The last Western emperor bore the names of Rome's founder and its first emperor: Romulus Augustus.

476

Romans called the boy Augustulus, 'little Augustus'. Odoacer spared him and sent him to live out his days in a castle in Campania.

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The event

• Fall of the Western Roman Empire476 · Ravenna. The Germanic commander Odoacer deposed the young emperor Romulus Augustulus and sent the imperial regalia to Constantinople. The year is traditionally taken as the end of the Western Roman Empire and the line between antiquity and the Middle Ages.

5th century

More amazing facts

• 476 · 1453 The Eastern Roman Empire outlived the Western one by almost 1,000 years: Rome fell in 476, Constantinople only in 1453.
• 476 · 499 Twenty-three years after the Western Roman Empire fell, India's Aryabhata wrote that the sky only appears to move — it is the Earth that rotates.
• 480 · 1585 The fraction 355/113 gives pi correct to six decimal places, and China had it 1,100 years before Europe.
• 525 · 731 For five centuries nobody knew they were living in AD anything.
• 525 · 628 There is no year zero because Dionysius Exiguus, inventing AD dating in 525, had no zero.
• 532 Emperor Justinian was nearly overthrown by sports fans.

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