Explanation: The Late Roman Emperor Honorius was as incompetent and passive an individual as one could imagine. Supposedly, upon hearing that the city of Rome itself had been fallen to barbarians for the first time in nearly 1000 years, he at first assumed that the messenger meant that his prized bird, also named ‘Rome’, had fallen, saying “But it [the bird] just ate from my hands!”

… he ruled for some 20 years, much longer than many competent and vigorous Emperors.

… sometimes in politics, it’s safer to be a useless idiot who destroys your own country than to be someone competent who threatens the accumulated privileges of the elites.

The Roman Empire itself would fall entirely around ~50 years later.