For almost five hundred years, Rome was the largest, wealthiest, and most politically important city in Europe.[32] Its population passed one million people by the end of the 1st century BC.[33] Rome's population started declining in 402 AD when Flavius Honorius, Western Roman Emperor from 395 to 423, moved the government to Ravenna and Rome's population declined to a mere 20,000 during the Early Middle Ages, reducing the sprawling city to groups of inhabited buildings interspersed among large areas of ruins and vegetation.