When Exactly Did the Roman Empire Fall? (Encore)
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The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily. The Roman Empire was one of the greatest empires in the ancient world. It left us a host of languages based on Latin, as well as many cultural institutions that still exist. While the Roman Empire is gone, when exactly did it cease to exist? Learn more about exactly when the Roman Empire fell, and if such a thing even makes sense, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. ♪♪♪

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Plus, hear from travel experts like travel channel and PBS host Samantha Brown on which destinations have shaped them and how to get the most out of every journey abroad. No fixed address is available wherever you listen to podcasts. The idea of the, quote, fall of the Roman Empire was popularized by the British historian Edward Gibbon when, in the late 18th century, he published his popular six-volume book titled The History of the Decline of the Fall of the Roman Empire.

The book is a seminal work that begins the story of the decline of the empire with the Emperor Commodus, the son of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who was famously portrayed in the movie Gladiator. Gibbon outlines many different causes of the decline of the empire, and there have been many other scholars over the last 250 years who have proffered their own theories as to why the empire eventually fell. These reasons include everything from the rise of Christianity to lead poisoning. The purpose of this episode isn't to go through the reasons why Rome eventually fell.

These reasons include everything from the rise of Christianity to lead poisoning. The purpose of this episode isn't to go through the reasons why Rome eventually fell. That is a much larger topic that would command its own episode and a subject that could probably be enough for a multi-hour series on the topic. Instead, I want to focus on a much simpler question. When did the Roman Empire fall? If you type that literal question into Google, it will return an exact date.

The date, which I will get to in a bit, is usually the date that's given in most textbooks and history courses. The problem is that the fall of Rome isn't that cut and dry. There are some empires in history that did end quite abruptly. For example, Nazi Germany had a definitive end. Hitler died on April 30, 1945, and then on May 7, the German government officially surrendered unconditionally, and Nazi Germany was no more.

On December 25, 1991, the Soviet Union officially ceased to exist. It was legally dissolved, and on that date, the Soviet hammer and sickle was lowered over the Kremlin, and the Russian tricolor was raised. And that was that. In both cases, the lead-up to the fall was a process that took years, but the end itself was a very definitive point in time. The collapse of Rome was not like that. If there were newspapers back then, at no time would there have been a headline that read, Roman Empire Falls.

Actually, there may have been one date, but I'll get to that in a bit as well. The fall of the Roman Empire was more like the fall of the British Empire. The British once had a vast empire that they directly controlled. Over time, bits and pieces began to splinter and change. Some colonies, as in the Americas, had a revolution and became totally independent. Others were granted dominion status before becoming independent. Some became independent but kept the British monarch as the head of their state.

Today, Britain still has a bunch of tiny islands all over the world, and there are still over a dozen countries that have King Charles as their head of state. It's hard to put a finger on when Britain stopped being an empire, or if it ever even did. It's a lot like defining what a heap of sand is. If you see a heap of sand, you know what that is, but if you start taking away grains of sand, at what point does it cease being a heap? With that, I want to go over some of the dates which have been proposed for when the Roman Empire ended.

And the first date that I would propose is January 17, 395. The Roman Empire was split into two by the Emperor Diocletian, and then it was merged again under Constantine, and then it was split again. The final split between East and West took place in 395 with the death of Emperor Theodosius I. After Theodosius, there was no longer a single Roman Empire. There were now Roman Empires, plural.

Everyone who lived in either the East or the West considered themselves Roman and believed that they lived in the Roman Empire. So, no one then would have thought that the Empire had fallen, even though in hindsight we can see that the Empire had passed a significant turning point. The next date that I would propose would be 455. This was the year that the Vandals sacked Rome. The administrative capital of the Western Empire had moved to the city of Ravenna 50 years earlier, but Rome was still the birthplace and heart of the Empire.

The Visigoths had previously sacked Rome in 410, but the 455 sack was considered much worse. They knocked down all of the aqueducts going into the city and stole many of the cultural treasures inside. The damage was so great that the modern term vandalism comes from the vandal sack of Rome.

The sack of Rome showed that Rome was no longer the great military power that it once was. Such a thing was inconceivable several centuries earlier. Now, Rome was no longer a great empire, but rather just one player among many in Europe. The next date is the one that's most commonly given for the fall of the empire, September 4th, 476.

That was the date that the last Western Roman emperor, the 11-year-old Romulus Augustulus, was deposed. By 476, there really wasn't much of a Western empire left. It consisted mostly of the Italian peninsula and land on the other side of the Adriatic Sea in what is today Croatia. Romulus Augustulus was deposed by the Germanic king Odoacer. Odoacer did not take the title of emperor for himself. He considered himself to be the king of Italy.

However, everyone still considered themselves Roman, and Odoacer ruled with the consent of the Roman Senate, which was the defining characteristic of every previous Roman emperor. Odoacer even collected the imperial regalia and sent it to the Eastern Emperor in Constantinople, which was a move that acknowledged that he ruled under the authority of the Roman Emperor. People in the empire had gotten used to some guy overthrowing some other guy to become emperor.

