the Huns did not stay long on one side, and under Attila
they fought a major battle against the Romans in 451, just
across the Rhine. This time defending the Romans were
the Goths, under Theodoric.
All of this did not stop Roman elites from trying to
appease barbarian commanders, often not to protect
Roman territories but to gain the upper hand in internal
power struggles. For example, the Vandals, under their
king, Geiseric, ravaged large parts of the Iberian Peninsula
and then conquered the Roman bread baskets in North
Africa from 429 onward. The Roman response to this was
to offer Geiseric the emperor Valentinian III’s child daughter
as a bride. Geiseric was at the time married to the
daughter of one of the leaders of the Goths, but this does
not seem to have stopped him. He annulled his marriage
under the pretext that his wife was trying to murder him and
sent her back to her family after mutilating her by cutting off
both her ears and her nose. Fortunately for the bride-to-be,
because of her young age she was kept in Italy and never
consummated her marriage to Geiseric. Later she would
marry another powerful general, Petronius Maximus, the
mastermind of the murder of Aetius by the emperor
Valentinian III, who would himself shortly be murdered in a
plot hatched by Maximus. Maximus later declared himself
emperor, but his reign would be very short, ended by his
death during the major offensive by the Vandals under
Geiseric against Italy, which saw Rome fall and savagely
plundered.
B Y THE EARLY fifth century, the barbarians were literally at the
gate. Some historians argue that it was a consequence of
the more formidable opponents the Romans faced during
the late Empire. But the success of the Goths, Huns, and
Vandals against Rome was a symptom, not the cause, of
Rome’s decline. During the Republic, Rome had dealt with
much more organized and threatening opponents, such as
the Carthaginians. The decline of Rome had causes very
similar to those of the Maya city-states. Rome’s
increasingly extractive political and economic institutions
generated its demise because they caused infighting and
civil war.