All language subtitles for 12 - Rome Rise Fall - The Puppet Master

Previously on "Rome: Rise and fall of an empire,"

in the late fourth century,
endless barbarian attacks

poisoned the empire with suspicion and
hatred for its own immigrant soldiers.

The half-barbarian, half-Roman general Stilicho
is not the last to be sacrificed,

a bloody death foreshadowing the fate
of an empire on the brink of collapse.

Now:

In the fifth century, over 500 years
after the death of Julius Caesar,

the Roman empire is ravaged by war and is
quickly losing land to its foreign invaders.

In the midst of this chaos, three Roman
generals compete for the power of emperor.

But through treachery, betrayal, and murder,
only one, the barbarian-born Ricimer, gains control of Rome.

He is the puppet master.

ROME
RISE AND FALL OF THE EMPIRE

THE PUPPET MASTER

In 455 A.D., the ancient city of Rome,
once a pinnacle of civilization,

is sacked by a violent
tribe of vandal barbarians.

Vandals have come from north Africa to the capital
of the Roman world, as it used to be anyway.

The romans are shocked and terrified
that barbarians could come

to their ancient cultural center and
literally take anything that they wanted.

After centuries of endless barbarian attacks,
Rome has lost control of the Mediterranean.

Desperate, the empire offers up its last
and greatest treasure, the land itself.

In exchange for peace, Rome grants
its fertile soil to the barbarian tribes.

The problem is that they had no choice, and so
the romans just negotiated with them and said,

"Ok. You're here. We can't get you out.
We'll give you this territory."

And romans just gave it away.

The empire has been officially divided
between east and west for over 75 years.

But while the east remains strong,
the west has lost most of its territory to the barbarians.

As it barters away its land, the empire
receives barbarian soldiers in return,

but the plan only backfires.

The emperors made a deal
with the devil so to speak,

because when the emperors
gave land to the barbarians,

they were giving away whatever tax revenues might
come to the imperial treasury from those lands.

The more you gave away, the poorer you got.

The poorer you got as a Roman emperor,
the more land you needed to give away,

and it was a deadly downward spiral
for the strength of the Roman empire.

The empire has always depended on foreign mercenaries.

Yet in the fifth century, the Roman army
is almost entirely of barbarian descent.

The former enemies are now peers.

Barbarians, once the slaves of romans,
are now often their superiors.

All these men are saying,
"hey, my parents may have been a barbarian, but I'm not".

"I'm a general in the Roman army."

And they're competing for the honor attached to leadership.

Age-old ethnic tensions divide the army,
pitting soldier against soldier, Roman against barbarian.

But in 456 A.D., one ambitious general is determined
to maintain order, though he himself is a barbarian.

His name is Ricimer.

Ricimer's career followed a path that
was quite normal for barbarian nobles.

He was from a minor branch of the gothic royal family.

He had no real prospects of winning power in his home society.

And so he sought service as an officer in
the Roman army, where he did very well for himself.

Now Ricimer devises a plan to gain
even more power in the western empire.

He will lead his army against Rome's greatest foe, the vandals.

The problem is, to all intents and purposes,
there is no such thing as the Roman army at this time.

A commander, whoever he happens to be,
sees a threat,

then has to raise the army however he can, if he has money,
then move that army to the location and fight.

Ricimer marches to Agrigentum
in modern-day Sicily

to confront the vandal forces sailing
from their stronghold of Carthage.

In Sicily, the vandal warriors come
down hard on Ricimer and his army.

The vandals know their enemy, and they know the terrain.

Sicily and southern Italy were like the vandals' ATM.

Every spring, they'd get in their ships and
row over and make a very violent withdrawal

and then go home, and the Roman security
cameras couldn't do anything about it.

Ricimer leads his troops against
the great onslaught of barbarians.

Yet despite his own military training,
his army of mercenary soldiers is at a disadvantage.

