The End of the Western Roman Empire

In 475 the general Orestes drove the emperor Nepos out of Italy and set his own young son on the throne. The boy’s name was Romulus (Anonymus Valesianus 8.37–38); because of his age the Romans called him Augustulus, “the little Augustus” (Anonymus Valesianus 7.36) (Marcellinus Comes, Chronicle under the year 475) (Procopius, Wars 5.1.2–8).

Procopius, writing some seventy years later, says that the barbarian troops in Roman service demanded a third of the land of Italy and that Orestes refused (Procopius, Wars 5.1.2–8). Odoacer, at the head of a force of Sciri, killed Orestes at Placentia, entered Ravenna and deposed the emperor. Because the boy was so young he spared his life, gave him an income of six thousand gold pieces and sent him to live with his relatives in Campania (Anonymus Valesianus 8.37–38). Odoacer then ruled Italy as king (Anonymus Valesianus 10.45–48).

Sources of the following decades do not agree on what had happened. Marcellinus, a chronicler in the East, writes under the year 476 that the Western empire of the Roman people, begun by Augustus, perished with this Augustulus, and that Gothic kings held Rome from then on (Marcellinus Comes, Chronicle under the year 476). Others describe a change of ruler inside an empire that continued. Procopius treats Odoacer as a soldier who seized power (Procopius, Wars 5.1.2–8). The Anonymus Valesianus says that Theoderic the Ostrogoth, who overthrew Odoacer, was sent by the emperor Zeno to hold Italy for him until he should come himself (Anonymus Valesianus 11.49), and a letter written in Theoderic’s name calls his kingdom a copy of the only empire (Cassiodorus, Variae 1.1). On the Danube frontier Eugippius, writing in 511, speaks of Roman rule as a thing of the past: the soldiers’ pay stopped coming and the garrisons dissolved (Eugippius, Life of Severinus 20).

For the church the new situation was that Italy’s rulers were Arian Christians, though the Anonymus says that Theoderic did nothing against the Catholic religion (Anonymus Valesianus 10.45–48) (Anonymus Valesianus 12.60), while the emperor lived far away in Constantinople. In 494 Pope Gelasius I wrote to the emperor Anastasius that the world is ruled by two powers, the “sacred authority of the priests” and the “royal power”; that the priests bear the heavier charge, since they must answer to God for kings as well; and that in divine things the emperor should obey the bishops, as they obey his laws in public affairs (Gelasius, Letter to Anastasius). The distinction between the two powers runs through the later history of Church and State.