Odoacer’s 476 victory ended the Western imperial court
Historians call the Western Roman Empire the Latin provinces run by their own court, especially from 395 to 476. After Third Century chaos, Diocletian institutionalised the idea that one man could not rule it all; in 476 Odoacer took Ravenna and made Romulus Augustulus abdicate.
Modern historians coined the labels Western and Eastern Roman Empire; Romans at the time saw one state run by two courts for convenience. The split had deep roots. In 43 BC the Second Triumvirate carved up the Republic's lands: Antony took the Greek-speaking East, Octavian got Italy, Gaul, Gallia Belgica and Hispania, and Lepidus was handed Africa, which Octavian soon took from him along with Sicily.
Geography kept pushing toward division. News of revolts or invasions travelled by ship or mounted courier, so governors, who commanded armies and collected taxes, acted with de facto autonomy. Rome also faced two frontiers at once: Germanic peoples beyond the Rhine and Danube, where Augustus pulled back after the Teutoburg Forest disaster, and the Parthians, later the Sasanians, in the east. An emperor campaigning on one border invited a rebel general on the other, and during the Crisis of the Third Century, which began when troops murdered Alexander Severus in March 235, generals such as Philip the Arab seized the throne exactly that way.
Marcus Aurelius first tried shared rule, alongside Lucius Verus, and Valerian and his son Gallienus split the empire east and west until the Sassanids captured Valerian at Edessa. Diocletian made the principle permanent in 286 with the Tetrarchy: two senior Augusti, each with a junior Caesar as heir. That scheme soon broke down, but the east–west division survived, and after Theodosius I died in 395 separate courts with their own successions governed the two halves.
The western court ended in 476, when Odoacer's Germanic foederati beat the army at Ravenna and he deposed Romulus Augustulus to become King of Italy; Edward Gibbon later made that date the fall of the West. In 480, after Julius Nepos was murdered, Zeno in Constantinople dissolved the western court altogether. Justinian won back North Africa, Italy and part of Hispania in the sixth century, but plague, invasions and religious strife wore those gains away, and Charlemagne's papal coronation in 800 launched a new imperial line rather than continuing the old one.
Source: Western Roman Empire