The Roman army, by the middle of the fifth century,
is no longer the army that it had been a hundred years before.

For one thing, it's considerably smaller.

For another, it's less well-armed,
and it's certainly less disciplined.

Consequently, there just doesn't seem to be any...

There's no evidence that there was
any kind of training or tactics or whatever.

It's simply this great whack of Germans is then
sent off against that great whack of Germans,

and they just keep killing one
another until either it gets dark

or somebody gives up or somebody runs
away or whatever the case may be.

Though the skill and discipline of Roman
formation has been lost for decades,

the vandals are unable
to break Ricimer's men.

The Roman army claims victory,
not for the empire, but for their great leader.

The battle-weary Ricimer returns home a hero.

But he's not the only general seeking
his fame and fortune in Rome.

Two old friends from his youth are
equally ambitious- Majorian and Aegidius.

Ricimer, Majorian, and Aegidius had all
effectively been fellow junior officers,

and their careers had marched in step
with one another over the years.

But now it is their innate differences
that stir conflict below the surface.

The three men reflect the great
ethnic divide hindering the empire.

I think one of the sources of
the obvious personal tension

between Aegidius, Ricimer,
and Majorian really lies in their origins.

Aegidius is from Gaul. Majorian is from Italy.

And Ricimer is a barbarian who wants to live as a Roman.

And Ricimer is out to prove that he has as much
right to a piece of the empire as any other Roman.

But the competition for absolute power in Rome
is not limited to Ricimer, Majorian, and Aegidius.

They must now swear allegiance
to a new emperor, Avitus,

whose tenuous claim to the throne rests
only on his formidable barbarian entourage.

It's quite clear that Avitus' regime rested
on a foundation of gothic military support

and that the gothic king was Avitus' most influential
and in some ways absolutely indispensable backer.

With his gothic bodyguards, Avitus is untouchable.

Ricimer and his friends can do
nothing but take their orders

and wait while the old figurehead enjoys the luxury
of power, neglecting the true problems of the empire.

In north Africa, Rome's grain supply
has been seized by the barbarian vandals.

North Africa was the breadbasket
of the empire, producing grain,

the staple of most people's diets, and olive oil, equally important
for the fat in people's diets and for a million other uses.

Without the precious grain, famine
grips what's left of the empire's provinces.

In Rome, the poor must steal what they can to survive.

Gone are the security and comfort of Rome's heyday,
replaced now by despair and turmoil.

So everything is topsy-turvy. There's no stability.

There's no sort of knowledge of what's
going to happen in the future.

Everything is uncertain.

The situation at the imperial palace soon declines as well.

Angry and impatient, emperor Avitus' visigoth soldiers
demand payment for their services.

Avitus is desperate.

Roman emperors couldn't pay the barbarian
troops that they needed in cash

because the Roman empire's revenues
were so greatly decreased.

So when Roman emperors were bartering for military support,
they were dealing in the only good currency they had left.

So Avitus has to strip the
bronze off of the temples

in order to pay the guys who came down to Gaul with him,
all the gothic army and his gothic entourage.

But by selling the treasures of Rome,
Avitus only saves himself.

He leaves Italy in the poorhouse.

Hungry and hopeless, the romans riot in the streets,
demanding that Avitus banish his gothic troops from Rome.

Avitus is not popular,
and he's not popular with the Italian army,

and he's not popular with
the Italian general Ricimer.

In the public's outrage, Ricimer
and Majorian see an opportunity.

Avitus was in a desperate situation,

and when the barbarian Roman commander Ricimer
decided that Avitus was a losing proposition,

Avitus had no choice except to flee.

The emperor may flee
the chaos of the crowd,

but escaping the ambitions of Ricimer
will prove to be more difficult.

In the fifth century, Rome is overrun by barbarians.

Three old friends, the generals Ricimer,
Majorian, and Aegidius,

maneuver to attain absolute power in
what's left of the western empire.

