The city which had taken the whole world was itself taken
In 410 ce, Rome fell to an army of nomadic Germanic peoples—Visigoths—who pillaged the city over the course of three days. Although Rome had already ceased to be the capital of the Western Roman Empire and the destruction was relatively restrained, the sack sent shock waves across the world. Changes known as the Migration Period, or the Barbarian Invasions, were then taking place, with great movements of peoples across all of Eurasia, from China to Britain.
Barbarian peoples began to invade settled empires such as those of Rome and China from around 300 to 650. They carved out new kingdoms, which in many cases gave rise to the nations of the modern era. Climatic changes in Central Asia drove the nomadic horse tribes of the steppes to seek better pastures, which in turn forced neighboring nomads to invade the so-called civilized empires. China was ravaged by the Xiongnu, Persia by the Hepthalites, and India by the White Huns.
Barbarians at the gates
In Europe, the arrival of the Huns in the lands east of the Rhine and north of the Danube displaced Germanic tribes who had long lived in delicate balance with the Roman Empire. The Visigoths moved into Roman lands, eventually storming Rome in 410, while other tribes including the Vandals, Suevi, Alans, Franks, Burgundians, and Alemanni invaded and settled territory from Gaul to Spain to North Africa. In the 440s the Huns, under Attila, ravaged Eastern Europe before being defeated by a coalition of Romans and Germans. The Western Roman Empire shrank to encompass little more than Italy itself, its puppet emperors controlled by barbarian generals. In 476, the last nominal emperor was deposed by one such general, Odoacer, marking the end of the Roman Empire in the west.
The Western Empire had however been in decline since at least the 3rd century. Its population and economy had diminished, making it increasingly financially dependent on the Eastern Empire; weakening central authority had given more autonomy to the provinces. The military, obliged to recruit from barbarian tribes, was losing its core strength. In reality, the Barbarian Invasions were probably part of a process: a transition, rather than a fall. Roman customs, culture, language, and particularly its religion in the form of Christianity, endured across the provinces, and many of the new ruling elite saw themselves as continuing in the tradition of Rome. The city itself survived sack by Alaric and his Visigoths, and by the Vandals in 455, and flourished under Theodoric the Ostrogoth (489–526).
In their turn, the successor states formed by Germanic tribes over the following centuries eventually found themselves under attack by further waves of invaders such as the Magyars and Vikings.
