August 9, 378 AD · Balkans (Thrace) Theater

Two years after the Goths were admitted across the Danube as refugees and then driven to revolt by Roman mistreatment, the Eastern emperor Valens attacked Fritigern's Gothic host outside Adrianople without waiting for reinforcements. Gothic cavalry, returning unexpectedly, smashed into the Roman flank; the legions were surrounded and annihilated on the field. Valens himself was killed, his body never recovered.

April 6, 402 AD · Northern Italy Theater

When Alaric's Visigoths invaded Italy itself, the half-Vandal generalissimo Stilicho — recalling troops from the Rhine and Britain to do it — checked them at Pollentia on Easter Sunday, capturing Alaric's camp and family. A second action at Verona forced Alaric to withdraw from Italy altogether.

December 31, 406 AD · Rhine Frontier (Germania) Theater

On the last day of 406, a vast confederation of Vandals, Alans, and Suebi crossed the Rhine — by tradition over the frozen river near Mainz — sweeping past a frontier denuded of troops. They poured into Gaul, sacking cities for years before moving on into Spain and ultimately North Africa.

August 24, 410 AD · Italy Theater

After years of failed negotiations with the court of Honorius — sheltered safely behind the marshes of Ravenna — Alaric's Visigoths entered Rome and sacked it for three days. The plunder was extensive but the violence relatively restrained by the standards of the age; Alaric, an Arian Christian, ordered the great churches spared. He died soon after, and his people were buried him, legend says, beneath a diverted river.

October 19, 439 AD · North Africa Theater

Having crossed from Spain into Africa, Genseric's Vandals overran the wealthy Roman provinces of the Maghreb and seized Carthage, the West's second city and the breadbasket of Italy. From Carthage the Vandals built a formidable navy and turned the western Mediterranean into a Vandal sea, raiding at will.

June 20, 451 AD · Gaul Theater

As Attila's Huns and their subject peoples ravaged Gaul, the Roman general Aetius assembled a grand coalition of Romans, Visigoths, Franks, and other peoples to stop them. The two enormous hosts met somewhere near Châlons in a daylong battle of appalling slaughter. The Visigothic king Theodoric was killed, but Attila was checked and withdrew to his camp; the next day he retreated from Gaul.

June 455 AD · Italy Theater

Sailing from Carthage, Genseric's Vandals landed unopposed and entered an undefended Rome. Pope Leo I persuaded Genseric to spare the inhabitants from massacre and fire, but for two weeks the Vandals stripped the city of its remaining treasures — including, it was said, the spoils of the Jewish Temple that Titus had carried there nearly four centuries before.

September 4, 476 AD · Italy Theater

The Germanic commander Odoacer, leading the Italian army's barbarian foederati, revolted when their demand for land was refused, killed the strongman Orestes, and deposed his teenage son, the puppet emperor Romulus Augustulus. Rather than name a new Western emperor, Odoacer sent the imperial regalia to Constantinople and ruled Italy as king, nominally under the Eastern emperor.