• Vandals: Migrated to Tunisia; had a series of succession disputes; Byzantines intervened and the kingdom collapsed in short order. The surviving Vandal nobility was paraded in chains through Constantinople, then given retirement estates in Anatolia.

• Visigoths: Held southern France and Spain for 300 years as a small, isolated ruling class; had a series of succession disputes; Umayyads intervened and the kingdom collapsed in short order. Some of the Visigothic nobility continued fighting a guerrilla war against the Umayyads, founding the kingdom of Asturias which became the nucleus of the Reconquista and the later Spanish kingdoms.

• Ostrogoths: Held Italy and part of Central Europe; had a series of succession disputes; the Byzantines intervened and gradually ground the Ostrogothic state out of existence over the course of a twenty-year war that left Italy permanently devastated.

• Burgundians: Migrated to southwestern France; formed a short-lived kingdom that was defeated and absorbed by the Franks.

• Suebi: A large and fluid group of tribes, many of whom were simultaneously known by different names (such as Quadi, Juthungi, and Alamanni), and whose main region of settlement became medieval and modern Swabia. One prominent group joined the Vandal invasion of Spain, and formed a kingdom in northwestern Spain and Portugal—which was annexed by the Visigoths after a succession dispute.

• Lombards: An offshoot of the Suebi; invaded Italy just after the Byzantines had defeated the Ostrogoths; formed a kingdom in the north (Lombardy) and several independent duchies in the south. The northern kingdom was conquered and absorbed by the Franks under Charlemagne in the eighth century, but the southern duchies survived for several more centuries by playing the Franks, Byzantines, and Arabs against each other. They were ultimately overrun by the Normans under Robert Guiscard.

• Huns: The Huns in Central Europe largely disappeared after the death of Attila, but some Hunnic groups survived in Eastern Europe and merged with later westward-migrating Turkic peoples like the early Bulgars.

• Franks: The dominant Germanic group in Western Europe, to the point that all western Europeans became known as “Franks” in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Assimilated many other Germanic groups; most medieval and modern European royal houses trace their ancestry to Frankish nobility.

• Angles: Another offshoot of the Suebi; formed the dominant kingdoms of Mercia and Northumbria in Britain until being conquered by Vikings; later liberated by, and assimilated into, the Saxon-descended kingdom of Wessex.

• Jutes: Settled in southwestern Britain (particularly Kent); played little political role and were soon assimilated by the Saxons.

• Saxons: Became the dominant group in England until the Norman Conquest. The Saxons on the continent were conquered by the Franks under Charlemagne, but many Saxon families later rose to prominence (the Ottonian dynasty, for example, gained control of the eastern half of the former Frankish kingdom for over a century).

To summarize: the Angles, Saxons, Franks, and Suebi all have modern-day descendants who still go by variants of those names. The Jutes and Angles were assimilated into the Saxons; the Burgundians and Lombards were assimilated into the Franks; the Vandals, Huns, and Ostrogoths have no identifiable descendants; and the Visigoths have a tenuous link to the later Spanish monarchies.