AD455 - the fall of the Roman west?

[Nathan Ross]

Maioran comes to mind, and several actions by other armies

Yes, I did wonder about Majorian. It's a shame we don't know more about his victories, and the army he used to win them - the remains of the western field army, or largely barbarian foederati? For all his abilities, he does seem to have been largely under the power of Ricimer though, and his victories were brief and soon overturned. His campaigns - and those of Marcellinus and others - were more directed at recovering small amounts of lost territory. We could imagine that he - or Ricimer - with the help of eastern forces perhaps, might have turned the tide at some point and recovered Africa, or even Gaul, but they did not.

Especially after the death of Stilicho, the West can be seen as a diminished Empire. By that definition, 408 would be as good as 455?

Perhaps so. But I do think it was the loss of Africa in 439 that really created the preconditions for the extinction of imperial power in the west. Africa was a vital source of food and manpower, a redoubt of Roman culture, and a fallback position for an embattled Italy if necessary. Once it was gone, the remnants of imperial power in Italy had nowhere to turn but eastward - a relationship that would soon resemble clientship.

Back in 408, the west still had a field army (I've come to suspect that Honorius and co believed that Constantine III was a greater threat than Alaric, and so chose not to risk weakening their army by a direct attack on the Goths, perhaps in fact to try and co-opt Alaric once again and turn him against their other enemies - a foolish strategy, if so, but the thinking behind it is understandable, perhaps...)

But after 439, the armies available to the western emperors seem to have been scattered and rather small in scale; they lacked a real chance of retaking Africa, or even challenging the Goths in Gaul and Spain. The best they could do was to hold their own territories for a while.

Certainly the western empire was in trouble in 408, but I think they still had the potential to recover. The combination of events in 455 made that impossible, perhaps - and the Vandalic sack of the city, much longer and more thorough than Alaric's work, seems to represent a more definitive tipping point than any relatively minor readjustments of residual power in later decades.