Ricimer’s Kingmaker Rule in the West

After Africa’s loss, the West’s budget and armies thinned. Into the vacuum stepped Ricimer, a magister militum with Suevic and Gothic ancestry and Italian command. He did not seek the purple. He controlled those who protected it. Between 456 and 472 he installed emperors, then removed them, all from within the marsh‑ringed capital of Ravenna and under the shadow of dwindling resources [15][16].

Ricimer’s method was simple. Hold the loyalty of key regiments; dole out what pay remained; cultivate senators who needed protection more than policy. Emperors—Avitus, Majorian, Libius Severus, Anthemius, Olybrius—came and went. Ricimer calibrated their tenures against his needs, their deaths or depositions against his calculations. Rome’s formal structure, drawn in the Notitia Dignitatum with neat lines and painted shields, remained; its energy coursed through Ricimer’s headquarters [8][15].

The streets of Ravenna and Rome felt the change. Processions still moved past the bronze‑green doors of the Pantheon; edicts still bore imperial names. But decisions were made in low‑ceilinged rooms with maps and muster rolls. The soundscape had shifted from senatorial oratory to the clink of buckles and the muffled speech of guards outside a general’s door. Purple robes had become uniforms of ceremony; the color of power was iron.

Ricimer did fight. He repelled threats, balanced Visigothic ambitions in Gaul, and managed a crumbling frontier. But his power grew in the space created by fiscal failure. Without Africa’s revenues, no emperor could pay armies reliably over time; without paid armies, no emperor could refuse the demands of a man who could. Ricimer’s dominance was thus both cause and symptom of the West’s decoupled authority [15][16].

The Senate adapted. Great houses in Rome and Milan learned to petition the general rather than the emperor, to secure exemptions and protection by acknowledging where coercion actually resided. In Gaul and Hispania, local bishops and nobles looked increasingly to regional powers—the Visigothic court in Toulouse, Burgundian princes near Lugdunum—for stability the imperial court could no longer provide.

By 472, Ricimer’s own death briefly destabilized the system he had built. But the pattern held. The key variable in Western politics was no longer who wore the diadem in Rome; it was who commanded the men along the Po and the Alps.