From these vicissitudes a reality emerges that has a fundamental importance for the purposes of our research: the primary responsibility for the collapse of the centralized imperial administration in the West fell entirely on the priestly family, which from this collapse was in no way weakened or diminished. In fact, if anything it gained in autonomy and security. It was certainly not a policy that had been programmed from the beginning, but considering the basis created at the time of Constantine, with the prohibition of the Roman emperors from residing in the capital, and the situation that had been determined in the course of the fourth century by the massive employment of barbarian populations in the Western armies, it was inevitable that eventually the ruling classes that reported directly to Rome would decide that they could do without an emperor. In actual fact there was never a “fall” of the Western Empire; what happened was only a slow agony of the imperial office, which became ever more estranged from the interests of the Western ruling classes, clergy and Senate, until it had become an unsustainable weight for them. After the death of Valentinian III, the West was transformed into a battlefield for opposing barbarian armies, which fought each other to impose their candidates for the imperial purple.
Traditionally the Emperor was the head of the army and his main task, at least in the West, was that of defending the state against external and internal aggression. In the course of the fifth century, the concentration of land in the hands of the clergy and the Senatorial class, which enjoyed wide exemptions and privileges, had made the recruitment of soldiers from the Romanized populations extremely difficult, so the Western army came to be made up almost entirely of barbarian warriors, installed as foederati by the generals Stilicho, Constantius and Aetius in Spain and Gaul, with the task of safeguarding the autonomy and privileges of the clergy and the landed nobility. When these same armies began to be used against each other to impose short-lived emperors, without effective power and incapable of imposing their authority on anyone, the ruling class that reported to the Roman Senate decided to abolish the imperial office in the West, which by then had become a source of permanent instability and a cause of the enfeeblement of the military resources at its disposal.
The barbarian Odoacer was only the material executor of this decision and he acted with the consensus and in fact the full support of the Senate and the Roman clergy. This is proven by the fact that Romulus Augustus resigned in front of the Senate. Straight afterwards the Senate unanimously decided to send a letter to the Eastern Emperor Zeno, in which it declared that it no longer intended to ratify the appointment of an emperor in the West, of which it felt no need: to simultaneously govern both the East and the West a single emperor was sufficient. The Senate, therefore, solemnly declared, in its own name and in that of all the people, that it agreed to the seat of the universal Empire being transferred from Rome to Constantinople, renouncing its own right to choose the Emperor (up till then the appointment of a new Emperor had always been ratified by the Senate). The letter continued by stating that the “republic” (sic) could count for its defense on the civil and military virtues of Odoacer, for whom it requested an official investiture, with his appointment as patrician [1].
It was a very logical conclusion, if one considers the historical facts. We have already seen the convulsive vicissitudes of the West in the two decades following the death of Valentinian. With the deposition of the last Emperor Odoacer performed a service not only for Italy, but for the whole of the West, which gained from it in stability and prosperity. And the autonomy and privileges of the Roman ruling classes were guaranteed everywhere by the barbarian populations, as they had never been under the Roman emperors.
Odoacer governed Italy with an army of barbarians of various ethnic groups, but he left the old offices and institutions intact and eventually made concessions to the Roman nobility and the Catholic clergy (although he was of Arian faith) that were far wider than the Christian emperors would ever have made, to the extent that he was acclaimed as “champion of the freedoms of the Roman Senate”. “The freedom of the Roman nobility,” writes the historian Ernst Stein, “for which Brutus and Cassius had died at Philippi, was never so completely restored as it was by the first barbarian king to rule Italy”. It is true that he handed out cultivable land to his own barbarian soldiers by taking it from the landowners, but the interests of the latter were well safeguarded. No property had more than a third of its surface area expropriated, and to compensate the landowners were indemnified with exemption from taxes, which came to the same amount.
For nearly twenty years Italy enjoyed a period of peace and economic rebirth. The peace was shattered by Theodoric's Goths, who took the place of Odoacer and his barbarians, who had been wiped out. The Roman clergy and aristocracy remained neutral, in appearance, between the two contenders. Their status and privileges did not change under the new “masters” and neither did their autonomy in regard to the Western Emperor. This might seem strange, since the historians state that Theodoric was persuaded to invade Italy by the Eastern Emperor Zeno. It is not to be excluded, however, that Zeno's intervention had been agreed, or even solicited, by the Roman ruling class. It even seems likely. Odoacer had initially been happy with just the office of “magister militum”, i.e. head of the army, and with the honorific title of Roman patrician. He had, however, been quick to assume the name “Flavius”, thus arrogating for himself the rights of the Gens Flavia and staking a claim for the imperial purple.
Not for himself, obviously, but for his son Flavius Telanus, whom he had named “Caesar”, the antechamber of the title of Augustus. It was probably this move that brought about his death. The Roman priestly organization cannot have been prepared to accept once again an emperor in the West, and certainly not one of barbarian origin. And in this its interests completely coincided with those of the Eastern Emperor, who, in the absence of a fellow-Emperor, also remained nominally sovereign of the whole of the West. His authority was formally recognized by all the barbarian chiefs. From a formal point of view, therefore, the Roman Empire was again reunited under a single emperor. In practice it was definitely divided into two parts, one subject to the secular branch of the family, the other to the religious branch, the Church, which remained completely free from all influences, and whose security was guaranteed by barbarian militias.
