To command one of the largest invasion forces ever attempted, Leo chose one of the worst commanders in history. His name was Basiliscus, and his main qualification was being Leo’s brother-in-law Against any other leader, the Vandals would have stood no chance; but under Basiliscus, the overwhelming odds just made for a more spectacular collapse. Landing forty miles from Carthage, Basiliscus somehow managed to wreck his fleet and largely destroy his army within five days. Panicking in the middle of a battle, the wretched general left the remains of his grand force to fend for itself and fled to Constantinople.
When he reached the capital, Basiliscus very sensibly hid in the Hagia Sophia, which was soon surrounded by an angry mob calling for his head. Leo was also in a lynching mood, but the timely intervention of the empress Verina managed to save Basiliscus, and Leo exiled him to Thrace instead of beheading him. His incompetence had left the East nearly impoverished and had extinguished the last hope of the West. His mischief, however, was not yet completed, and, though disgraced and exiled, he would return to haunt the empire again.
The only silver lining in the disaster was that it enabled Leo to finally break completely free from his barbarian master. Since Aspar was the de facto head of the military, he was quite unfairly blamed for the entire debacle, and his reputation plummeted. Seeing his opportunity, Leo lured Aspar to the palace and had him quietly assassinated, barring the doors so that no help could come.* It was a less-than-honorable solution, but Leo was at last free. Zeno was now the most powerful general in the army, and he was completely loyal to the crown. Against all odds, Leo had broken the barbarian hold on the throne.
He was not, however, to enjoy his triumph for long. Three years later, in 474, Leo died of dysentery, and the throne passed to his son-in-law Zeno. The new emperor had handled his heady rise to power well enough, but his fellow Isaurians had let it go straight to their heads and were now getting on everyone’s nerves by strutting around Constantinople as though they owned the place. As if this weren’t bad enough for Zeno, he was also saddled with rather atrocious in-laws. Leo’s family could never quite reconcile themselves to the fact that a jumped-up provincial had risen so quickly, and Leo’s wife, Verina, in particular had been horrified by her daughter’s marriage to the uncouth Isaurian. For a few years, the Empress Mother managed to maintain a cordial disdain for her daughter’s husband, but it turned to outright hatred when her only grandson—Zeno’s seven-year-old son—died of an illness. For the rest of her life, Verina blamed the heartbroken Zeno for the boy’s death and did everything in her power to under cut him.
Slightly less dangerous an enemy than Verina was her worthless brother Basiliscus, who never let incompetence stand in the way of his dreams, and who was busy scheming to seize the throne himself. He had largely destroyed his own credibility with his shameful conduct against the Vandal kingdom of Africa, but this had done nothing to damage his unshakable belief that he should be sitting on the throne. Time, he was sure, had glossed over the mistakes of the past, and though he had never been particularly close to his sister, he was quite willing to make common cause with her against their mutual enemy. The vengeful siblings somehow attracted the support of a disgruntled Isaurian general named Illus, and the three of them hatched a plan to overthrow their despised relative.
Waiting until Zeno was busy presiding over the games at the Hippodrome, Verina sent a frantic messenger to tell him that the people, backed by the Senate, had risen against him. Zeno had grown up far from the busy life of the capital, and for all his success he never really felt at home in the cosmopolitan city. He was painfully aware of how unpopular he had become, and the roar of the crowd around him was quite indistinguishable from the cacophony of revolt. Not bothering to check if his citizens were actually rising against him, the terrified emperor fled with a handful of followers and what was left of the imperial gold reserve to his native Isauria.
Constantinople now belonged to Verina, the mastermind of the rebellion, and she planned to have her lover crowned immediately, but it turned out that toppling an emperor was a good deal easier than making a new one. The army may have not raised a finger to help Zeno, but they balked at handing the throne over to an unknown whose only qualification was that he was sleeping with Verina. Only a member of the imperial family could become emperor, and the army turned to the one candidate readily available—Basiliscus. Incredibly, the man who had almost single-handedly destroyed the military capability of the East and doomed the West with his disastrous African campaign now found himself hailed by the army as the supreme leader of the Roman Empire.
The new emperor soon proved that his stewardship was on par with his generalship. His first action was to allow a general massacre of every Isaurian in the city—despite the fact that Isaurian support had been vital in his bid for the throne. He then turned to his sister, rewarding her part in the revolt by having her lover executed and forcing her into retirement. Having thus mortally offended his coconspirators, Basiliscus sent an army to crush Zeno and secure his position on the throne. To lead this all-important expedition, the emperor made the baffling choice of the Isaurian general Illus, apparently without considering that his recent slaughter of Isaurians in the capital might make Illus a less than perfect candidate to go fight his countrymen. Indeed, Illus marched straight to Zeno and switched sides, encouraging the emperor to return to Constantinople at once and reclaim his throne.
Meanwhile, Basiliscus was busy eroding any support he had left in the capital. Appointing the dubiously named Timothy the Weasel as his personal religious adviser, he let the man talk him into trying to force the church to adopt the heretical belief that Christ lacked a human nature. When in response the patriarch draped the icons of the Hagia Sophia in black, the annoyed emperor announced that he was abolishing the Patriarchate of Constantinople. This action proved so offensive that it touched off massive riots and caused a local holy man named Daniel the Stylite to descend from his pillar for the first time in three decades.* The sight of the saint wagging his finger frightened Basiliscus into publicly withdrawing the threat, but that did little to restore his popularity.
By the time word came that Zeno was approaching with a large army, tensions in the capital were explosive. Basiliscus defiantly promised a valiant defense, but there was no one willing to waste any more time fighting for him. The Senate threw open the gates, and the population poured out into the streets, cheering Zeno as he triumphantly entered. Basiliscus fled with his family to the Hagia Sophia, but was led out by the patriarch after exacting a promise that none of his blood would be spilled. True to his word, Zeno had the fallen emperor sent off to Cappadocia, where he was enclosed in a dry cistern and left to starve.
Only two years had passed since that terrible night when Zeno had been forced to flee the city, but the world had irrevocably changed in his absence. In the moment of Constantinople’s weakness, the dying embers of the Western Empire had finally been snuffed out. A barbarian general named Odoacer, growing tired of the charade of puppet emperors, decided to rule Italy in his own right. Smashing his way into Ravenna, where the teenage Romulus Augustulus was cowering, Odoacer decided at the last moment to spare his life, choosing instead to send the young emperor into exile.* On September 4, 476, Romulus Augustulus obediently laid down the crown and scepter and went to live with his family in Campania. Though no one thought him important enough to bother recording when or where he died, his abdication marked the end of the Western Roman Empire.