W. Robert Godfrey

It aided Justinian's propaganda to label them barbarians and to say that he as the noble Roman emperor had to recapture Italy for the Roman Empire from the hands of these barbarians.

It's very interesting that it was a historian, Marcellinus, in Justinian's court who in his chronicle first declared that the Western Roman Empire had ended in 476.

He's the only ancient historian or early medieval historian who ever said that.

But that observation made in Justinian's court has stayed with us down until today.

The Roman Empire in the West ended in 476.

Well, Justinian wanted that to be true so he could justify his invasion of Italy and his efforts to conquer Italy.

Most historians today think it was more a battle of Roman against Roman.

It was more what we would call a civil war than a real war of reconquest.

But when Justinian conquered Italy, Italy for a time became unoccupied.

area, not really feeling that the Byzantine presence was their people coming back to rescue them, but really foreigners now there.

And so some say this is where the Western Empire really ended.

This is when the division between East and West became palpable with Justinian's control of parts of Italy.

He never was able to control absolutely all of it.

But he managed to reestablish a Byzantine presence or an Eastern Roman presence in Italy that lasted down to the middle of the eighth century.

So there's long history, long shadows to these things.

So Justinian is a sort of point at which the East reaches a measure of separation from the West, not an absolute separation.

There could be a lot of contact, a lot of back and forth, so much so that when Charlemagne was crowned emperor in 800,

Charlemagne sent to the Eastern emperor and said, will you ratify my election?

Will you approve my election?

And the emperor said, yes, ratify this election.