Alaric's Goths sack Rome
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.
Historical — it happened, and the record is settled.
Subjects
- Rome · city · Italy
- The Roman Legion · military_formation · Frontier provinces, principally Rhine, Danube, Britain, Syria, North Africa · not located
Evidence
Partly verified — Core facts are sourced; some optional detail is deliberately absent. This is the standing of the weakest source, not an average.
Periodisation of Roman civilisation and the Roman/Byzantine continuity debate
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.
Wikipedia (survey article with scholarly citations); Momigliano, Brown, Ward-Perkins, Kaldellis · accessed 2026 · Partly verified
Survey and bibliography at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_period ; key positions: A. Momigliano (1936 onwards), P. Brown (late antiquity as transformation), B. Ward-Perkins (2005, 'The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization'), A. Kaldellis (Roman continuity)
Late antique accounts of 476: Marcellinus Comes, Jordanes and the Anonymus Valesianus
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.
MGH Auctores Antiquissimi (Monumenta Germaniae Historica) · chronicles composed 6th century CE · Partly verified
Marcellinus Comes, Chronicon s.a. 476, in MGH AA 11; Jordanes, Getica 242-243, in MGH AA 5.1; Anonymus Valesianus pars posterior 37-38
Recorded on Rome
- Traditional foundation of the Roman Republic
- Construction of the Via Appia begins
- The Punic Wars
- The Augustan settlement: Octavian becomes Augustus
- Assassination of Julius Caesar
- Caesar crosses the Rubicon
- Inauguration of the Flavian Amphitheatre
- The empire reaches its greatest territorial extent
- Construction of Hadrian's Wall begins
- The Antonine Constitution (Constitutio Antoniniana)
- Dedication of Constantinople
- Administrative division of the empire on the death of Theodosius I
- Alaric's Goths sack Rome
- Odoacer deposes Romulus Augustulus - the contested 'fall' of the Western Roman Empire
Related
Related because they share a subject in the Atlas — never because the text looks similar.
- Odoacer deposes Romulus Augustulus - the contested 'fall' of the Western Roman Empire · 0476-09-04
- Administrative division of the empire on the death of Theodosius I · 0395
- Dedication of Constantinople · 0330-05-11
- The Antonine Constitution (Constitutio Antoniniana) · 0212
- Construction of Hadrian's Wall begins · 0122
- The empire reaches its greatest territorial extent · 0117
- Inauguration of the Flavian Amphitheatre · 0080
- Caesar crosses the Rubicon · -0049-01-10