In perhaps the last great military encounter in the history of the western Roman empire, Aetius managed to pull together an army of Romans, Goths, Franks, Burgundians and Celts, and with it decisively defeated his enemy at the battle of the Catalaunian Plains (modern-day Châlons) in Gaul. At the Huns’ second attempt, however, in 452, Aetius could offer little resistance. Attila invaded Italy and sacked several cities in the north. His greatest triumph was the successful siege of the imperial capital of Milan, and in a moral victory he also forced Valentinian III to flee from Ravenna to Rome in terror. However, at the river Po disease and inadequate supply lines brought the Huns’ campaign to a stuttering halt and they eventually retreated. Attila died that same year. According to one source, he met his end not fighting but, bizarrely, on his wedding night. He had been feasting to celebrate his marriage to a beautiful Gothic princess by the name of Hildico, and after retiring to their nuptial quarters, the great Hunnic leader suffered a nosebleed and choked to death on his own blood.
As quickly as Attila’s empire sprang up, so it disintegrated after his death. By that time, however, the death blow to the west had been dealt. Aetius may have successfully seen off Attila, but he lacked the military firepower to take North Africa back from the Vandals. He did not live to see the proof of that stark fact. In return for brilliantly defending the western empire from the blistering assault of Attila’s forces, Aetius – the ‘last Roman’ – was thanked by Valentinian III with assassination in 454. The emperor was fearful and envious of his commander’s power. Over a decade after Aetius’s death in 468, the eastern empire made one final play for North Africa. In a sea battle off the coast of what is now Libya, however, the Byzantine fleet was roundly defeated by that of the Vandals.
After the loss of Africa, the only revenues the western empire could rely on were those of Italy and Sicily. These were not nearly enough to pay for an army large enough to dictate terms to the multitude of barbarians settled in the west: the Goths, Burgundians and Franks of Gaul, the Goths and Suevi of Spain, and the Vandals of North Africa. The balance of power between the Roman army and the forces of barbarians, between the western emperors and the barbarian kings had fatally, permanently shifted. The reality of where power now lay was most clearly pronounced in the accession in 455 of Emperor Avitus. The one thing that had secured his rise to ‘power’ was a military alliance with Theodoric II – a barbarian king. In due course, further treaties were struck between the imperial administration at Ravenna and the Goths and Vandals, whom the administration acknowledged, in effect, as legitimate possessors, inheritors and partners in the west. Bit by bit the remaining Roman territories splintered out of central control. The last breath of the western empire, however, was gasped in Italy.
By 476, the financial and military muscle of the central authorities of Italy were so limp, so withered that they were no longer able to maintain themselves let alone keep intruders firmly in check. The lines defining Roman and barbarian were becoming increasingly blurred, the histories of citizen and invader ever more fused. However some distinctions were still visible, some did still matter. Take Odovacar, for example. This man made the gentle transformation from top Roman general to Germanic king when he settled his Roman soldiers in Italy. Indeed, that little rump of the Roman army in Italy wasn’t really Roman either. The soldiers were Germanic mercenaries who, like their leader, came from the people of the Sciri. Odovacar had no money to give them, so he paid them with land – possibly as much as one-third of Italy once its current Roman owners had been booted off. There could be no clearer statement of who were now the successors to the old western empire.
Odovacar thus became sole effective ruler of Italy. With the loyalty of his settled Scirian soldiers, he had now secured his personal power base too. There remained one awkward distinction left to resolve – the small anomaly of Romulus Augustulus. The office of the western Roman emperor had long been a quaint tradition in the process of fossilization, the ceremonial appointee of some barbarian commander or king. Little Romulus, however, took this trend to a new extreme. He was a sixteen-year-old boy and the son of a usurping army commander recently toppled by Odovacar. He controlled nothing outside Italy, Odovacar controlled everything within it. Legitimacy, if it existed at all, belonged really to the man whom Romulus and his father had usurped, Julius Nepos, the last emperor to be formally recognized by the eastern emperor. So, why bother keeping Romulus? Indeed, why bother finding a replacement? Surely it would be better to send him back to his family in Campania, to give him a decent pension and to let him live in peaceful obscurity?
Taking the side of caution, however, Odovacar despatched an embassy to Zeno, the eastern emperor. Why didn’t Zeno take over sovereignty of both halves of the empire, proposed Odovacar, while the Germanic king administered everyday affairs in Italy? The suggestion posed an awkward dilemma. For Zeno, deposing Romulus was not a problem – Constantinople had never recognised him anyway. The problem was Nepos whom he had recognised. But while he realised that Nepos no longer held any sovereignty, the eastern emperor did not want to be the one who effectively sanctioned the handover of power to the Germanic king, the one who formally ended the western state. Chance, however, offered him a solution.
Coincidentally Zeno had in his possession a letter from Nepos. The usurped western emperor had written to Zeno to request his help in making a last bid for power, a last bid to win back the Roman state in the west. After some reflection, Zeno made two deft, sidestepping replies. To Odovacar he said that the king needed to offer his allegiance to Nepos because the last formally recognised western emperor was the only person who could legitimately acknowledge Odovacar’s status. To Nepos, however, he made an apology: he could not offer him any practical assistance in recovering the west. Such an endeavour, he implied, was utterly futile. And with that Zeno had accepted – without having to spell it out – that the western empire was lost and Odovacar had seized power
In Italy, with Romulus deposed, Odovacar tended to one last tidying up exercise. What to do about the ceremonial robes of office of the western Roman emperor? He was certainly not going to be wearing them. He was not a sovereign Augustus – that was not his role nor the basis of his power. He was happy to call himself king. No, perhaps the best place for them was in the east, with the emperor Zeno. A messenger was summoned and the imperial vestments, diadem and purple cloak were dispatched to Constantinople.
If Odovacar was tempted to see the occasion as momentous or somehow ominous, maybe he reassured himself that there could well be another emperor some time in the future. There might one day be the occasion for just such a leader, but there was certainly no need for one now, not in his Italy. The ancient Roman authority of an Augustus, the power which had created and ruled an empire for centuries and which was embodied in those imperial signs of office, was, at least for the time being, leaving the west.
NOTES
SEVEN HILLS OF ROME
1. Virgil, Georgics, Book 4. 8ff.
2. Ibid., 73–4.
3. Peter Jones and Keith Sidwell (eds), The World of Rome: An Introduction to Roman Culture (Cambridge, 1997), p. 7.
4. Polybius, Histories, Book 6. 52.
5. Livy, Book 1. 32.