But first they must subdue its incompetent emperor, Avitus.

Chased out of Rome, Avitus flees over the
Alps and westward into his native Gaul,

where he gathers visigothic
supporters before returning to Italy.

With the support of his fellow gauls,
Avitus hopes to easily regain the throne,

but back on Italian soil,
Ricimer and Majorian are waiting for him.

The ambush is brutal.

These battles are up-close and personal,
because you have to be able to kill them from up that close.

So there's pushing, there's shoving, there's running back.

There are dead bodies to climb over.

There are injured men yelling.

In the bloodbath, the army of Avitus is annihilated.

But in a surprising turn, Ricimer
spares the emperor's life on the battlefield.

Avitus is made bishop in a church
in the same Italian city where he is defeated.

Why was Avitus, the deposed emperor,
made into a bishop?

So that he would no longer have any
military connections or any military power

and so that Ricimer,
who deposed him, could say:

"I didn't slaughter a
legitimate Roman emperor.

I allowed him to follow a religious
vocation, which he had always wanted to do."

This is the public story.

But in the shadows, Ricimer sends a secret assassin,
his old friend Majorian, to silence Avitus for good.

For Ricimer, holy exile isn't enough.
He must have total victory.

Italian romans wanted to protect
what they saw as their own interests.

With the deposition and then strangulation of Avitus,
the emperor from Gaul was out of the picture.

And now romans in Italy could hope
that they would go back to the future

and that Italy,
the source of Rome's original greatness,

would once again be the source
of the Roman empire's salvation.

With the emperor Avitus finally gone, Italy celebrates.

But the mastermind behind Avitus' death
has no plans of proclaiming himself as a replacement.

Ricimer himself would have realized
that he can never survive as emperor.

It would have been unacceptable for a barbarian of...

a barbarian warlord with indeed royal connections
to barbarian royal houses, to assume the Roman throne.

No barbarian leader really contemplated it seriously.

Instead, Ricimer names a man he thinks
he can control, his best friend.

Majorian, the man whom Ricimer decided
to make emperor instead of himself, was an Italian.

Ricimer had gauged the sense of
especially the Roman upper class in Italy.

The Roman upper class in Italy wanted an Italian emperor.

Ricimer decided he'd be the power behind the throne
and make Majorian, that good Italian, into the Roman emperor.

Like the Wizard of oz, however, behind the curtain,
Ricimer was going to pull the strings, or so Ricimer thought.

With the new regime, the three old friends
enjoy the spoils of power.

Ricimer is named master of soldiers in Italy,
and Aegidius is sent on assignment to his native Gaul.

Aegidius is reasonably successful.

We have a number of sources that
say very positive things about him,

both as a commander and as an individual.

So he seems to have been a very charismatic
and successful military commander.

Aegidius secures his army's camp
in Gaul near the city of Soissons,

With the Franks to the north, the visigoths to the west,
and the burgundians to the east, he is trapped in a sea of barbarians.

Under constant attack from
their barbarian enemies,

Aegidius and his army rise to the occasion,
determined to defend Roman Gaul at all costs.

Aegidius was a Roman
from Gaul, from France,

who had extensive military
and diplomatic experience,

and the Roman hope was that he could prevent
further, especially gothic, incursions in Gaul

and protect what admittedly small part of
Gaul was still part of the Roman empire.

The endless barbarian assaults take
their toll on his already diminished forces.

But Aegidius refuses to admit defeat.

At this stage, Aegidius, in the 450's,
there's still hope perhaps,

and he clings on to this view and tries and
hopes for a restoration of Roman power.

With Aegidius in Gaul, Ricimer expects
to wield full power in Italy.

But Majorian has other plans.

What Ricimer discovers is that Majorian has
every intention of being an active Roman emperor

rather than the figurehead
that he was intended to be.

He tried very hard to push Ricimer into
the shadows and into the sidelines,

and he tried to take command of
major military ventures on his own.

