Odoacer deposes Romulus Augustulus - the contested 'fall' of the Western Roman Empire

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Odoacer, commanding Herulian, Rugian and Scirian troops in the Italian army, deposes the boy emperor Romulus Augustulus and takes the title king of Italy rather than emperor, returning the western imperial insignia to Constantinople. This journey emits the event as uncertain because what is contested is not the deposition but its meaning. Four problems. First, the significance is a modern construction: 476 owes its status largely to the Gibbon-era narrative of decline and fall, and Momigliano and others began dismantling it from the 1930s. Second, contemporaries did not experience it as an ending - the Roman Senate continued to meet, Roman law and taxation continued in Ostrogothic Italy, and consuls continued to be appointed. Third, there was a rival western claimant, Julius Nepos, who was still recognised in the East and lived until 480, so Romulus Augustulus is arguably not even the last western emperor. Fourth, the empire itself did not end: the eastern Roman state ran continuously to 1453, its rulers titled basileus ton Rhomaion and its people calling themselves Romans, and Justinian reconquered Italy fifty-nine years later. Later claims by the Holy Roman Empire and by Ottoman sultans styling themselves Kayser-i Rum complicate any clean terminus further. Alternative candidate dates in serious use include 410, 439, 476, 480, 554, 568, 602, 632, 800, 1204 and 1453. Treat 476 as a convention, not a fact.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.