The period after the taking of Carthage by Geiseric saw the height of the power of the Vandals. In about the 400 AD, the Vandals had started moving westward across Europe. After almost a decade of battles with the Franks, they crossed the Pyrenees. In 429, the Vandal king Geiseric took a fleet across the straits of Gibraltar.

After the capture of Carthage, Gaiseric built a fleet and began plundering Roman ships. Gaiseric also hated the Catholic Church, although he was a Christian himself. The Vandals took great care to destroy any churches they found. It is most likely because of later Christian writers that the word vandal has the meaning it does today.

Ten years later Carthage fell, and the city became the centre of a powerful state that lasted for about a century. From their North African base, the Vandals raided Sicily and exercised control over the Mediterranean. After the murder of Emperor Valentinian III in 455 AD, Gaiseric and his pirates pillaged Rome for two weeks.

The traditionally held view of the Vandal sack of Rome is that it was extremely brutal and wantonly destructive, but in actuality it wasn't the blood bath of popular imagination. Pope Leo I (Leo the Great) met with Gaiseric and begged him not to murder citizens or burn the city. Gaiseric agreed to these terms and the gates of Rome were thrown open to him and his men. Whether it was the pope's pleas that saved the city or not, during the two weeks the Vandals plundered the city they seem to have concentrated on looting rather than destruction. They took anything of value from the city they could carry to their ships waiting at Ostia, including people captured as slaves or hostages, but there was no wholesale slaughter of Roman citizens, rape by Vandal soldiers was forbidden on pain of death, and there is no notable destruction of public buildings by the Vandals.

The decline of the Kingdom of the Vandals began almost immediately after Gaiseric's death, and Carthage was eventually recaptured by the Byzantine general Belisarius in 533 AD. After being captured by the Arabs in 705, Carthage was totally eclipsed by the new town of Tunis.

Well, tourist-y people, this here's the end-o-the-line for me. All I got left to do is convince all my kin that we need to go on ahead inta Rome! If'n ya wanna read the rest of my tale, just roll over my purty pucture and it'll appear. Hope you enjoyed gettin' Vandal-ized! I know I sure did enjoy Vandal-izin' ya!