the imperial regalia to Constantinople because a Roman Emperor still ruled in the East.

The overthrow of Romulus Augustulus marked the end of the Western Roman Empire, but the Eastern Mediterranean still bowed to Constantinople, and would continue to do so for the next thousand years. Historians refer to this successor state as the “Byzantine Empire“, for clarity’s sake, but its rulers and inhabitants continued to call themselves “Romans” and think of themselves as a direct continuation of the old Empire, although it was linguistically and ethnically Greek, rather than Latin. Under the Emperor Justinian the Great (527-565 AD), the Byzantines reconquered Italy, albeit briefly, but this Eastern Empire suffered the same ravages of perennial civil wars and succession crises that had brought down Western Rome. Byzantine dominance of the Eastern Mediterranean and Levant was brought to a sudden end in the 7th century, when the Muslim conquests overran Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and North Africa, but Constantinople continued to hold away over Anatolia and Greece. Imperial authority waxed and waned over the following centuries, reaching a nadir in 1204 AD with the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade. The Byzantine Empire was reestablished in 1261 AD, but it was never again more than a shadow of its former self. Territorial loss continued apace, until Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror of the Ottoman Empire captured Constantinople and destroyed the remnants of Imperial Rome for good in 1453 AD. Or did he?

_{Mehmed the Conqueror Enters Constantinople, Fausto Zonaro}

First of all, there is the question of Russia, the so-called “Third Rome“. With the collapse of Byzantium, Muscovy was left to increasingly take up the mantle of leading Orthodox Power, leading to a cultural obsession that arguably remains prevalent to this day. Ivan III, the Prince of Moscow who formally reasserted Russian independence from the Tatars, married Sophia Palaiologina, niece of the last Byzantine Emperor, in 1472 AD, creating a formal dynastic connection. As late as the 18th century, Empress Catherine the Great named one of her grandsons ‘Constantine‘ in expectation of placing him on the renewed Byzantine throne. But for all that, Imperial Russia claimed to be the successor to Rome, the inheritor of its legacy, not the legal continuation of the Roman Empire. For that, we must leap back six centuries and travel several hundred miles to the West.

In 797 AD, the Byzantine Empress Irene of Athens had seized power from her son, Emperor Constantine VI, and declared herself sole and direct ruler of Eastern Rome. This was……problematic. Not the coup d’état, that was relatively commonplace for Byzantine court politics, but that a woman had taken the throne. There was no precedent in Roman history for this. Not in the Byzantine Empire, not in the Roman Empire, not in the Republic, not in the Kingdom. Women influencing and dominating their sons or husbands from behind the scenes was relatively common–and in fact, accusations of that became one of the most widespread political attacks. But it was a violation of all tradition for a women to attempt to reign directly. She was unable to ever establish her rule with any legitimacy, and a conspiracy overthrew her in 802 AD, after only five years. However, it just so happened that this brief interregnum coincided with momentous events occurring in Western Europe, with affects that would reverberate for centuries.

In 768 AD, Charlemagne had become King of the Franks. Over the following thirty years, he had expanded the Frankish Kingdom into what would become known as the Carolingian Empire, bringing virtually all of modern France, Germany, Switzerland, the Low Countries, and Northern Italy under his dominion, and achieving a level of political unity in Western Europe not seen since the fall of the Roman Empire. On Christmas day, in 800 AD, this achievement was formalized, when Pope Leo III declared him to be the new Emperor of the Romans, taking advantage of what they saw as the title’s vacancy.

The reasons behind this remain controversial, with scholars debating over whether Charlemagne or Leo was the instigator, and what they exactly hoped to accomplish. In practice, it proved to be a major component in the ongoing Great Schism between Eastern and Western Christianity, and gave Western Europe a claim to imperial equality (or even superiority) to the Roman East.

The Carolingian Empire lasted until 888 AD, when succession disputes finally pulled it apart. The Imperial title fell into disuse for a time, but was revived by Otto the Great in 962 AD, founding what became known as ‘the Holy Roman Empire’. Under Otto and his heirs, this Roman empire would be one centered on Germany and northern Italy, excluding France, and would come to be a decentralized, elective monarchy, in which powerful nobles chose the Emperor, often leading to confusion and chaos. Voltaire famously quipped that the Holy Roman Empire was “neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire”, which had more than a sting of truth to it. From the 1440s onward, control of the Imperial throne was monopolized by the Hapsburg dynasty, but the explosion of the Protestant Reformation in the early 1500s vastly undermined Imperial authority. By the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648 AD, the various principalities and kingdoms of the Empire had gained a vast degree of independence which they would never really relinquish. Still, the Empire continued to exist, and function as legal and administrative entity, all the way into the early 19th century. It was not until 1806 AD that Emperor Francis II dissolved the Holy Roman Empire for good. With Napoleon’s victories in the War of the Third Coalition and the creation of the Confederation of the Rhine, it was impossible to pretend anymore that the Empire held any true hegemony over Central Europe–and Francis wanted to avoid the humiliation of the ‘Corsican Ogre’ siezing the title for himself.

There is a sort of sad postscript to the final dissolution of the Roman Empire in the West, in the form of Italy’s pretensions to imperial grandeur following the country’s unification in the mid-19th century. “After the Rome of the emperors, after the Rome of the Popes, there will come the Rome of the people” proclaimed Giuseppe Mazzini, one of the leading intellectuals of the Risorgimento, and Rome was chosen as the new Kingdom’s capitol despite the fact that Unity was driven by the northern-based Kingdom of Piedmont and Sardinia. Under Mussolini’s rule, attempts to form a ‘New Roman Empire‘ would proceed apace, but amounted to nothing but humiliation and defeat. And again, like the Third Rome of the Tsars, there was no pretensions to actually being the legal continuation the Roman Empire, merely its political and cultural successor.

