Which year did the Roman Empire fall?

Date the Roman Empire Fell?


  • Total voters
    282

Anaxagoras

Banned
I would say 395 AD, with the death of Emperor Theodosius I. He was the last emperor to rule over a united Empire. After his death, the empire permanently split into Western and Eastern halves and was never again united. There's a reason that we thereafter refer to a "Western Roman Empire" and an "Eastern Roman Empire" or "Byzantine Empire", rather than simply a "Roman Empire".
 
383 AD

More or less when Rome became unable to meet its financial obligations for good regarding paying the armies on the frontier.
 
The only thing that stops me from saying that it's 1923 is personal prejudice against Turks in this historical context. You take the empire of Constantine and compare it to the Rome of Marius and it's amazing how dissimilar they were. There have been Isaurians, Armenians and every flavor of ethnicity from across the empire that had one of their own ascend to the purple. The only thing that I can really cast against the Turks was the level to which they did not prescribe to the customs of the Romans they ruled over, rather than assimilating into Hellenic culture they persisted with their turkishness and that's the real backbone against them being legitimate.

I also suppose the lack of coronation with the conquering Turks hurts their legitimacy as well, there was no crowning at the Hagia Sophia. If the turks were orthodox we would let it slide, but the amount of legal change that coincided with the religious change does a lot to discredit them. Constantine changed the religion, but the law was roman, Heraclius changed the language of the law but kept the religion. Maybe the change from the conquest in 1453 was too abrupt to qualify or we're all too willing to deny them the title of Rome for reasons we wouldn't otherwise.

I still cast my vote for 1453, it's the most I'm comfortable with even though it's certainly not that simple and all things being fair was probably after rather than before.
 
This is like saying the Kingdom of Jerusalem isn't the Kingdom of Jerusalem after losing the city of Jerusalem to Saladin.

That's like saying the Fatimid Caliphate wasn't really a Caliphate as it didn't hold Damascus as the seat of government thus has more in common with Ptolemaic Egypt than the succession to Muhammad.
 
And the Turks of Rum had been lording it over what they referred to as Rome for 4 centuries when, at last, they captured the apparent capital of the Roman Empire. They subsequently claimed to be Rome and ruled over much the same land with much the same people. They took power by the age-old military usurpation method.

So, I would say, there's still debate. None of the transfers from one Rome to another not-Rome are crystal-clear, unless you go all the way to 1923 (and even then, Italy had a few years of pretending to be a Roman Empire, but they did seem to call it resurrection; and Turkey is still a fairly clear successor to the then-Roman OE; but at least here 'claiming to be the Roman Empire' ends.)
There is a huge difference between conquering a state, and then claiming to be its continuation, and actually being the continuation of that state. If, say, the Huns had conquered Constantinople and claimed to be Emperors of Rome, then I would mark the fall of the (eastern) Roman Empire at that point-since thats where continuity ends. There was no conquest of the eastern roman empire until 1453-there was a direct continuity that could be traced back to the Republic.


Citizenship for a Roman is much the same as it is for an American: it is defined by the state one has loyalty to, not the language or the culture. Those living in what some term the "Byzantine Empire" called themselves Romans, called their state the Roman Empire, and had unbroken continuity with the state universally agreed upon to be the Roman Empire.

I'm sticking with 1453.
This, so much this. Being Roman didn't mean you spoke Latin-half of the empire's citizens were Greek culturally, and spoke greek. Since the time of Augustus at least, Roman officials in the east were required to be fluent in Greek. Being Roman was, much as you say, the same as being American: it was more about the identity than any unifying culture.

I would say 395 AD, with the death of Emperor Theodosius I. He was the last emperor to rule over a united Empire. After his death, the empire permanently split into Western and Eastern halves and was never again united. There's a reason that we thereafter refer to a "Western Roman Empire" and an "Eastern Roman Empire" or "Byzantine Empire", rather than simply a "Roman Empire".
We refer to it as a "western" and "eastern" empire because it's convenient for us. The Romans didn't see it like that. They saw it as one indivisible, united empire, ruled by 2 emperors. They didn't see it as "there's an emperor in the east and an emperor in the west, ergo we must be 2 empires now." There was usually a senior and a junior emperor de facto (usually, the emperor in the east being the senior emperor).
 
I'd consider the Ottomans the pseudo-successor to the Roman Empire; they filled the void left by Byzantium and basically ruled an empire composed of ex-Eastern Rome at its greatest heights, plus Mesopotamia and the Hedjaz, minus southern Italy. And the kicker here is if you had avoided either the Ottoman interregnum or the death of Mehmed II for a few years, chances are the Ottoman claims to the title of Ceasar would be taken far more seriously.

So they're the murky 'almost-was-the-direct-heir-of-Rome' in my book.
 
This, so much this. Being Roman didn't mean you spoke Latin-half of the empire's citizens were Greek culturally, and spoke greek. Since the time of Augustus at least, Roman officials in the east were required to be fluent in Greek. Being Roman was, much as you say, the same as being American: it was more about the identity than any unifying culture.

