Odovacar Essay ⋆ History Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Odovacar was the chief of the Heruli tribe of Germans and possibly a member of the Sciri tribe who lived in the Carpathian Mountains in the early fifth century c.e. and were defeated and integrated into the Ostrogothic tribal confederation. His name is probably made of the Germanic elements od, meaning “wealth,” and wacar, meaning “vigilant.” Odovacar was a commander of the Germanic mercenaries who were in service of Julius Nepos, the Western Roman emperor (474–475 c.e.). Upon the removal of Julius Nepos by his Romano-Germanic master of the army, Orestes, Odovacar’s troops, mainly made of the Heruli, revolted against Orestes and his son, the puppet emperor Romulus Augustulus. With Odovacar as their chief, the revolting mercenaries defeated Orestes at Piacenza and removed Romulus Augustulus from the throne and put an end to the Western Roman Empire (476). Odovacar was then confirmed as a patrician by the Eastern Roman emperor, Zeno, and set up his administrative capital in Ravenna, which was already the capital under Julius Nepos and Romulus Augustulus.

Not content with the title of patrician, Odovacar chose to call himself king of Italy (Rex Italiae) and refused to accept the restoration of Julius Nepos to a real position of power, as requested by Emperor Zeno. In the early years of his reign Odovacar minted coins in the name of Nepos, accepting his superiority in formality. However, Odovacar’s position as the master and king of Italy was established beyond doubt. In 476 he managed to gain control of Sicily via a treaty with the Vandals of North Africa. This was part of Odovacar’s plan to restore and revive the territorial integrity and the military strength of the Roman Empire, despite occasional setbacks and territorial losses to the Germanic tribes to the north of Italy. Odovacar changed very little in the administrative system of Italy and ran the government based on the imperial administration of the now defunct Western Roman Empire. He had the approval of the Roman Senate and was largely accepted as the ruler of Italy by the population.

Following provocations for regaining the power by the deposed emperor, Julius Nepos, who was residing in Dalmatia, Odovacar invaded that territory in 481. Shortly after (484), he attacked the western regions of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire in accordance with a treaty drawn with Illus, commander of the Byzantine forces who was planning to depose Zeno. The quick territorial expansion of Odovacar, together with his open hostilities against Zeno prompted the latter to provoke the Rugi tribe of Austria to attack Odovacar’s kingdom from the north. Despite the fact that Odovacar managed to defeat the Rugi in their own territory, his rapid expansion and foreign campaigns had made him weak enough to fall prey to Theodoric the Great, the king of the Ostrogoths. Theodoric, appointed in 488 by Zeno as the king of Italy, repeatedly defeated Odovacar and conquered all of Italy between 488 and 490. In 493 Ravenna, in which Odovacar was taking refuge, also fell to Theodoric. The conqueror made peace with Odovacar by offering to rule Italy jointly with him. However, pletion contained approximately 2.3 million blocks of stone, ranging from 2.5 to 15 tons each, was built under the orders of Khufu, the second king of the Fourth Dynasty. The other famous pyramids of Giza were built during the Fourth Dynasty reigns of Khafra and Menkaure, with the Great Sphinx built (presumably in his own facial likeness) to guard Khafra’s pyramidal tomb. These massive building projects obviously strained the Egyptian economy and reduced the royal treasury. Probably as a result, although pyramids continued to be built in later Old and Middle Kingdom dynasties, they were never to the magnitude of those built in the Fourth Dynasty.

Contrary to the once popular view that the pyramids were built using slave labor, it is now thought that they were built by paid workers who rotated between the building projects and their own private work, with the bulk of the labor occurring in the inundation season, when agricultural work ceased. This contention has been supported by archaeological finds of workers’ tombs, bakeries, and other elements associated with a workers’ village just south of Khufu’s pyramid complex.

The downfall of the Old Kingdom was likely the result of several decades of poor inundation levels (due to global cooling, which reduced rainfall to the Nile’s sources in Ethiopia and East Africa), resulting in famine. Reliefs from the causeway of Unis (from the Fifth Dynasty), which depict scenes of starving men, and the account of the sage Ipuwer, which discusses the horrible conditions of this time, provide support for this theory. The Old Kingdom ultimately fragmented, with different factions taking control of separate nomes, the once-powerful central state becoming a collection of fiefdoms that would not be unified again until the advent of the Middle Kingdom nearly 200 years later.

References:

Brewer, Douglas J., and Emily Teeter. Egypt and the Egyptians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999;
Hassan, Fekri. “The Fall of the Egyptian Old Kingdom.” Available online. URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk (May 2006);
James, T. G. H. An Introduction to Ancient Egypt. New York: Harper and Row, 1979;
Lichtheim, Miriam. Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book of Readings. Berkeley: University of California, 1973;
Malek, Jaromir. In the Shadow of the Pyramids: Egypt during the Old Kingdom. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986;
Trigger, Bruce G., et al. Ancient Egypt: A Social History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

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