So, at long last, nearly fourteen centuries after the abdication of the last Western Roman Emperor, we come to the end of the story. Right? Well…..

_{The Eastern and Western Roman Empires, 814 AD}

Remember a few paragraphs ago, when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Empire? The Ottoman sultans saw themselves as the true inheritors of the Imperial Roman legacy, not some Germans or Russians a thousand miles beyond the farthest frontier of the Old Empire. And, in truth, they had good reason to. The Ottoman Turks would go farthest in terms of reassembling a Mediterranean empire, securing control of Eastern Europe, North Africa, the Levant, Anatolia, and Mesopotamia by the 16th century. Signifying this, the Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror took the title Kayser-i Rûm; Emperor of Rome. For several centuries, Turkey was the unquestionably strongest power in Europe and the Mediterranean world, and for much of the 16th and 17th centuries it engaged in a series of epic clashes with the Hapsburgs for regional hegemony. However, following the disastrous Second Siege of Vienna in 1683 AD, the Ottomans slipped in a gradual but inexorable decline, losing territory and prestige with each generation. By the 19th century, it had become known as ‘the Sick Man of Europe’, and continental Great Power politics increasingly turned around the so-called ‘Eastern Question‘, as Russia, Austria, France, and Britain sparred for influence and control within the decaying husk of the Sultanate. In a desperate gamble to restore their power and relevance, the Ottomans entered World War I on the side of the Central Powers in 1914 AD. It was a fatal mistake, and by 1918 AD the Empire had collapsed completely. Following the confusing, multi-sided war involving British, French, Soviets, White Russians, Armenians, Arabs, Kurds, Greeks, and multiple factions of Turks misleadingly labeled ‘the Turkish War of Independence‘, the new leader and founder of the Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, formally abolished the monarchy. Sultan Mehmed VI went into exile in 1922 AD, ending the reign of the last Roman Emperor.

So are we done now? Yes! Well. No. Kinda.

There is one remaining Roman imperial title that arguably remains in continuous use up to the present day. The title of Pontifex Maximus originated during the Roman Republic as chief priest and one of the elected magistrates. During the Imperial era, it became subsumed into the complex web of titles and positions that made up the Roman “emperor”. However, the title fell out of favor after the Empire’s conversion to Christianity. The last emperor recorded to use the title was Gratian (367-383 AD). His co-emperor and successor, Theodosius the Great (379-395 AD) is perhaps most famous for his Edict of Thessalonica, which formally made Christianity the official state religion of the Roman Empire. In it, the Bishop of Rome is refereed to as pontifex. Over the following centuries, Pontifex Maximus became an oft-used title in reference to the Papacy, though, it should be noted that it is not one of the Pope’s official titles, although Summus Pontifex Ecclesiae Universalis, ‘Supreme Pontiff of the Whole Church’ is. Still, it is one of the strongest remianing connections between Imperial Rome and the present day. Though the Vatican never explicitly claimed the Imperial mantle of Rome, the history of the Papacy was certainly shaped by that presumption. Much of the Great East-West Schism was caused by conflicts over the limits of Papal power, and the Holy Roman Emperors spent decades fighting with the Popes over their respective spheres of authority.

So, when did the Roman Empire fall? Did it fall at all? Well, yes. It pretty clearly fell in 476 AD. The Eastern Roman Empire, while maintaining many of the Western Empire’s traditions, is linguistically, ethnically, culturally, and politically distinct enough that it makes sense to differentiate them. The state that fell in 1453 AD had almost nothing in common with Rome besides a name. The loose collection of German principalities that finally fell apart in 1806 AD had even less, and its territories barely overlapped that of the original Roman Empire. The Ottoman Sultanate that dissolved in 1922 AD had an even more tenuous connection, one based on a Mediterranean hegemony that the Turks had lost at leas a century prior. And the Papacy, though clearly a remnant of the Roman world, has never claimed the right of imperium or secular rule over more than central Italy. So what was the point of this whole essay then? Rome may have fallen in 476 AD, but its legacy continued to shape Europe, North Africa, and the Levant for millennia to come. Medieval understanding of international relations focused around the concept of the Translatio Imperii, the idea that supreme imperial power was “passed down” from one state to the next in an endless chain. In practice, this meant that political legitimacy eventually traced back to the Roman Empire, the cradle that had birth the Kingdoms and Churches of both Western and Eastern Europe. As opposed to the system of Westphalian Sovereignty that emerged out of the Reformation and Early Modern Era, Medieval and Renaissance political theorists tended to believe in the concept of ‘Universal Monarchy‘, the idea that there only ever one supreme sovereign who all other potentates looked to. Of course, the never-truly-resolved divide between the Byzantine and Holy Roman Empires meant this theory never quite seemed to work out. And many potentates had little interest in bowing to a foreign monarch, no matter how neat and tidy his charts of legal succession were.

I think most people know how influential Rome has been on what we call ‘Western Civilization’, but I think it’s worth examining just how deep and complex this truly was. Beyond just cultural and political inspiration, Rome provided the predominant font of political legitimacy for most major Empires in the European and Mediterranean worlds for two thousand years.

That’s a pretty amazing legacy.