Despite the efforts of many scholars, there is still a widespread tendency to view 476 and the fifth-century decline of western Roman power as a particularly decisive turning-point, when 'civilisation' fell and 'barbarism' ruled. So there are a few important misconceptions that I think is important to deal with first before we can get to the status of the city itself, apologies in advance to anyone who knows this already! It is absolutely true that the empire weakened significantly in the fifth century, particularly with the fall of North Africa to the Vandals and the repeatedly failure of imperial expeditions to reconquer the region, but it emphatically was not a time when Roman liberties were trampled by 'barbarian' soldiers. As Guy Halsall put it, Rome was not murdered, as it had instead ‘accidentally committed suicide’. No-one, whether 'barbarian' or Roman, had actually wanted to bring the empire down – they instead sought to improve their own positions within imperial structures, which often meant defeating other people doing the exact same thing. Competition at the top and in the provinces had brought the crumbling edifice of central government down, allowing warlords to seize power across much of the west.

Over time, the western Roman empire was reduced to a shadow of its former self, being only in direct control of Italy, which contributed to Odoacer’s decision to submit himself to first an ex-emperor in Dalmatia and then the eastern emperor in Constantinople, rather than to maintain the charade through puppet emperors as other generals did before him. The western empire was, by 476, an irrelevant body for many people, but the Roman empire itself was not. In the same year the empire ruled by Constantinople was coincidentally wracked by internal disorder too, but it would recover and retain its position as the preeminent power in the Christian world. Moreover, 476 itself is a date worth thinking about, since it is now acknowledged that its importance in modern historiography was due to tensions in Constantinople in 518, the year in which the chronicler Marcellinus Comes first noted that the western empire had fallen in 476. At that point, the eastern empire was reconsidering the possibility of taking back from the west, so naturally Marcellinus, a man closely tied to the house of Justinian, wrote these dramatic words as a reflection of these ambitions; the west was really lost, and it was up to the 'real' Romans to take it back:

[In 476] With this Augustulus perished the Western empire of the Roman people, which the first Augustus, Octavian, began to rule in the seven hundred and ninth year from the foundation of the city.

Yet when we look at eastern Roman policies from the previous years, which even involved handing over the imperial regalia to 'barbarians' and the active recognition of the western kingdoms' legitimacy, it is not so clear (before Marcellinus) that the eastern Romans had thought the same. Perhaps 476, in the words of Brian Croke, was just 'a manufactured turning-point', one that has firmly entrenched itself in the public consciousness, but one with far less significance to the people at the time. For a more accurate representation of the sixth century world, Andrew Louth’s chapter from the New Cambridge Medieval History sums it up quite well:

The beginning of the century saw Anastasius (491–518) on the imperial throne, ruling an empire that was still thought of as essentially the Roman Empire, coextensive with the world of the Mediterranean, however unrealistic such a view seems to modern historians, who have the benefit of hindsight. Although Anastasius ruled from Constantinople, ‘New Rome’, over what we call the ‘Eastern Empire’, the Western Empire having been carved up into the ‘barbarian kingdoms’, this perspective is ours, not theirs. Through the conferring of titles in the gift of the emperor, and the purchasing of alliances with the wealth of the Empire – wealth that was to dwarf the monetary resources of the West for centuries to come – the barbarian kings could be regarded as client kings, acknowledging the suzerainty of the emperor in New Rome, and indeed the barbarian kings were frequently happy to regard themselves in this light. The discontinuation of the series of emperors in the West, with the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476, was regarded by very few contemporaries as a significant event: the notion that East and West should each have its own emperor was barely of a century’s standing, and the reality of barbarian military power in the West, manipulated from Constantinople, continued, unaffected by the loss of an ‘emperor’ based in the West.

The Ostrogoths, who invaded Italy in 489, played an important part in this complex political web, since they were in theory sent by the emperor to take back the province from Odoacer, who as I mentioned already was content to play at being a loyal governor on behalf of Constantinople. By then, the tensions between Constantinople and Ravenna had escalated, especially given Odoacer's expansion into Dalmatia, and Emperor Zeno needed a reason to get Theoderic, the leader of the Ostrogoths, away from Constantinople after a tense military stand-off. This arrangement benefited both sides and, as we will see, Theoderic would henceforth maintain a certain deference to the imperial regime in Constantinople. This was to be expected, since Theoderic himself was a Roman citizen, a patrician, and the consul of 484. Not that Odoacer was any less 'Roman' in his rule, since he too had minted coins with the emperor's image and remained respectful of the influential men belonging to the senate in Rome. The transition of power between the two men was therefore not about the overthrowing the mechanisms of the Roman state, but was a much more straightforward regime change. It is also worth noting that the 'Ostrogoths' who invaded Italy should not be seen as an ethnically homogeneous group, but a more diverse one forged from Theoderic and his fellow leaders' campaigns over the previous decades. Ethnic identity was no less complex in the past than now and there is still a fierce debate on how we should define them. I won't wade into that debate, but keep this in mind whenever I use 'Ostrogoth', a term that was just as flexible as 'Roman' in late antiquity.

With this out of the way, what happened to Rome the city? The answer… not very much. Rome was still dominated by the senatorial aristocracy, a small class of rich and influential men with names that loudly proclaimed their long and illustrious heritage. Grand titles such as the consulship (yes, this continued under the Ostrogoths and new consuls were still recognised by Constantinople!) were the senatorial families’ purview, a powerful reminder of the importance of the city of Rome even in a new world ruled by ‘barbarians’, for chroniclers would using their consular years to date contemporary events. Rome had also continued to mint its own coins, of a type that did not explicitly proclaim loyalty to Theoderic (his coins always had the face and name of the emperor on them anyway); instead, the bronze coinage were inscribed with the words INVICTA ROMA (‘unconquered Rome’), as well as the imageries of the imperial eagle and the wolf that had fed Romulus and Remus, the founders of the city.

The administration was altered to account for existing Ostrogothic power-structures, particularly that of the army, but respect for tradition was the general rule for how Theoderic's regime treated the existing institutions. A good example of this is the Edict of Theoderic, a law-code from c.500, which updated legislation and commanded its audience, whether Roman or Goth, to obey Roman law. Legislation was a traditional plank of imperial power, so it is no surprise that someone as Romanised as Theoderic would commission such a code. Justinian, emperor of the Romans, proclaimed much of the same three decades later:

The imperial majesty should be armed with laws as well as glorified with arms, that there may be good government in times both of war and of peace, and the ruler of Rome may not only be victorious over his enemies, but may show himself as scrupulously regardful of justice as triumphant over his conquered foes.

We should also remember that Theoderic's men could have only consisted of a tiny fraction of the population of Italy, so there was never a possibility that he could have imposed anything particularly un-Roman. Like any other contemporary post-Roman warlord, whether Clovis of the Franks, Gundobad of the Burgundians, or Alaric II of the Visigoths, legislation was a way to reconcile the new elite with their Roman population. The focus of legislation did change, for example local customs were integrated into law and it also dealt with more mundane matters such as cattle-rustling. It speaks to an extent of a changed economic and political reality, but the disintegration of the Mediterranean trade network that fed growth was already collapsing decades before, so 476 was hardly a turning-point for this reason. As Sean Lafferty's excellent study of this topic has pointed out, we should not view this simply as a decline of legal culture or sophistication, but instead on how Roman law adapted to the times.