Western Roman Empire

The Western Roman Empire is the half of the empire administered from Italy after the division of 395, and it lasted eighty-one years. The division was administrative rather than a separation, and contemporaries did not think two empires had been created. What made the western half fail first was structural. It was poorer, less urbanised, and had a far longer land frontier along the Rhine and Danube to defend on a smaller tax base. The crossing of the frozen Rhine at the end of 406 by Vandals, Alans and Suebi broke the frontier, and the groups that entered were never expelled. Britain was abandoned around 410. Alaric sacked Rome the same year, the first time in eight hundred years. Real power passed to army commanders who made and unmade emperors - Stilicho, Aetius, Ricimer - most of them of barbarian descent themselves. Aetius held Gaul together and beat Attila at the Catalaunian Plains in 451, and was murdered by the emperor he served three years later. Africa, the grain supply, was lost to the Vandals in 439. By the 470s the empire was Italy and little else, funded by nothing. Odoacer deposed the boy emperor Romulus Augustulus in 476 and sent the imperial regalia to Constantinople, saying the west no longer needed an emperor of its own. That gesture, rather than any battle, is the conventional end of the Roman Empire in the west. Ravenna replaced Rome as the imperial residence in 402 because it was surrounded by marsh. The last emperors were mostly children or nominees of their generals. Romulus Augustulus was pensioned off rather than killed and may have lived for decades. Some historians now argue the empire did not fall so much as devolve into its own army.

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