The Barbarians were the savage and wild peoples who lived outside the confines of established empires such as the Greeks, Romans and Persians. With the decline of the Roman army in the 5th and 6th Centuries, the Barbarians increased their incursions on Roman territory, eventually sacking the city of Rome in 410 AD.
The proliferation of the Barbarian tribes into what had once been the Roman world ushered in the Dark Ages. While savage and resourceful warriors, some of the Barbarian tribes, such as the Huns, didn’t even have a written language. During the Barbarian primacy, the Western World regressed into a period of anarchy and violence. The Franks ruled Gaul; the Ostrogoths ruled Italy and Pannonia; the Visigoths controlled the Iberian Peninsula; the Celts controlled Britain. It would take many centuries before the Western World returned to the levels of civilization known in Roman times.