Majorian is an emperor who's clearly very
dynamic, who is also very efficient,

and he's also aware of the deficiencies of
the empire, which he's determined to rectify.

Majorian devises a grand campaign against
the vandal king Gaiseric, leaving Ricimer on the sidelines.

This Ricimer will not allow.

The alliance between Ricimer,
Majorian, and Aegidius yields success

when Majorian is made emperor,
and Aegidius gains victories in Gaul.

But Ricimer's power as the mastermind is
threatened when Majorian strikes out on his own,

launching an expedition against
Rome's greatest enemy, the vandals.

Majorian leads his troops across the
alps into Gaul and south into Hispania

to prepare a naval attack against
the vandals of north Africa.

Majorian commissions carpenters to
build the strongest, fastest ships,

hoping to overpower the great
fleet of the vandal king Gaiseric.

Majorian wanted to drive the
vandals from north Africa

to restore the Roman empire's most
important source of food and revenue.

Camped near the mediterranean coast, Majorian takes
every precaution for his important and expensive mission.

Majorian is, by all the evidence we have, careful.

He sends scouting forces across
the straits of Gibraltar,

tests the waters, if you will, of local support for a landing,
because it's going to be a landing operation.

Not exactly D day, but it's gonna be a very significant naval action.

But in the night, disaster strikes,
despite all of Majorian's efforts.

Gaiseric's men set the Roman fleet ablaze.

Once again, the vandals prove to be too much for the romans.

They cannot defeat the vandals.

Lots of things- they just collapse before
they even really start in some cases.

The expedition had really collapsed halfway through,
and the romans up to that point were winning.

If Majorian had been able to conquer Africa,
it's quite clear that he would have been unchallengeable.

But as it was, the mission was a disaster,
the invasion was a disaster.

The fleet that had been collected to carry
the soldiers across the Mediterranean

was burned in the harbor
where it was being mustered.

Majorian returns to Italy dejected,
his great plan to recapture north Africa ruined.

This is a humiliating act on the part of Majorian.

The way Roman concepts of
power and honor worked,

this emperor, the last one who really
had the capacity to lead men into battle

and thereby achieve the image of manliness,
is humiliated.

Along the same wooded road to Rome,
a troop of soldiers rides to intercept the emperor.

It is the honor guard of Majorian's old friend Ricimer.

Majorian was the first military emperor that
Rome had had in years and years and years,

but with the failure of the vandal expedition, Ricimer,
for some reason or other, decided to get rid of him.

There may have been other things going on.

Majorian may have blamed
the failure on Ricimer.

Ricimer may have blamed the failure
on Majorian. We have no idea.

Fifth-century writer John of Antioch:

"Ricimer and his soldiers arrested him,

stripped him of his purple robe and crown,
beat him, and beheaded him.

Thus ended Majorian's life."

A messenger carrying news of
Majorian's murder makes his way slowly

to the far-off Roman outpost of Soissons,
Gaul, where Aegidius is stationed.

It is very bad news for the general.

The only response that Aegidius is likely to have had is
that he and Majorian and Ricimer were buddies.

They had served together for decades.

What does this make him?

I mean, his legitimacy was his appointment by Majorian,
who has now been discredited and killed.

I think his future is very uncertain.

With Majorian dead, Aegidius no longer sees any
point in continuing to cooperate with Ricimer,

and so Aegidius simply breaks away.

He refuses to recognize Ricimer
and Ricimer's new government

and effectively rules his bit of
Gaul as an independent kingdom.

Aegidius must prepare his soldiers.

Declaring independence from Ricimer
is akin to declaring war.

Rejecting Ricimer's rule in Italy, Aegidius considers his kingdom
of Soissons the last vestige of the Roman empire.

There's no evidence that they're responding
to orders from Ricimer or anyone else in Italy.

They're on their own. They're completely independent.

