THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY I 226
The End of the Western Empire and the First King of the West
14-20. The End of the Western Empire and the First King of the West
Olybrius died at the end of October 472. The throne remained vacant through the winter; and it was not until March of 473 that Gundobad proclaimed Glycerius emperor at Ravenna. But Gundobad soon left Italy, having affairs in Gaul; and Glycerins, deprived of his support, was unable to maintain his position. He succeeded, indeed, in averting one danger, when he induced a body of Ostrogoths, who had entered Italy from the north-east under their king Widimir, to join their kinsmen, the Visigoths of Gaul. His position, however, had never been confirmed by the Eastern Emperor; and at the end of 473 Leo appointed Julius Nepos, the nephew of Marcellinus of Dalmatia, to be emperor in his place. In the spring of 474 Nepos arrived in Italy with an army: Glycerius could offer no resistance; and in the middle of June he was captured at Portus, near the mouth of the Tiber, and forcibly consecrated bishop of Salona in Dalmatia. The accession of Nepos seemed a triumph for the Roman cause, and a defeat for the barbarian party. Once more, as in the days of Anthemius, an emperor ruled at Rome who was the real colleague and ally of the Emperor of Constantinople; and Nepos, unlike Anthemius, had the advantage of having no master of troops at his side. With the aid of the Eastern Empire, and in the absence of any successor to Ricimer, Nepos might possibly hope to secure the permanent triumph of the Roman cause in the West.
But the aid of the Eastern Empire was destined to prove a broken reed, and Ricimer was fated to find his successor. In 475 a revolt, headed by Basiliscus, drove Zeno, who had succeeded to Leo in 474, from Constantinople, and disturbed the East until 477. The West was thus left to its own resources during the crisis of its fate; and taking their opportunity the barbarian mercenaries found themselves new leaders, and under their guidance settled its fate at their will. For the first few months of his reign Nepos was left undisturbed; but even so he was compelled to make a heavy sacrifice, and to buy peace with Euric at the price of the formal surrender of Auvergne, to the great grief of its bishop Sidonius. In 475, however, there appeared a new leader of the barbarian mercenaries. This was Orestes, a Roman of Pannonia, who had served Attila as secretary, and had been entrusted by his master with the conduct of negotiations with the Roman Empire.
On the death of Attila, he had come to Italy, and having married a daughter of Romulus, an Italian of the rank of comes, who had served under Aetius as ambassador to the Huns, he had had a successful career in the imperial service. He had risen high enough by 475 to be created magister militiae by Nepos; and in virtue both of his official position and of a natural sympathy which his previous career must have inspired he became the leader of the barbarian party. Once at the head of the army he instantly marched upon Rome. Nepos, powerless before his adversary, fled to Ravenna, and unable to maintain himself there, escaped at the end of August 475 to his native Dalmatia, where he survived as an emperor in exile until he was assassinated by his followers in 480. At the end of October Orestes proclaimed as emperor his son, a boy named Romulus after his maternal grandfather, and surnamed Augustulus. Thus was restored the old regime of the nominal emperor controlled by the military dictator, and for nearly a year this regime continued.
But the barbarian mercenaries — the Rugii, Sciri, and Heruli — were by no means contented with the old condition of things. Since the fall of Attila, they had emigrated so steadily into Italy from the northeast, that they had become a numerous people; and they desired to find for themselves, in the country of their adoption, what other Germanic tribes had found m Gaul and Spain and Africa — a regular settlement on the soil in the position of hospites. They would no longer be cantoned in barracks in the Roman fashion: they desired to be free farmers settled on the soil after the German manner, ready to attend the levy in time of need for the defence of Italy, but not bound to serve continually in foreign expeditions as a professional army. They accordingly asked of Orestes a third of the soil of Italy: they demanded that every Roman possessor should cede a third of his estate to some German hospes. It appears a modest demand, when one reflects that the Visigoths settled by Constantius in south-western Gaul in 418 had been allowed two-thirds of the soil and its appurtenant cattle and cultivators.
But the cession of 418 had been a matter of free grant: the demand of 476 was the demand of a mutinous soldiery. The grant of southwestern Gaul had been the grant of one corner of the Empire, made with the design of protecting the rest: the surrender of Italy would mean the surrender of the home and hearth of the Empire. Orestes accordingly rejected the demand of the troops. They replied by creating Odovacar their king, and under his banner they took for themselves what Orestes refused to give.
Odovacar, perhaps a Scirian by birth, and possibly the son of a certain Edeco who had once served with Orestes as one of the envoys of Attila, had passed through Noricum, where St Severinus had predicted his future greatness, and come to Italy somewhere about 470. He had served under Ricimer in 472 against Anthemius; and by 476 he had evidently distinguished himself sufficiently to be readily chosen as their king by the congeries of Germanic tribes which were cantoned in Italy. His action was prompt and decisive. He became king on 23 August: by the 28th Orestes had been captured and beheaded at Piacenza, and on 4 September Paulus, the brother of Orestes, was killed in attempting to defend Ravenna. The Emperor Romulus Augustulus became the captive of the new king, who, however, spared the life of the handsome boy, and sent him to live on a pension in a Campanian villa. While Odovacar was annexing Italy, Euric was spreading his conquests in Gaul; and when he occupied Marseilles, Gaul, like Italy, was lost.
The success of Odovacar did not, however, mean the erection of an absolutely independent Teutonic kingdom in Italy, or the total extinction of the Roman Empire in the West, and it does not therefore indicate the beginning of a new era, in anything like the same sense as the coronation of Charlemagne in 800. It is indeed a new and important fact, that after 476 there was no Western Emperor until the year 800, and it must be admitted that the absence of any separate Emperor of the West vitally affected both the history of the Teutonic tribes and the development of the Papacy, during those three centuries.
But the absence of a separate emperor did not mean the abeyance of the Empire itself in the West. The Empire had always been, and always continued in theory to be, one and indivisible. There might be two representatives at the head of the imperial scheme; but the disappearance of one of the two did not mean the disappearance of half of the scheme; it only meant that for the future one representative would stand at the head of the whole scheme, and that this scheme would be represented somewhat less effectively in that part of the Empire which had now lost its separate head. The scheme itself continued in the West, and its continued existence was acknowledged by Odovacar himself. Zeno now became the one ruler of the Empire; and to him Odovacar sent the imperial insignia of Romulus Augustulus, while he demanded in return the traditional title of patricius, to legalise his position in the imperial order. The old Roman administration persisted in Italy: there was still a Praefectus Praetorio Italiae; and the Roman Senate still nominated a consul for the West.
Odovacar is thus not so much an independent German king, as a second Ricimer — a patricius, holding the reins of power in his own hands, but acknowledging a nominal emperor, with the one difference that the emperor is now the ruler of the East, and not a puppet living at Rome or Ravenna. Yet after all Odovacar bore the title of rex: he had been lifted to power on the shields of German warriors. De facto, he ruled in Italy as its king; and while his legal position looks backwards to Ricimer, we cannot but admit that his actual position looks forward to Alboin and the later Lombard kings. He is a Janus-like figure; and while we remember that he looks towards the past, we must not forget that he also faces the future.
We may insist that the Empire remained in the West after 476; we must also insist that every vestige of a Western Emperor had passed away. We may speak of Odovacar as patricius; we must also allow that he spoke of himself as rex. He is of the fellowship of Euric and Gaiseric; and when we remember that these three were ruling in Gaul and Africa and Italy in 476, we shall not quarrel greatly with the words of Count Marcellinus: Hesperium Romanae gentis imperium . . . cum hoc Augustulo periit . . . Ootkorum dehinc regibus Romam tenentibus.
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