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Updated: May 1, 2025
The kingdom of Italy, a name to which the Western empire was gradually reduced, was afflicted, under the reign of Ricimer, by the incessant depredations of the Vandal pirates. In the spring of each year, they equipped a formidable navy in the port of Carthage; and Genseric himself, though in a very advanced age, still commanded in person the most important expeditions.
Forty days after this calamitous event, the subject, not of glory, but of guilt, Italy was delivered, by a painful disease, from the tyrant Ricimer, who bequeathed the command of his army to his nephew Gundobald, one of the princes of the Burgundians.
By the clemency, however, or the contempt, of Ricimer, he was permitted to descend from the throne to the more desirable station of bishop of Placentia: but the resentment of the senate was still unsatisfied; and their inflexible severity pronounced the sentence of his death He fled towards the Alps, with the humble hope, not of arming the Visigoths in his cause, but of securing his person and treasures in the sanctuary of Julian, one of the tutelar saints of Auvergne.
A brave and numerous army was attached to his standard: and, though he was prevented by the arts of Ricimer, and the arms of the Visigoths, from marching to the gates of Rome, he maintained his independent sovereignty beyond the Alps, and rendered the name of Ægidius, respectable both in peace and war.
But at the bidding of Ricimer, who had become the most powerful general, the senate deposed Avitus; he fled to his country Auvergne, and was killed on the way in September, 456. All power now lay in the hands of Ricimer. He was by his father a Sueve; by his mother, grandson of Wallia, the Visigothic king at Toulouse.
The stern Ricimer, who trampled on the ruins of Italy, had exercised the power, without assuming the title, of a king; and the patient Romans were insensibly prepared to acknowledge the royalty of Odoacer and his Barbaric successors.
An expedition sent against him at the instigation of Ricimer, the Sueve, by the Eastern emperor Leo, was ill commanded by Basiliscus, and failed. But after the Vandal king died , his kingdom was torn by civil and religious disorders, and by the revolts of the Moors, and, fifty-seven years after the death of its founder, was conquered by the general of the Eastern Empire.
But he was an able and good man, and attempted to revive the traditions of the empire, and met the fate of all reformers in a hopeless age, doubtless under the influence of Ricimer, who substituted Severus, a Lucanian, who perished by poison after a reign of four years, so soon as he became distasteful to the military subordinate, who was all-powerful at Rome, and who ruled Italy for six years without an emperor with despotic authority.
To appreciate this letter, it must be borne in mind that it was written by Pope Simplicius a year after the western empire was extinguished; that the writer had seen nine western emperors deposed, and most of them murdered, in twenty-one years; that it was addressed to the eastern and now only Roman emperor; and that the writer was living under the absolute rule of the condottiere chief who had succeeded Ricimer, and is called by Pope Gelasius a few years afterwards "Odoacer, barbarian and heretic".
He chose Libius Severus to fill the place of Majorian and had him proclaimed in Ravenna upon November 19, 461; and upheld him for nearly four years till he died in Rome on August 15, 465, poisoned, men said, by Ricimer.
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