Im endlessly fascinated by Roman history and especially Late Antiquity. A major part of Rome’s fall, though not the only force, is of course the barbarians. It’s my understanding that unlike previous eras the tribes of the later Roman Empire managed to unify into a long lasting entities, fielding massive and independent armies and establishing their own kingdoms. The most well known are the Franks, the Goths and the Vandals. These groups were made up of the individual tribes that Rome used to try and keep separate and at odds with each other.
So after the Franks, the Goths, or the Vandals established their respective kingdoms did they still recognize the individual tribes that made up their confederation? Or did they begin to identify simply with the larger confederation they were apart of? Is there any record of old rivals feuding within these super confederations after they established their kingdoms or were those rivalries outdated and irrelevant at that point? Did the new kingdoms recognize the individual tribes in their political systems in any way?
Thank you for your time.
I think that you're coming at this from the wrong angle of inquiry. You're presupposing that at some point distinct entities such as the Goths, Vandals, and Franks existed as clearly demarcated cultural/ethnic identities that were incompatible with each other, ie one could not be a Visigoth and a Frank or a Vandal and a Roman. This is a mistaken point of view and a holdover of the 19th century.
The Goths, Visigothic and Ostrogothic, did not exist as a monolithic institute that had other tribes serving under/with them and existed completely separately from each other. Peter Heather argues in Empire and Barbarians that these sorts of "tribal" identities did not coalesce into their familiar forms until after these groups of people were operating in Roman territory. At that point the distinctions between, for example, a Visigoth and Suebian and an Alan all serving under Alaric would have been rather minimal. Their identity as an Alan or Suebian would have been subsumed into the far more nebulous "Visigothic" even if that particular individual's ancestors were not "Gothic" but had in fact come from Indo-Iranian populations such as the Alans. All of these outside impositions onto the various identities are Roman constructions. That is not to say that the Romans were incorrect to label the Goths as inhabiting land around the Baltic or Black Sea is incorrect, it is rather a simplification of a far more complex web of identities and loyalties that were never set in stone.
These various groups that eventually coalesced together into kingdoms such as the Visigothic and Ostrogothic kingdoms, but these were not predicated on settled ethnic differences between all of these disparate groups. This is entirely consistent with previous Roman practice as well, and that is worth bearing in mind. Stilicho, the de facto ruler of much of the western part of the Empire was half Vandal and still rose to be the most powerful man in the West. The idea of these homogeneous and distinct groups is a hold over of the 19th century and especially 19th century nationalist ideas on the origins of the respective nation states, ie that the Anglo-Saxons showed up and slaughtered all the natives and then made England their home. Later Medieval chronicles often helped to compound these errors. Bede for example attempts to tell us where the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes all variously settled in Britain. As if all of the residents of Jutland would only settle in certain parts of England, the Saxons another, and the Angles a different part. Up to a certain degree this is helpful, and fascinating work has been done drawing parallels between the various locales, such as East Anglia, and similar material culture. The connections between East Anglia and Vendel age Sweden are in particular quite detailed and very interesting.
However you do touch on something very interesting, there did exist separate legal systems at least in the case of Francia for Romans and Franks, the Salic Law infamously invoked in succession issues. Famously Frankish lives were valued more than Roman ones and the penalties for wrongs against a Frankish man were harsher than they were for the same crime against a Roman (and additional stipulations concerned Romans who were still a part of the King's court). However the Salic law does not draw distinctions between the various groups that ended up as "Franks". We know through archaeological evidence that the people who ended up as "Franks" were not drawn exclusively from some part of Germania that was exclusively the province of the Frankish people. Many different groups were moving around and the lines between the various tribes were constantly shifting and being renegotiated and reforming.