Oh, and I almost forgot - I’m going to bed, really, and won’t comment until the morning - yeah, right - the fact that the Vandals had swept through Spain and captured North Africa, which was the principal granary of Rome, really put an end to the whole thing. Until Belisarius came back through (from Constantinople) half a century later Rome only ate by permission of the barbarians. The Ostrogoths from the north and the Vandals in the south - that was pretty much all she wrote.
The truth is, the Roman Empire did not fall in a day in 476 A.D., it withered away until nothing was left but a shriveled denuded trunk of its’ former self.
Then the Goths took over, then the Byzantines sought to recapture the Italian peninsula in the 6th century.
The Goth & Byzantine wars devastated Italy.
That was the onset of the Dark Ages.
Good night!