Fall of Rome

Between AD 395 (when the Visigothic leader Alaric began to ravage inside the Roman imperial frontiers in Thrace and Macedonia) and 495 (when Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths, was proclaimed king of Italy), the Roman empire in the West was no longer capable of resisting barbarian incursions. Italy and the western provinces were gradually occupied by Germanic peoples mostly migrating under pressure from the advancing Huns. In 401 and again in 403 Alaric invaded Italy but was forced to withdraw by Stilicho. After the latter’s death in 408 there was no general able to defeat the Visigoths, and on 24 August 410 they entered Rome and sacked it, the first time the city had fallen to a foreign enemy since its capture by the Gauls in 390 BC. In 452 the Huns devastated parts of Italy, but their king Attila (known as the ‘Scourge of God’) was persuaded by Pope Leo I, the Great, to withdraw without entering Rome. Three years later the city fell to Gaiseric, king of the Vandals, who stayed for a fortnight in the city to plunder its treasures. The last Roman emperor in the West was the young Romulus Augustulus who reigned briefly 475–6. He was deposed and banished by Odo(v)acer, German commander of the imperial guard, who was proclaimed king of Italy by the army and accepted the emperor in the East as his overlord. With him the Roman empire in the West came to an end. (For the division of the empire into two halves see BYZANTINE AGE.)

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