With the deposition of the last puppet emperor, Romulus Augustus, the division between civil and religious powers, with their two different spheres of influence, brought about at the time of Constantine, was taken to its extreme and logical consequences. In the East the Emperor was sovereign to all effects, but formally recognized dependence on Rome in matters of religion. In the West the supreme authority of the Emperor, from whom the various barbarian chiefs continued to receive confirmation of legitimacy, was formally recognized, and formally they governed in his name, but in practice power was completely in the hands of the Church and the Senatorial ruling class.
In the other “barbarian” states into which the West had been broken up, the situation was more or less the same as in Italy. In all of them the Roman administrative system was maintained, the Senatorial nobility kept their privileges and property and the Catholic clergy saw their power and the ecclesiastical patrimony increase.
The old Western ruling class thus freed itself of its most onerous and difficult duty: that of providing for the recruitment and maintenance of an army to safeguard their security against foreign invasions, and their interests and privileges with regard to the subjected population. These tasks were entirely transferred to the barbarians, who constituted a permanent warrior class, and who performed them far more effectively than the Roman emperors and far more cheaply for the Roman ruling class. Control over and administration of the subjected Roman population, however, remained entirely in the hands of the old ruling classes.
Throughout the West the barbarians became in practice (as they had always been, for that matter) the “champions” and defenders of the independence of the Senatorial class and the Catholic clergy. Independence from whom? Clearly from the Emperor himself. This is not surprising, because, as we have seen, the fall of the Western Empire was the logical final consequence of that decision to safeguard the independence of the secret priestly organization against the centralized power, by physically separating the seat of the imperial administration from that of the Church.
The historical facts therefore demonstrate that responsibility for the so-called “fall” of the Western Empire should be wholly attributed to the Western priestly family, and not to the barbarians.
It should be stated clearly that neither the Visigoths nor any other barbarians who had settled in the Empire as foederati had ever had the intention of bringing it down. In fact, if anything the opposite was true. Ataulf, who succeeded Alaric in the same year as the sack of Rome, declared several times that he intended to gain glory for himself by bringing the name of Rome back to its past greatness by using the military power of the Visigoths, and that he wanted to be remembered by posterity as “the author of the restoration of Rome”[2]. And we must not forget that, for example, it was the Visigoths, Franks, Burgundians and Alans who gave their lives at the Catalaunian Fields to save the Empire from invasion by Attila; one of the many episodes in which the barbarians fought in its defense. Stilicho, Constantius and Aetius fought all their countless battles at the head of armies mainly made up of barbarians, whose deployment became ever more massive as the Roman population's civic sense weakened and it became more difficult to recruit soldiers from it. But the barbarians were not responsible for this. Responsibility fell entirely on the priestly family, which had never had a sense of the state, but only that of the family, and had used the barbarians as the most efficient instrument for maintaining their dominion over Roman society and continuing to maintain their wealth and inordinate privileges [3].
In the East, directly subject to imperial authority, things went completely differently. The Emperor, in order to allow for the survival and governability of his state, (avoid political conditioning, avoid social revolts, by promoting wellbeing and the economy, and procuring the financial means to provide for defence and the administration) had to revoke many of the privileges of the Senatorial class and the clergy, limiting their powers and heavily taxing their property. The clergy and nobility were thus completely subjugated to the imperial authority, and lost their autonomy. In return the integrity and independence of the state were safeguarded.
In the West, however, the priestly families avoided this inevitable process by entrusting the defense of their autonomy, interests and privileges to a class of professional warriors, constituted from the barbarian populations. The price to pay was the independence and unity of the state; a price which, as far as can be judged from the historical vicissitudes of that period, was paid deliberately and without hesitation. For that matter, it was in line with an ancient tradition. The Judaic priestly family had emerged as the dominant class in Judah on its return from the Babylonian exile, under Persian domination, and had continued to prosper under the dominion of the Tolomeans. Only when Antioch threatened its existence by prohibiting the Jewish religion, did the family react, creating an independent state, with a king taken from its own ranks at its head. But the period under the Hasmoneans was not one of the happiest for the priestly families as a whole, which willingly accepted Roman dominion, at least until it began to invade the sphere of religious autonomy. There was nothing strange or new, therefore, in the Western priestly families preferring the dominion of barbarian sovereigns to that of an emperor of their own lineage.
[1] Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. XXXVI
[2] E.A. Thompsom, work cited, p. 45
[3] In this regard it is important to note that only the barbarians who had initially gone into the service of the Roman ruling classes as “foederati” - Visigoths, Goths, Burgundians and Franks – could stay in the Western territories and form stable political units even after the “fall” of the Empire. All the other barbarians, who had not placed themselves at the service of the Roman ruling classes, had always and invariably been driven out or exterminated. And they would be subsequently, too: Alans, Swabians and Silingi Vandals, who had treacherously occupied Spain, were wiped out by the Visigoths, on Flavius Constantius' behalf; the Hasdingi Vandals resisted in North Africa for almost a century, but were eventually swept away by Belisarius; the Alamanni, who had penetrated into Switzerland and Lorraine, were annihilated by Clovis' Franks; the Lombards, who had entered Italy in the seventh century, were then completely vanquished by the Franks of Pepin the Short.