Vandal (Civ5)/Civilopedia

The Vandals were an East Germanic tribe, their original homeland in Scandinavia. The Vandals crossed the Baltic into Poland at some point in the 2nd Century BC. By 406 AD, the Vandals had reached the Rhine. Attempting to cross it, they met fierce resistance from the Franks, who had settled the Romanized regions of northern Gaul. The Vandals decisively defeated the Frankish army, and then proceeded to plunder their way southward. After sacking Frankish and Roman cities, they reached and crossed the Pyrenees in 409 AD and marched into Iberia.
Under pressure from the Visigoths there, Genseric led the Vandals across the straits into North Africa in 429. There Genseric established a Vandal kingdom in 435 when a treaty with Rome gave them control of the province of Numidia. Genseric broke the treaty in 439 and seized Carthage, along with its extensive shipyards and fleet. Over the next decade, along with unrelenting piracy and raids against the Romans and Byzantines, the Vandals overran Sardinia, Sicily, Corsica and the Balearic Islands.
With the death of Attila, the Roman emperor felt free to end the Vandal incursions and sought to return the lost lands to Rome through his daughter's marriage to Genseric's son. However, through a convoluted series of events and distrust, the effort ended in 455 AD with the landing of a Vandal army in Italy and its capture of Rome.
The sack of Rome proved the highpoint of Vandal power. The death of Genseric in 477, religious tensions, revolts in former Roman provinces, and lack of trade brought a slow decline. In a final costly war, the Byzantine Belisarius crushed the Vandal armies, killed the Vandal general Tzazo and captured most of the Vandal cities. In 534 AD Gelimer, the last Vandal king, surrendered Carthage to the Roman conquerors, ending the Vandal reign forever.