How the arrival of the Huns set Goths, Vandals and other peoples moving into the Roman Empire, and how in a century of invasions, sacks and new kingdoms, the Western Roman Empire came to an end.
Stop 01 · c. 370
The Huns Arrive: c. 370
Around 370 CE the Huns, nomadic horse-archers from the steppe, reached the Volga and pushed west. Their origins are uncertain: they probably came from Central Asia, but they left no writings of their own, and the Romans learned of them only through the refugees they drove before them. The Huns defeated the Alans, then broke the Gothic kingdoms north of the Black Sea, subduing most of the Greuthungi and then most of the Tervingi. Their chief weapon was a composite bow of wood, bone or antler and sinew, 120 to 150 centimetres long. Terrified Goths fled west, and in 376 tens of thousands of them reached the Roman frontier on the Danube, asking to be let in.
Huns in battle with the Alans. An 1870s engraving after a drawing by Johann Nepomuk Geiger (1805–1880).Peter Johann Nepomuk Geiger · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Around 370 CE the Huns, nomadic horse-archers from the steppe, reached the Volga and pushed west. Their origins are uncertain: they probably came from Central Asia, but they left no writings of their own, and the Romans learned of them only through the refugees they drove before them. The Huns defeated the Alans, then broke the Gothic kingdoms north of the Black Sea, subduing most of the Greuthungi and then most of the Tervingi. Their chief weapon was a composite bow of wood, bone or antler and sinew, 120 to 150 centimetres long. Terrified Goths fled west, and in 376 tens of thousands of them reached the Roman frontier on the Danube, asking to be let in.
In 376 the Roman emperor Valens allowed tens of thousands of Goths, mostly Tervingi under Alavivus and Fritigern, to cross the Danube, hoping to gain farmers and soldiers. Roman officials under Lupicinus mistreated and starved them, selling off food meant for them, and desperate families sold children into slavery. The Goths rebelled. On 9 August 378, near Adrianople (modern Edirne), Valens attacked without waiting for the western emperor Gratian's reinforcements. Gothic cavalry under Alatheus and Saphrax fell on the Roman flank, and the eastern field army was destroyed: modern estimates of Roman dead run from 10,000 to 20,000, about two-thirds of the force. Valens himself was killed. It was Rome's worst defeat since Edessa in 260.
On the last day of 406, according to the chronicler Prosper of Aquitaine, a great mass of Vandals, Alans and Suebi crossed the Rhine, probably near Mainz, into Roman Gaul. Frontier garrisons may have been thinned to fight Alaric in Italy, and the Franks, Roman allies, could not hold them back. The invaders plundered northern Gaul; St Jerome listed Mainz, Worms, Reims and Strasbourg among the cities sacked. In autumn 409 they crossed into Spain. In 429, under King Gaiseric, the Vandals crossed again, into North Africa, perhaps 80,000 people in all. St Augustine died while they besieged his city of Hippo, and in 439 they took Carthage, the greatest city of Roman Africa, and made it their capital.
The Visigoths, led by Alaric, had invaded Italy in 401 and besieged Rome three times, demanding gold, land and recognition from Emperor Honorius, who sheltered behind the marshes of Ravenna. Honorius refused to deal. On 24 August 410 the Goths entered Rome through the Salarian Gate and plundered it for three days, no foreign army had captured Rome for nearly eight centuries. The shock echoed across the Roman world; in Bethlehem, Jerome asked what could be safe if Rome could perish. Alaric died of illness months later. The Visigoths moved on to southern Gaul and Spain, where they built a kingdom with its capital at Toulouse, and later Toledo.
From 434 Attila ruled the Huns, at first with his brother Bleda, who died around 445. Their empire reached from the steppe to the Rhine, and Constantinople bought peace at a rising price: in 443 it paid 6,000 Roman pounds of gold and tripled the yearly tribute to 2,100 pounds. In 451 Attila invaded Gaul and besieged Orléans. On 20 June, at the Catalaunian Plains, a Roman and Visigothic army under the general Aëtius and King Theodoric I fought him to a standstill; Theodoric was killed. In 452 Attila ravaged northern Italy instead, razing Aquileia, until famine and disease struck his army. He died in 453, and his empire fell apart within a few years.
Attila's death in 453 left his sons fighting over the inheritance, and his subject peoples took their chance. In 454 a coalition led by Ardaric, king of the Gepids, with Heruli, Rugii, Sciri and Suebi, fought the Huns at the river Nedao in Pannonia, thought to be a tributary of the Sava. According to the 6th-century historian Jordanes, nearly 30,000 Huns and their allies fell, among them Ellac, Attila's favourite son. The Amal Goths revolted the same year. Hunnic power lingered, but its Germanic subjects were gone and Turkic-speaking newcomers pressed from the east. In 469 another son, Dengizich, was defeated and killed in Thrace, and the Huns seem to have merged into other peoples, such as the Bulgars.
BattlesPannonia: the Nedao, 454 (exact site unknown)
In 455 the Vandal king Gaiseric, claiming that a broken marriage pact freed him from his treaty, sailed from Carthage and sacked Rome again, for two weeks in June; Pope Leo I persuaded him to spare those who did not resist. In 476 the Germanic soldiers serving Rome in Italy demanded land to settle on. Odoacer, one of their commanders, led a revolt, killed the general Orestes and on 4 September deposed Orestes's son, the boy emperor Romulus Augustulus. He did not bother to name a successor, and sent Romulus to retire in Campania. Historians traditionally mark this as the end of the Western Roman Empire. The Eastern empire, ruled from Constantinople, carried on for nearly a thousand years.
Emperor Zeno, at odds with Odoacer, found a use for another Germanic leader: Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, whose people had served the empire as federates in the Balkans. In 488 Zeno sent him to overthrow Odoacer, and that autumn the Ostrogoths moved west with their families. They beat the Gepids at Sirmium in August 489, then Odoacer on the Isonzo and at Verona. Odoacer won at Faenza in 490 but lost on the Adda that August and shut himself up in Ravenna. After a long siege, the two kings agreed in February 493 to rule Italy jointly. At the banquet to seal the deal, Theodoric killed Odoacer with his own sword. He ruled Italy until his death in 526.
BattlesSirmium, August 489 · Verona, 489 · Ravenna, besieged until 493
In Rome's place rose new kingdoms. Theodoric's Ostrogoths held Italy from 493. The Franks, united under Clovis, conquered most of Gaul. Clovis was baptised a Catholic, unlike most Germanic kings, who were Arian Christians, and in 507 he beat the Visigoths at Vouillé, near Poitiers, killing their king Alaric II and taking Aquitaine. His kingdom would become France. Angles, Saxons and Jutes settled in Britain after the Roman legions left; the monk Gildas wrote that Saxons had first been invited in to fight off the Picts and Scots. In 568 the Lombards under Alboin entered an Italy wrecked by two decades of war between the Ostrogoths and Byzantium. It was the last great movement of the migration age.
BattlesVouillé, 507 · Pavia, falls to the Lombards, 572