Odoacer
Odoacer deposed the last western Roman emperor in 476 and ruled Italy for seventeen years as a king who acknowledged the emperor in Constantinople. He was the son of a man named Edeko who had served Attila, and was probably of Scirian or Rugian origin; he arrived in Italy as a soldier in the imperial army, which by then was almost entirely made up of Germanic federate troops. The revolt of 476 was about land. The federates demanded a third of the estates of Italy for settlement, the patrician Orestes refused, and the army made Odoacer king. Orestes was killed, and his son Romulus — a boy of about fifteen whom Orestes had installed as emperor months earlier — was deposed at Ravenna and pensioned off to a villa in Campania. Odoacer then did the intelligent thing. He sent the imperial insignia to Constantinople with a message that the west had no further need of an emperor of its own, and asked to govern Italy as a patrician under Zeno's authority. Zeno replied ambiguously and accepted the fact. He governed competently for seventeen years: the senate continued, consuls were appointed, the administration ran, and Italy was quieter than it had been for decades. Zeno eventually solved two problems at once by encouraging Theodoric and his Ostrogoths to take Italy from him. The war ran four years, and after a negotiated agreement to rule jointly Theodoric killed him at a banquet in Ravenna in 493. The year 476 became the date for the fall of the Roman Empire only much later, chiefly through Gibbon. Nobody at the time thought an empire had ended: the emperor in Constantinople was still the emperor, and Italy was being governed in his name by a man who sent him the crown.
- Lived: 433 CE – 493 CE
- Nationality: Gothic
- Roles: military_leader, leader
