The Vandal king Genseric had become extremely powerful and influential by A.D. 455, and his son, Huneric, was set to marry a Roman princess named Eudocia. However, North Africa was a key source of grain, and the Romans tried to take it back on several occasions. "The Hun-Driven Barbarian Invaders of the Roman Empire." Carinus, left behind in the West, was later defeated and killed by Diocletian, who was proclaimed emperor in November 284 by the army of the East. Aetius was murdered by the emperor Valentinian III in September 454, and this event marked the sunset of Roman political power. Frank, member of a Germanic-speaking people who invaded the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century. However, Genseric's successors faced economic problems, quarrels over succession (Vandal rules stipulated that the eldest male in the family should be king) and conflicts with theByzantine Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire that was based at Constantinople. has been suggested as a cause for the migrations, forcing tribes westward, creating a domino effect that led to Germanic tribes moving into the Western Roman Empire. The invasions and the civil wars worked in combination to disrupt and weaken the empire over a span of half a century. The reentrant triangle of land between the upper Danube and upper Rhine had to be permanently abandoned to the barbarians around it in about 260. Counting several sons and brothers, more than 40 emperors thus established themselves for a reign of some sort, long or (more often) short. The Germans and the Gauls were driven back several times by the confederated Frankish tribes of the North Sea coast and by the Alemanni from the middle and upper Rhine. What replaced the western Roman Empire by 500? The discussion also revolves around the relationship between these migrations and the collapse of the Western Roman Empire: namely, did the empire collapse as a result of these barbarian invasions, or did the slow decline of the empire which had been cemented by the Crisis of the Third Century initiate a period of (often violent) migration? To cheer the inhabitants of Rome, who had succumbed to panic, he began construction of the famous rampart known as Aurelians Wall. 11 Facts About The Great Wall of China You Dont Know, The Barbarians Who Saved & Destroyed the Late Roman Empire, The Roman Senate: An In-Depth Understanding.