So the fabric of the empire has now broken down into pieces.

In Rome, Ricimer prepares for war as well,
but first he must find a new emperor to do his bidding.

This time, there is no dispute.

The man he chooses is no more
than a puppet- Libius Severus.

No one wants to be emperor.

It's not a job that anyone needs.

The only person who needs an
emperor is the generalissimo.

He's the guy who needs the emperor.

Nobody else needs one.
So Ricimer's there, and he needs an emperor.

So he's the one who appoints the
successor to Majorian, Libius Severus.

With the new emperor Severus by his side,
Ricimer can do as he pleases,

and nothing will please him more than
getting rid of Aegidius once and for all.

In the fifth century, emperor Majorian and his two old friends,
Ricimer and Aegidius, share power in Rome.

But when Ricimer has Majorian brutally
murdered and appoints a new puppet as emperor,

Aegidius has no choice but to remain in
his native Gaul and prepare for war.

After such a personal betrayal, Aegidius
and his men are ready to do battle with Ricimer.

The power alliance between the three old friends has been hijacked,
and Aegidius is left out in the cold.

Maybe he thought he had an understanding
that he was a co-player in this game,

that there were two generals in charge here-
Ricimer and Aegidius.

Aegidius find out that he wasn't reguarded as a player.
He wasn't consulted.

And he'd lost the third part of the triangle.

Now he's on his own.

But Ricimer is already making plans
to block Aegidius' impending attack.

With the new emperor, Severus, under his thumb,
Ricimer makes a deal with Rome's one-time enemy, the goths.

Ricimer saw this as a really serious threat-
Aegidius' proposed invasion of Italy.

So Ricimer did the smart thing. He made an alliance with the
goths, who were in Aegidius' rear- goths, Aegidius, Italy-

because Ricimer knew if the goths could
put pressure on Aegidius from the back,

Aegidius couldn't come to Italy,
and that's in fact what happened.

Just as he has always done,
Ricimer commissions someone else to do his dirty work.

Emperor Severus proves to be the perfect puppet for Ricimer,
happy to allow the war against Aegidius to unfold.

As Aegidius moves his troops south
from his kingdom in Soissons, Gaul,

he is attacked by Ricimer's army of
goths outside the city of Orleans.

These battles begin with both sides roaring at each other,
like at the kickoff of a football game.

There was an actual word for it.

It starts out with a low growl, and then all the soldiers
eventually are just yelling at the top of their lungs.

Then you throw missiles at the other side.

With such a powerful barbarian enemy, Aegidius and his troops
are hard-pressed to gain the advantage on the battlefield.

The barbarians were especially good at
running at full speed and using throwing axes,

which were very sharp with a heavy head,

and either shattering the shield of the men opposing them
or if you were really lucky, hitting them with the ax.

But while the goths are soldiers for hire,
Aegidius fights for the survival of Rome.

Finally he claims victory, but the losses are great.

In the field hospitals of Gaul, Aegidius
and his men recover from the gothic attack.

But he knows there will be more.

Aegidius has his hands full essentially.

These deals that Ricimer cuts with kingdoms in his
vicinity obviously mean that he has to deal with these.

These are going to be his priority.

He's going to be busy in Gaul and not be
able to detach any forces to invade Italy.

He just simply doesn't have the resources to deal with it.

Desperate to vanquish Ricimer's forces in Rome,
he turns to an unlikely source for help.

Aegidius sends a messenger south to
Rome's most menacing enemy, Gaiseric,

who as king of the vandals, had taken north Africa,
the breadbasket of the empire, over 20 years earlier.

He sends an envoy to try to strike a deal,

and Aegidius must have been very worried about how this deal
would be perceived if it got out to be public knowledge.

On the one hand, people could see,

"well, if we can reach a real deal with the
vandals, then we have a real bright "future"

but on the other hand, "what will we have
to give up to deal with these people

who have taken away the most precious,
the richest part of our empire?"

