Alaric's Goths sack Rome

Assembled from 46 blocks · 2 evidence · 44 related

1. Story
2. The city is taken for the first time in eight hundred years. The shock across the Mediterranean world was enormous - Jerome and Augustine both respond to it - yet the western empire continues for another sixty-six years, and Rome was no longer the imperial capital in any case. It is a useful corrective: the events contemporaries experienced as catastrophic and the events later historians chose as endings are not the same events.
3. Knowledge
4. Rome
5. The Roman Legion
6. Alaric's Goths sack Rome
7. Connections
8. Rome
9. The Roman Legion
10. Colosseum (Flavian Amphitheatre), Rome
11. The Roman Legion
12. Roman Law
13. The Mediterranean Sea (Mare Nostrum)
14. Ostia Antica
15. Via Appia
16. Traditional foundation of the Roman Republic
17. Construction of the Via Appia begins
18. The Punic Wars
19. Caesar crosses the Rubicon
20. Assassination of Julius Caesar
21. The Augustan settlement: Octavian becomes Augustus
22. Inauguration of the Flavian Amphitheatre
23. Dedication of Constantinople
24. Administrative division of the empire on the death of Theodosius I
25. Alaric's Goths sack Rome
26. Odoacer deposes Romulus Augustulus - the contested 'fall' of the Western Roman Empire
27. The Pantheon, Rome
28. The Pantheon dome spans about 43 m in unreinforced concrete
29. Rome
30. Roman Citizenship (civitas Romana)
31. The Roman Road Network
32. Hadrian's Wall
33. Augustus (Gaius Octavius / Imperator Caesar Divi Filius Augustus)
34. Gaius Julius Caesar
35. Caracalla (Marcus Aurelius Antoninus)
36. The Punic Wars
37. Caesar crosses the Rubicon
38. The Augustan settlement: Octavian becomes Augustus
39. Construction of Hadrian's Wall begins
40. The empire reaches its greatest territorial extent
41. The Antonine Constitution (Constitutio Antoniniana)
42. Alaric's Goths sack Rome
43. Odoacer deposes Romulus Augustulus - the contested 'fall' of the Western Roman Empire
44. Evidence
45. Where to end the Roman Empire is an open scholarly question with several defensible answers - 476, 480, 554, 602, 800 and 1453 among them - and the choice reflects the historian's criterion (western imperial office, state continuity, material culture, self-identification) rather than a discoverable fact. A substantial 'continuity' school treats the eastern Roman state as unbroken to 1453.
46. The 6th-century eastern chronicler Marcellinus Comes is the earliest writer to present 476 as the extinction of the western empire; the near-contemporary western sources describe a change of ruler in Italy, with Odoacer taking the title of king and returning the imperial insignia to Constantinople. The framing of 476 as an ending is itself a source-critical problem, visible already in antiquity.