Attila's sons had at once begun quarreling…

The Rugi, a Germanic tribe that migrated from southwest Norway to Pomerania around CE 100 and from there to the Danube River valley, had been allies of Attila until his death; they have settled in what is now Austria.

The Gepids, after the Battle of Nedao and the consequent disintegration of the Hunnic Empire, become the dominant power in the eastern regions of the Carpathian Basin.

Ardaric unites the Gepids with other Germanic tribes and founds in the Pannonian Basin the Kingdom of the Gepids.

According to Jordanes, the Gepids "by their own might won for themselves the territory of the Huns and ruled as victors over the extent of all Dacia, demanding of the Roman Empire nothing more than peace and an annual gift" after their victory.

Emperor Marcian confirms their status as allies of the empire and grants them an annual subsidy of one hundred pounds of gold.

The late-fifth-century treasures excavated at Apahida and ...

…Someșeni show that the Gepid rulers accumulated great wealth in the second half of the century.

The powerful patricius and magister militum of the West Aëtius is now at the height of his power.

The enmity between Aetius and Petronius Maximus, prefect of Rome in 420 and twice consul, clearly leads to the events that will gradually bring down the Western Roman Empire.

Initially however, the principal beneficiary of this will be Maximus, who, according to the historian John of Antioch, poisoned the mind of the Emperor against Aëtius, resulting in the murder of his rival at the hands of Valentinian III.

John’s account has it that Valentinian and Maximus placed a wager on a game that Maximus ended up losing.

As he did not have the money available, Maximus left his ring as a guarantee of his debt.

Valentinian then used the ring to summon to court Lucina, the chaste and beautiful wife of Maximus, whom Valentinian had long lusted after.

Lucina went to the court, believing she had been summoned by her husband, but instead found herself at dinner with Valentinian.

Although initially resisting his advances, the Emperor managed to wear her down and succeeded in raping her.

Returning home and meeting Maximus, she accused him of betrayal, believing that he had handed her over to the Emperor.

Although Maximus swore revenge, he was equally motivated by ambition to supplant "a detested and despicable rival," so he decided to move against Valentinian.

According to John of Antioch, Maximus was acutely aware that while Aëtius was alive he could not exact vengeance on Valentinian, so Aëtius had to be removed.

He therefore allied himself with a eunuch of Valentinian's, the primicerius sacri cubiculi Heraclius, who had long opposed the general with the hope of exercising more power over the emperor.

Although in 453 Aetius had been able to betroth his son Gaudentius to Valentinian's daughter Placidia, Valentinian feels intimidated by Aetius, who had once supported Joannes against him and who, Valentinian believes, wanted to place his son upon the imperial throne.

Maximus and Heraclius are therefore able to enlist Valentinian in a plot to assassinate Aetius.

The ancient historian Priscus of Panium reports that on September 21, 454, while Aëtius was at court in Ravenna delivering a financial account, Valentinian suddenly leaped from his seat and declared that he would no longer be the victim of Aëtius's drunken depravities.

He held Aëtius responsible for the empire's troubles and accused him of trying to steal the empire from him.

When Aëtius attempted to defend himself from the charges, Valentinian drew his sword and together with Heraclius, struck Aëtius on the head, killing him.

Later, when Valentinian boasted that he had done well in disposing of Aëtius, someone at court responded, "Whether well or not, I do not know.

But know that you have cut off your right hand with your left."

Edward Gibbon credits Sidonius Apollinaris with this famous observation.

Heraclius’s alliance with Petronius ends, however, with the death of Aëtius: when Maximus asks to be conferred the consulship and the patriciate, Heraclius advises Valentinian to refuse.

Heraclius, in fact, has advised the Emperor not to allow anyone to possess the power that Aëtius had wielded.

The Maltese Islands had become a thriving part of the Roman Empire by 117, being promoted to the status of municipium under Hadrian.

When the Roman Empire split into Eastern and Western divisions in the fourth century, Malta had fallen under the control of the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire from 395,which rules from Constantinople.

Although Malta will be under Byzantine rule for four centuries, not much is known from this period.

There is evidence that Germanic tribes, including the Goths and, in 354, the Vandals, briefly took control of the islands before the Empire launched a counterattack and retook Malta.

The Ostrogoths, the eastern branch of the Goths, had settled and established a powerful state in Dacia, but little has been heard of the Ostrogoths for the past eighty years or so since their subjugation by the Huns in around 370.

The Huns had fiercely oppressed them, having uprooted them from their homes in the Ukraine, transferred them to Pannonia, and taken away their grain.

(However, a pocket had remained behind in the Crimea when the bulk of them moved to central Europe, and these Crimean Ostrogoths will preserve their identity through the Middle Ages.)

Their recorded history begins with their independence from the remains of the Hunnic Empire following the death of Attila the Hun in 453.

Allied with the former vassal and rival, the Gepids and the Ostrogoths led by Theodemir had broken the Hunnic power of Attila's sons in the Battle of Nedao in 454.

The Ostrogoths now enter into relations with the Empire, and are settled on lands in Pannonia on the middle Danube River as federates of the Romans.

During the greater part of the latter half of the fifth century, the East Goths will play in southeastern Europe nearly the same part that the West Goths had played in the century before.

They will be seen going to and from, in every conceivable relation of friendship and enmity with the Eastern Roman power, until, just as the West Goths had done before them, they pass from the East to the West.

Skandagupta succeeds Kumaragupta I as ruler of the Gupta Empire in 455.

He may have been the son of a junior wife; it may even be that he was simply a successful general who promoted himself into the ruling Gupta clan.

He certainly had immediately to face some of the greatest challenges in the annals of the empire having to contend with the Pushyamitras and the Hunas (a name by which the "White Huns" are known in India).

He defeats the Pushyamitras, a tribe who had settled in central India but then rebelled.

He is also faced with invading Indo-Hephthalites or Hunas, from the northwest.

Skandagupta had warred against the Hunas during the reign of his father, and is celebrated throughout the empire as a great warrior.

He crushes the Huna invasion in 455, and manages to keep them at bay; however, the expense of the wars drains the empire's resources and contributes to its decline.

...Corsica, ...

The Vandals, with their rule firmly established in what are now northern Tunisia and northeastern Algeria, and their large fleets controlling much of the western Mediterranean, have by this time annexed Sardinia, …

…the Balearic Islands, and …