Odoacer overthrowing Romulus Augustulus really wasn't any different than what had happened before, save for the fact that Odoacer was German. You can definitively say that 476 was the end of Roman emperors in the West, sort of, and you could say that you can't have an empire without an emperor. However, it still leaves the oh-so-slight problem that everything was going along just swimmingly in the eastern half of the empire, centered around Constantinople.

To be sure, the Roman Empire was different and smaller and not based in Rome, but its direct continuation was still going strong after 476. The next date you could use is 565, which marks the death of Emperor Justinian. Justinian was an Eastern emperor, but he was the last one to attempt to retake the Western Empire. He managed to reconquer the Italian peninsula and Dalmatia, as well as some territory in Libya, Tunisia, and southern Spain.

After Justinian, the Eastern Empire, which was now just the Roman Empire, stuck to the Eastern Mediterranean.

Another date you could use is 603, which was the last known date that the Roman Senate passed anything. The Senate was the defining institution of Rome, dating back to when it became a republic in 509 BC. The emblematic phrase which defined Rome was Senatus Populesce Romanus, abbreviated as SPQR, and SPQR is still on the manhole covers in Rome today.

The next low point was probably 636 with the Roman defeat at the Battle of Yarmouk. I've previously done an entire episode on the Battle of Yarmouk, but it was basically the battle that established the Islamic Caliphate as the power in the Middle East. After this, the Romans, which history calls the Byzantines, were confined mostly around Constantinople in what is today Turkey, Greece, and the Balkans.

For the next 800 years, the Roman Empire kept shrinking and becoming more and more insignificant. Islam expanded, as did powers in the West. The next big date, which is certainly the biggest date on this list, is May 29, 1453, the day Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Empire. I mentioned before that there might have been a day where the newspaper headlines would have actually read Roman Empire Falls, and this was that day.

Again, I did an entire episode on the subject, but this was the date when whatever flame the Roman Empire had burning was extinguished. The last Roman emperor with some sort of direct link back to Augustus had died and the capital established by Constantine had been sacked. While this might have extinguished the flame of Rome, believe it or not, there were still a few burning embers after Constantinople fell.

Even though Constantinople was gone, there were still parts of the empire that hadn't yet come under Ottoman control. These rump states had all the same Roman lineage as the Greater Byzantine Empire. If the fall of Constantinople was putting out the last flame, these were the small glowing sparks. The Empire of Trebizond was a small state located along the coast of the Black Sea in what is today northern Turkey and the Crimean Peninsula.

The emperors of Trebizond, after the fall of Constantinople, claimed that they were now the heirs of the Roman emperors. Trebizond didn't last very long and was conquered by the Ottomans in 1461. Trebizond itself also had a successor state, the Principality of Theodoro, located on the Crimean Peninsula's southern shore. And they were conquered by the Ottomans in 1475.

The very last of the Byzantine successor states, the Despotate of Epirus, located on the western coast of Greece and Albania, was conquered in 1479. With the final embers of the Eastern Roman Empire extinguished, you'd think that we might be done. However, we are not. If you remember back to my episode on the Holy Roman Empire, they claimed the mantle of the Western Roman Empire. This was also confirmed by the Pope who crowned Emperor Charlemagne and who also controlled the city of Rome.

If you accept the Holy Roman Empire as the successor to the Roman Empire, then the end of the Roman Empire was in 1806. But wait, there's even more. The daughter of the last emperor, Constantine XI Palaeologos, was married to the leader of Russia. The Russians used this marriage to call themselves an empire, and the Russian leader began to use the term Tsar, which is Russian for Caesar.

If the Russian Empire was the successor state, then the Roman Empire ended with the Russian Revolution in 1917. However, the Ottomans claimed the mantle of Rome by right of conquest. And if you accept that the Ottomans are the successors of the Roman Empire, then the Roman Empire ended in 1922. Now, I grant, the last of these few cases are pretty extreme. Nonetheless, they do show just how long the lingering influence of the Roman Empire was.

Personally, I think the only reasonable date that you can assign to the fall of the Roman Empire is 1453. While 476 was the year of the last Roman Emperor, I don't think it resulted in enough major changes to say that that was the end of the Empire. The crumbs of Empire which existed after the fall of Constantinople were too small to carry the mantle of Rome, so I really wouldn't count them.

However, no matter where you draw the line, the one thing you have to admit is that it took a really long time for the Roman Empire to finally fall. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Oakton and Cameron Kiefer. I want to thank everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible. I'd also like to thank all the members of the Everything Everywhere community who are active on the Facebook group and the Discord server.

If you'd like to join in the discussion, there are links to both in the show notes. And as always, if you leave a review or send me a boostagram, you too can have it read on the show.