when did rome divided into east and west
Western Roman Empire Though the Empire had seen periods with more than one Emperor ruling jointly before, the view that it was impossible for a single emperor to govern the entire Empire was established by Emperor Diocletian following the disastrous civil wars and disintegrations of the Crisis of the 3rd century. His ideas were instituted in Roman law by the introduction of the Tetrarchy in AD 285, which divided the position of Augustus (Emperor) into two; one in the East and one in the West, each with an appointed Caesar (junior Emperor and designated successor). Though the tetrarchic system would collapse in a matter of years, the East-West geographical administrative division would endure in one form or another for centuries to come. As such, the Western Roman Empire would exist intermittently in several periods between the 3rd and 5th centuries. Though some emperors, such as Constantine I and Theodosius I, would manage to rise to the position of Augustus in both halves and as such reunify the Empire, it would often divide again upon their deaths. After the death of Theodosius I in AD 395, the Empire was divided between his sons after which it would never again be unified. Eighty-five years later, in 480, following various invasions and the collapse of central control in the West, Zeno of the Eastern Empire recognized the reality of the Western Empire's reduced domain—effective central control had ceased to exist even in the Italian Peninsula after the depositions of Julius Nepos and Romulus Augustulus—and therefore abolished the Western court and proclaimed himself the sole emperor of the Roman Empire.
History of the Roman Empire The Western Roman Empire began to disintegrate in the early 5th century as Germanic migrations and invasions overwhelmed the capacity of the Empire to assimilate the migrants and fight off the invaders. The Romans were successful in fighting off all invaders,[citation needed] most famously Attila the Hun, though the Empire had assimilated so many Germanic peoples of dubious loyalty to Rome that the Empire started to dismember itself. Most chronologies place the end of the Western Roman empire in 476, when Romulus Augustulus was forced to abdicate to the Germanic warlord Odoacer.[13] By placing himself under the rule of the Eastern Emperor, rather than naming himself Emperor as other Germanic chiefs had done, Odoacer ended the Western Empire by ending the line of Western Emperors. The eastern Empire exercised diminishing control over the west over the course of the next century. The empire in the East—known today as the Byzantine Empire, but referred to in its time as the "Roman Empire" or by various other names—ended in 1453 with the death of Constantine XI and the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks.[14]