The Migration Period (376-567)

Tens of thousands of Visigoths fleeing Hunnic pressure were allowed to cross the Danube into Roman territory, where exploitation by Roman officials and food shortages pushed them rapidly toward open revolt. The crossing is conventionally taken as the start of the Migration Period, opening two centuries in which Germanic and other peoples redrew the map of Europe.

Location: Danube frontier, Roman Empire

A Gothic army destroyed a Roman field army under Emperor Valens, who was killed along with much of the Eastern Empire's mobile forces. It was one of Rome's worst military defeats, and contemporaries and modern historians alike mark it as a turning point in the empire's ability to control the peoples within its borders.

Location: Near Adrianople (Edirne), Thrace

Emperor Theodosius I concluded a peace settling the Goths within the empire as allied troops (foederati) under their own leaders, the first time a barbarian people was accommodated inside imperial borders as a semi-autonomous body. The treaty set the template for decades of similar bargains between Rome and migrant groups.

Location: Balkans, Roman Empire

After years of failed negotiations and blockade, Visigoths under Alaric entered and sacked Rome for three days. It was the first capture of the city in eight centuries, and contemporaries such as Augustine, who wrote The City of God in response, treated it as a world-altering event.

Location: Rome

The Vandals crossed from Spain into North Africa in 429 and seized Carthage in 439, capturing the empire's richest tax provinces and grain supply. From Carthage their fleet dominated the western Mediterranean, culminating in their sack of Rome in 455, which made their name a byword for destruction.

Location: Carthage, North Africa

Attila's Hunnic empire, which had extracted tribute from both halves of the Roman world, was checked at the Catalaunian Plains by a coalition of Roman and Visigothic forces under Aetius and Theodoric I. After Attila's death in 453 his confederation collapsed, releasing the subject peoples who had been pushing westward since 376.

Location: Catalaunian Plains, Gaul

The Germanic officer Odoacer deposed the teenage Western emperor Romulus Augustulus and sent the imperial regalia to Constantinople. The conventional date for the fall of the Western Roman Empire, it passed with little contemporary comment, as real power in the West had already shifted to barbarian generals and kingdoms.

Location: Ravenna, Italy

Theodoric the Ostrogoth killed Odoacer, established the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy, and ruled with a stated policy of Roman-Gothic cooperation, preserving Roman administration, law, and the Senate. His reign (493-526) was remembered as a late-antique golden age of relative stability.

Location: Ravenna, Italy

Clovis unified the Frankish tribes, defeated the last Roman authority in Gaul at Soissons (486), and around 496 was baptized as a Catholic Christian, allying the Franks with the Roman Church rather than Arianism. His kingdom became the most durable successor state of the West and the ancestor of France and Germany.

Location: Kingdom of the Franks, Gaul

The Byzantine reconquest of Italy from the Ostrogoths (535-554) ended Gothic rule but wrecked the peninsula, destroying Rome's aqueduct system and grain supply. The war exhausted both combatant powers, and the Italy the Byzantines won was a depopulated, ruined land.

Location: Italy

The Lombards crossed the Alps into a defenseless Italy and seized much of the north, ending Byzantine control of most of the peninsula and completing the Germanic settlement of the former Western Empire. Historians conventionally close the Migration Period with this invasion, after which the map of early medieval Europe was set.

Location: Northern Italy