After traveling through Gaul and Hispania,
Aegidius' envoy finally reaches north Africa.

In the vandal camp, the messenger
delivers Aegidius' plea.

It looks as though Aegidius may have sought to establish
some sort of relations with Gaiseric in north Africa,

from the point of view that
they both have a common enemy.

That is Ricimer in Italy.

And therefore, Ricimer could be caught
between Gaul and north Africa-

a potentially very dangerous
position for Ricimer.

The barbarian king Gaiseric could be the last,
best hope for the empire's survival.

Surrounded by barbarians in Gaul,
Aegidius is unable

to drive his army against Ricimer,
and the puppet emperor Severus.

With nowhere else to turn, Aegidius
sends a plea for aid to the vandal king Gaiseric.

In Soissons, thousands of miles away from the vandal kingdom
in north Africa, Aegidius can only wait for a reply.

We don't know for sure, but I think it's
likely that Aegidius' envoy reached the vandals

and that perhaps a deal was in the making.

We really can't say.

Aegidius has run out of time.

Assassins sent by Ricimer make certain
he will never fulfill his dreams of a restored empire.

It seemed this mission was erious enough, and perhaps
that it seemed possible that it was going to succeed,

which led Aegidius' enemies to finally
find a way to undo him by treachery

because they couldn't take him in
direct battle on the field of combat.

With Aegidius out of the way,
Ricimer's hunger for power only increases,

and his thirst for blood cuts short the
life of his puppet emperor, Severus.

Ricimer makes and unmakes,
through violence, a series of emperors,

trying to find that front man who would allow Ricimer to
really be the power without developing ambitions of his own.

The problem for Ricimer was that when
he put a puppet on the Roman throne,

that puppet didn't want to remain a puppet.

But now total power is his.

Ricimer's ambition and bloodlust seem to know no limits.

For two years, Ricimer rules Rome without naming an emperor.

And the barbarian vandals continue to ravage Italy.

Any alliance they might have had with the murdered
Aegidius is now as dead as the general himself.

As Ricimer sits on his impotent throne,
they take the empire away piece by piece.

When the western empire starts to disintegrate,
it disintegrates very rapidly.

In a sense, the Roman empire doesn't actually fall.

It simply splinters away until the title of
emperor becomes meaningless.

Ricimer's continued failure against
the vandals only makes matters worse.

As the vandals strike against
the eastern empire's coastline,

its capital of Constantinople is finally forced
to move against Ricimer before it's too late.

From within his protected palace walls,

the eastern emperor Leo devises a plan to save the troubled
western empire from Ricimer and the barbarian invaders.

It is at this point that Leo realizes that he has to stop the vandals,
and so what he does is he sends Anthemius.

Now, Anthemius was the son-in-law
of the previous eastern emperor,

and he actually had a better
claim to the throne than Leo did.

So Leo's kind of killing two birds with one stone here.

He gets rid of a potential
opponent as it were,

and he provides an emperor for the west,
a competent emperor for the west.

And Leo has plans for Anthemius' family as well.

He sends them all from their home in Constantinople
westward to Ricimer's palace in Rome.

Anthemius' young daughter Alypia
is offered to Ricimer in marriage

in an attempt to subdue the ambitions of the bloodstained
general while Anthemius assumes the throne of the western empire.

It seems as though the western
government had nothing against this,

and Ricimer, who was, as it were,
the effective ruler of Italy,

welcomed him there and married
his daughter called Alypia.

So it looks as though everything was set for a good beginning,
and things might have gone very well.

Ricimer's assumption that Anthemius will serve simply
as another puppet emperor soon proves false.

The real problem was Anthemius.

Anthemius was sent by the east.

Anthemius was acting like an emperor and wasn't always-
he wasn't always doing what Ricimer wanted.

In 468 A.D., with Anthemius now
maintaining control in the west,

the eastern emperor Leo finances a large-scale
expedition against the vandals in Sicily.

