End of the Western EmpirePolitical
Odoacer Deposes Romulus Augustulus
The Germanic commander Odoacer deposes the boy emperor Romulus Augustulus and sends the imperial regalia to Constantinople, ending the line of Western Roman emperors.
On 4 September 476, the federate troops of Italy proclaimed Odoacer their king after his victory over the patrician Orestes at Pavia. The deposed Romulus Augustulus, barely a teenager and the son of Orestes, was pensioned off to a villa in Campania, while Odoacer dispatched the western imperial insignia to Emperor Zeno in Constantinople with the message that one emperor sufficed for the Roman world. The act was less a cataclysm than a ratification of decades of political reality: real power in Italy had long rested with barbarian generals commanding the Roman army. Yet later historiography, from Marcellinus Comes to Edward Gibbon, would seize upon 476 as the symbolic close of the Western Empire and the conventional opening of the Middle Ages in the Latin West.
