Under pressure from Huns to their east and seeing the Roman garrisons to their south and west weakening,

 Under pressure from Huns to their east and seeing the Roman garrisons to their south and west weakening,

on December 31, 406 A.D., Vandals and other Germanic barbarian tribes began to cross the Rhine River into the territory of the Roman Empire. It was one of the most momentous events in world history.

Although it has never been definitively determined, it is likely that the Vandals migrated into what is now Germany from Scandinavia centuries earlier, after passing first through modern Poland. Throughout the first four centuries A.D. they had looked enviously across the Rhine at the wealth of the Roman civilization in Gaul (modern France) but the might of the Roman legions kept them at bay.

But by the beginning of the 5th century Rome was in trouble. Goths had penetrated the empire from across the Danube, inflicting a stunning defeat on the Romans at the Battle of Adrianople in 378 A.D. As Roman forces pulled back to defend the Italian peninsula, the defenses along the Rhine were weakened and, in many cases, abandoned. 

In the winter of 406 Germanic tribes—Vandals, Alemanni, Franks, Burgundians, and others— were gathered along the north/eastern banks of the Rhine. When the river froze, they swarmed across and into Gaul, changing the course of world history.

Edward Gibbon, in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, writes: “On the last day of the year, in a season when the waters of the Rhine were most probably frozen, (the barbarians) entered without opposition the defenseless provinces of Gaul….This memorable passage of the Suevi, the Vandals, the Alani, and the Burgundians, who never afterwards retreated, may be considered the fall of the Roman Empire in the countries beyond the Alps; and the barriers, which had so long separated the savage and civilized nations of the earth, were from that fatal moment levelled with the ground.”

The Vandals pillaged and plundered their way across Gaul and into what is now Spain, before eventually crossing into and conquering much of North Africa. Eventually they would sack Rome itself.

Throughout Europe the barbarian conquests ushered in what came to be known (controversially these days) as “the Dark Ages.” With the collapse of the frontier, the Romans were forced to abandon Britannia, which fell into a precipitous cultural and economic decline. In time, all of western Europe came to be dominated by Germanic invaders and their descendants. 

The Vandals and their barbarian allies crossed the Rhine 1,617 years ago today.