There is no example of the east helping the west
militarily unless their own interests were involved.

And almost always it involved the vandals,
because the vandals had this giant port,

they had a fleet, and of course, this is
what prompted the big expedition in 468,

because they were now actually
able to attack the east anywhere.

But Ricimer cannot tolerate Anthemius,
who, backed by the eastern empire, diminishes his own hold on power.

And the tradition in the west by this point
was that the emperors were merely figureheads,

that Ricimer made the important decisions,
made emperors and removed them,

and conducted military operations himself, whereas
Anthemius was perfectly capable of doing this himself.

Filled with jealousy,
Ricimer sabotages the attack,

assassinating Rome's own commanders,
leaving the empire's forces vulnerable.

The whole thing falls apart,

and then unfortunately, the fleet, which is headed
by Leo's brother-in-law, it falls apart as well.

The ships are burned. Everything is a complete disaster.

After the empire's
crushing defeat in Sicily,

Ricimer spends months gathering troops in Milan before
launching a full-scale attack on Anthemius in Rome.

So Ricimer brings in the army, and they
besiege Anthemius in Rome for nine months

until eventually Rome falls, and meanwhile,
while the siege is going on,

Leo has had envoys sent to him from the west saying
all hell is breaking loose, it's civil war, do something.

But there's no time to save Rome from
Ricimer's wrath, and all Anthemius can do is flee.

In a familiar scene, the deposed Anthemius
seeks sanctuary in a church.

Well...we know that the besiegers broke into Rome
early in July of 472 and that Anthemius' followers scattered.

Anthemius disguised himself as a beggar
and was caught probably at the shrine of the martyr Chrysogonus.

But this time, Ricimer hires no assassin to silence his emperor.

On the steps of the Christian altar,
he personally sees to the sacrifice of his latest victim, Anthemius.

He was executed. I assume it was cutting his head off.
That's the normal way it's done.

Chances are they probably stuck his head
on a pike and paraded it around.

Ricimer plays true to form.

Once again with blood and steel,
he carves out his place in Rome,

leaving only corpses in his wake,
bodies as lifeless as the empire itself.

Again without an emperor, Rome succumbs
to anarchy and violence.

Barbarians meet little resistance
as they raid the towns of Italy.

They go out, and they sort of rape,
loot, and plunder,

attack cities and whatever else, and then come back,
and this is what people have to face every year.

So it's...There's no stability.

Ricimer does nothing as the empire self-destructs.

He cares only for himself, as always,
garnering his power from the empire's weakness.

So now there is a peculiar
circumstance here-

we don't seem to need a real emperor,

and it's hard to find a role that's clearly cut out
for the commanding officer of the western armies.

One could really question why
we have any imperial government at all.

This society is slipping out of the structural system
that we had identified with the Roman empire.

Ricimer is a man who has
built his career and power

on the countless dead bodies of his enemies,
both barbarian and Roman.

Now he is alone, master of an empire in name only.

In such turbulent times, even the details
of Ricimer's death are fragmented.

Priscus, the only source, tells us that
he died vomiting copious quantities of blood.

Hemo... and that's it. And so we have no idea whether
it was an ulcer or cancer or what.

With the sources, we have no idea.

When the puppet master dies,
the western empire dies with him.

By now, barbarian leaders,
whether they were goths or something else,

really had the money and the men to
decide the fate of the Roman empire.

And that is exactly what happened
in the years after the death of Ricimer.

Ricimer's struggle to dominate brought
nothing but ruin to the empire he hoped to control.

Yet in his absence, its future grows even more bleak.

Next on "Rome, Rise and fall of an empire,"

After serving in the court of Attila the hun,

a Roman diplomat named Orestes makes his way
to Italy intent on saving the crumbling empire

Only one man stands in his way-
an ambitious barbarian with his own plans for Rome.