14d: Fall of the Western Empire

On the death of Theodosius the Great in 395 AD, the Roman Empire was divided for good into its Eastern and Western halves. The Eastern Empire benefited from fairly stable leadership to go along with its other military and economic advantages. But the Western Empire staggered on under the leadership of German generals and Roman puppet emperors. In 475 AD the Western Emperor Julius Nepos made the mistake of putting the German general Orestes in charge of his armies. Before year's end, Orestes (a former associate of Attila the Hun) had rebelled against Nepos and drove him out of his capital at Ravenna. Because he was, as a German, not considered Imperial material, Orestes crowned a puppet emperor - his young son Romulus Augustulus. The arrangement lasted exactly one year. In 476 the mercenary general Odovacar declared himself "King of Italy," killed Orestes, and packed little Romulus Augustulus off for good. Realizing that he lacked the status to be Emperor, Odovacar returned the imperial regalia back to the Eastern Emperor Zeno. In return, Zeno confirmed Odovacar as "King of Italy."

So ended the Western Roman Empire, at least according to Enlightenment historians like Edward Gibbon. The common people of the Western Empire probably didn't even notice.  In northern Africa, the Vandals had established their kingdom; the Visigoths ruled most of Spain along with southwestern France. Western France was divided among the Burgundians to the south and the Franks to the North. Other nations holding on to parts of the Western Empire included the Bretons, Britons, Anglo-Saxons, Ostrogoths, Gepids, Picts and Scots. Bubbacus and Jethra still had taxes to pay and bureaucrats to obey; it's just that the paying and obeying was done to a Visigoth king, or a Vandal king, or a Frankish king - as opposed to a figurehead Roman emperor. Odovacar himself preserved all the features of the old Roman government, including the Roman Senate and rule of Roman law. As a result, Odovacar was quite popular with the people of Rome and all Italy. They supported him wholeheartedly in his diplomatic and military efforts to become more than just the king of Italy.

Odovacar 's dreams of being more than just  "King of Italy" bothered the Eastern Emperor Zeno. Trying to kill two birds with one stone, Zeno prompted the neighboring Ostrogoth king Theodoric to attack Odovacar in 493 AD. Though not a Roman himself, Theodoric had lived for a long time in Constantinople and held high posts in the Roman army. Zeno wanted to get Theodoric and his Ostrogoths as far away from the Eastern Empire as he could. After successfully deposing Odovacar, Theodoric showed the same great respect for Roman culture, letting even pagan Romans live as they pleasedt Unfortunately, Theodoric left no strong successor after his death in 526 AD, leaving predictable confusion behind. Within a decade the Eastern Emperor Justinian (527-565 AD) had invaded Italy. The last of the truly Roman Emperors to rule the East, Justinian wanted to reconquer the Roman Empire in its entirety. He took his reconquest of Vandal North Africa as a promising sign. Justinian, in fact, succeeded in overthrowing the Ostrogothic kingdom. But ithe fighting was long and bloody, and in the process Justinian stamped out most of the old Roman culture still remaining in Italy.

In 568 AD, a fierce German tribe known as the Lombards invaded, and shortly retook all Italy (save for Ravenna and its surrounding area) from the Eastern Empire. Italy became a crazy quilt of Lombard duchies, with little if any residual Roman culture save for the Latin language. Now the rest of the old Roman Empire really did belong to barbarian monarchs. Indeed, the year 568 AD is a more logical ending date for the Western Roman Empire than the departure of sad little Romulus Augustulus a century earlier. Although the city of Rome had was now a mere shadow of itself physically and culturally, it was still very heavily populated. The masses had to look somewhere for leadership and material assistance, and this was provided by the bishops of Rome, also known as "popes." In the Western Empire, the bishops of  Western or "Catholic" Church tended to consider itself equal to the emperors, and the bishop of Rome (or "pope") was considered the prince of Catholic bishops. As such, Roman bishops had considerable wealth at their disposal, which they used to fill the void left by the emperors.

With the end of the Western Empire, the Catholic church gained even more political clout. The bishop of Rome exerted influence not only at home, but all overthe former Western Empire. In recognition of this fact, the pope Gregory I (590-604 AD) adopted the old Roman title pontifex maximus and began sending ambassadors to the countries of the West. Although Gregory's relationships with the Christian patriarchs of the Eastern Empire were polite, his Papacy marked the beginning of the Roman church's quest to rule the rest of the church. In the Eastern Empire, the patriarchs of the great cities competed with each other for influence and Imperial favor, thereby weakening their individual status. In the West, though, the Bishop of Rome alone determined the correct belief; his ability to control kings and nobles would have been unthinkable in the East. This difference in approach only deepened the division between the Western Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches.

The Lombard rulers of Italy had understandably little affection for the ambitious bishops of Rome. But the popes could count on strong defenders in the Frankish kings of northwestern France. The greatest of Frankish kings, Charlemagne (768-814 AD) was himself a devout Catholic believer, always willing to help the Pope when needed. Once Charlemagne had conquered sufficient territory to consider himself an emperor, Pope Leo III crowned him imperator on Christmas Day 800. Whether the ceremony was Charlemagne's own idea is open to question. Like his predecessors, Pope Leo III was looking to increase the Western church's influence, so it suited his purposes to have a Western Emperor. And if the Western Emperor received his crown from the Pope, so much the better. Whether the ceremony was Charlemagne's idea or Pope Leo III's the so-called Holy Roman Empire had begun. As the Emperor of the West, Charlemagne declared himself as the successor of Romulus Augustulus and claimed equality with Empress Irene of Byzantium. The Holy Roman Empire would change many times over the centuries. As some wags have put it, it was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. Yet in the hearts of its rulers it always remained a Christianized continuation of the state founded by Romulus and Remus on the morning of April 23, 753 BC.