As already mentioned, the Rhomanoi living in the ERE were fully convinced to be romans and living in the roman empire. There is no doubt, that from the roman point of view, the roman empire existed until 1453.

Actually I already confirmed 1453 above. But this is again fully irrelevant to me!

The romans did not think in epochs and they did not ask this weird question. It is a question of modern historians, which tried to divide history into epochs. One important reason for such epochs was the question: when did the ancient age end and the mid-age start? Combined with this question they combined the question, until when can we call the ERE a truly roman ancient empire, and when did it become a mid-age kingdom called Byzantine Empire.

Therefore we have to define, what ancient age means. And what defines a roman empire as distinct of a byzantine empire. Also the really tricky question: What does "Fall" mean? Of course from the point of view of a modern historian. The opinion of the romans of their times is not really relevant.

Remember, the initial question in the title of this thread was not: When did the sovereignity of the roman state end?
The question was: When did the Roman Empire fall?
And this question is a fully different beast. The answer to this question is unknown since 1500 years and fills libraries.
 
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Dirk

Banned
Maybe the change from the conquest in 1453 was too abrupt to qualify or we're all too willing to deny them the title of Rome for reasons we wouldn't otherwise.

It wasn't abrupt, it had been more or less expected for a long time. The Byzantines were vassals of the Turks for almost a hundred years before then, all their territory except for a few pastures in the southern Peloponnesus and the great city itself was gone, and the emperors had by then married some daughters to the Ottoman sultans and their relatives.

It's not like the Byzantine state apparatus ceased to exist after the fall of the city. You think all those soft bureaucrats and psychopath tax collectors cared a fig who ruled them, so long as they had it good? After the Ottoman conquest they were swimming in opportunities they hadn't had since the 1100's: the wealth of Anatolia, Thrace, Bulgaria, Greece, all partially theirs. They knew the eternal city, where the sultan would move his court and make his capital, better than anybody, and all they needed to do was convert, and maybe not even that.

So if you don't think the Empire fell in the second quarter of the 7th century, or else in 1204, I don't see how you can think it fell in 1453. From Roman to Christian to Muslim, from Latin to Greek to Turkish, the state apparatus had a clear descent.
 
1453. There wouldn't be any dispute if the East had fallen a comparatively short time after the West -- say to the Arabs in 674. There's a debate only because it lasted so long and looked so un-Roman by the end.

I note that the numbering of the Byzantine emperors continues that of the earlier Roman ones, so that the predecessors of the last emperor, Constantine XI, include Constantine II, who only ruled in the West.
 
Who said it ever fell? Vatican City and Catholic Church still here!
I voted 1453, but I would have gone for 1917 with Tsarism. The entire WRE didn't fall in 476, and the Byzantine Empire was the other Roman Empire. Considering that the Byzantine Empire was Greek after Justinian, 1973 with the end of the Kingdom of Greece would do, and why not 1803 with the HRE?
 
There is a huge difference between conquering a state, and then claiming to be its continuation, and actually being the continuation of that state. If, say, the Huns had conquered Constantinople and claimed to be Emperors of Rome, then I would mark the fall of the (eastern) Roman Empire at that point-since thats where continuity ends. There was no conquest of the eastern roman empire until 1453-there was a direct continuity that could be traced back to the Republic.

There were a number of conquerors in during the height of the Empire who utterly changed the way the state was run. A few also changed the religion along with the law system. Maybe it was still Roman after those, but that was because there was no one else around to conquer them so conquerors came from within.
 

J.D.Ward

Donor
410 Sack of Rome by the Goths. End of the Western Roman Empire.

1204. Fall of Constantinople to the Fourth Crusade. End of the Eastern Roman Empire.

Anything subsequent to this is just minor successor states and deposed dynasties. For the Holy Roman Empire, see Voltaire: "Neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire".

Isaac Asimov described this problem of identifying the end of an empire in Foundation.

Isaac Asimov said:
Somewhere in the fifty years just past is where the historians of the future will place an arbitrary line and say: "This marks the Fall of the Galactic Empire".
And they will be right, though scarcely any will recognize that Fall for additional centuries.
 
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410 Sack of Rome by the Goths. End of the Western Roman Empire.

Isaac Asimov described this problem of identifying the end of an empire in Foundation.

I agree with Isaac Asimov, that empires fall long before they loose their souvereignity. Thats why 1453 is unimportant from my point of view. In the case of the WRE the souvereignity was lost in 476, when Odoaker sent the insignia to the East. Very latest when the last legal emperor of the WRE Julius Nepos died 480 in Dalmatia.

But as Asimov says, this is irrelevant! There is a point of no return for every empire and this point causes lots of disputes amongst historians. I trend to agree with Peter Heather just for once, who said, that the WRE lost every chance to recover, when it failed to reconquer Africa in 468.

But honestly, the sack of Rome in 410 has nothing to do with the Fall of Rome. Therefor the City of Rome was simply not important enough anymore. Whatsoever, the Fall of the WRE was not the Fall of the Roman Empire!
 
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