Campbell-Moffat, Thomas; (2023) The Value of 476: Charting the end of the Western Roman State. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

The subject of my thesis is when the western Roman state came to an end. The initial impulse for this question was the consideration that the apocryphal ‘end’ of the western empire – the deposition of Romulus Augustulus by Odovacer in 476 – lacked a great deal of explanative power. In fact, the concept of ‘empire’ is itself a little nebulous, making it difficult to determine what specifically ended. To that end, I have taken a five-point model for the early state derived from Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages (2005). The criteria are as follows: I) The centralisation of legitimate enforceable authority II) Stable and independent resources for rulers III) A class-based system for surplus extraction and stratification IV) The specialisation of governance, and a system of office-holding that outlasted the individual officeholders themselves V) The concept of a public power, or an ideological system separable from the rulers and ruled. The aim is to take each of these criteria, apply them to the western Roman state, and to determine if, when, and how each could be said to have ended: essentially, what changed, when did it change, what were to consequences of that change. The primary objective is to offer a more factually accurate and historically compelling date than the traditional ‘end’ in 476. The secondary objective is to determine how each criterion fits into the overarching culturalist/structuralist debate that animates the field, as it is becoming increasingly clear that we are talking about separate things.

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