Western Roman Empire
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The Western Roman Empire, in historiography, refers to the western provinces
of the Roman Empire at any one time during which they were administered by
a separate independent Imperial court, coequal with (or only nominally subor
dinate to) that administering the eastern half. "Western" and "Eastern Roman
Empire" are modern terms describing de facto independent entities; however,
at no point did Romans consider the Empire split into two, but rather consi
dered it a single state governed by two separate Imperial courts out of admi
nistrative expediency. The view that the Empire was impossible to govern by
one emperor was established by Diocletian following the disastrous civil war
s and disintegration of the Crisis of the 3rd century, and was instituted in
Roman law by his introduction of the Tetrarchy in AD 285, a form of governm
ent which was legally to endure in one form or another for centuries. The We
stern Court was periodically abolished and recreated for the next two centur
ies until final abolition by the Emperor Zeno in 480, by which time there wa
s little effective central control left in the area legally administered by
the Western Court.
A Western Roman Empire existed intermittently in several periods between the
3rd and 5th centuries, after Diocletian's Tetrarchy and the reunifications
associated with Constantine the Great and Julian the Apostate (331/2–363).
Theodosius I divided the Empire upon his death (in 395) between his two sons
. Finally, eighty-five years later, Emperor Zeno of the Eastern Court recogn
ized the reality of the Western Empire's reduced domain (Imperial control ha
d been lost over even the Italian Peninsula) after the death of Western Empe
ror Julius Nepos, and proclaimed himself sole emperor of the Roman Empire.
The rise of Odoacer of the Foederati to rule over Italy in 476 was populariz
ed by eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon as a demarcating event for
the end of the Western Empire and is sometimes used to mark the transition f
rom Antiquity to the Middle Ages.
The ongoing struggle between the rising Papacy and the retreating Eastern Em
pire (which had reconquered Rome in the 6th century) led the Pope to unilate
rally declare the Frankish King Charlemagne to be the successor of the Weste
rn Emperors in 800.[citation needed] This new imperial line would evolve in
time into the Holy Roman Empire, which revived the imperial title but was ot
herwise in no meaningful sense an extension of Roman traditions or instituti
ons.