Traditionally dated to this period in 476, the Germanic warlord Odoacer forced the abdication of the teenage emperor Romulus Augustulus in Ravenna. Odoacer sent the imperial regalia to Constantinople rather than claiming the title of emperor for himself, effectively ending the Western Roman Empire. Historians still debate the precise date, but the event marks the conventional close of antiquity in Western Europe.
Romulus Augustulus was barely a teenager, a puppet installed by his own father, the general Orestes, and he ruled for less than a year before Odoacer's mutinous soldiers demanded land in Italy and, when refused, marched on Ravenna. Odoacer captured the boy-emperor but showed him surprising mercy, pensioning him off to a villa in Campania rather than having him killed.
Rather than crown himself emperor of the West, Odoacer sent the imperial vestments and diadem to Constantinople, acknowledging the Eastern emperor Zeno as sole ruler of the Roman world while governing Italy in practice as its king. The gesture was less humility than pragmatism: the western throne had become a hollow office propped up by barbarian generals for decades.
Contemporaries barely noticed the event as a rupture; the label '476' as the fall of Rome was largely a later invention of historians like Edward Gibbon. Roman institutions, language, and law persisted in Italy for generations, but the political fiction of a unified empire in the West was gone for good.