Practice question · Multiple choice
Odoacer deposed the last western emperor in 476 and sent the imperial insignia to Constantinople rather than wearing them. Why did contemporaries not read this as the end of the Roman Empire?
Hints
- Ask where a Roman emperor could still be found in 477.
- Odoacer’s gesture with the insignia was a claim that Italy needed no separate emperor, not that it needed no empire.
Show the answer
D. An emperor reigned in the East, and Odoacer governed Italy as his nominee
Why
Because there was still a Roman emperor, in Constantinople. Odoacer’s message to Zeno was that one emperor sufficed for both halves, and he ruled Italy under that fiction. Julius Nepos, the claimant Romulus had displaced, went on styling himself western emperor until 480, which is a poor fit for an empire that had ended.
Practise Late Antiquity and the Germanic Kingdoms
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