Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/122

 86 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE ,. fusing rapidity. The real power was in the hands of Ricimer, a man of German descent, who seems to have resolved not to share the fate of Stilicho and Aetius, and hence killed his emperors first. Finally, however, he himself died a natural death in 472. In the East the emperors maintained them- selves more successfully against the leaders of the soldiery. It is true that when the able emperor, Marcian, died in 457, a barbarian named Aspar succeeded in making emperor his steward, Leo; but Leo proved too strong for Aspar, whom he had killed in 471, and Leo handed on the crown in 474 to his son-in-law, Zeno, an Isaurian from Asia Minor who reigned until 491. Constantinople also demonstrated its superiority by twice nominating rulers for the West. But Nepos, the second of these, was not acceptable to the bar- barian mercenaries, who drove him out of Italy in 475. Their leader Orestes is then said to have made an emperor of his handsome fourteen-year-old son, who bore the aus- picious and historic name, Romulus. In any case, in 476 the soldiers turned against Orestes, who had not rewarded them with the grants of land they desired, and he was overthrown by another barbarian, Odoacer. Odoacer was willing to admit a vague sort of overlordship by the Eastern emperor and to receive such titles as " patrician" from him; the sen- ate and consuls and much of the administrative system introduced by Diocletian still went on in Italy. But the emperor at Constantinople had practically no authority in the West. Britain, Gaul, Spain, and North Africa had already passed quite out from his control, and Italy now became to all intents and purposes an independent king- dom. From 476 to 800 there was no other Roman emperor than the one reigning at Constantinople. Since Constanti- nople was not Rome, nor its inhabitants in any true sense Romans, — though they so called themselves, — it is legiti- mate to speak of the Roman Empire as now at an end. It is true that the Roman law and governmental system and for a time the use of Latin as the official language con- tinued at Constantinople. But it will be clearer henceforth to speak of this half or less of what had once been the