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 222 A Short History of The World imperfectly from her capture and looting by Alaric half a century earlier. Then the Vandals made themselves masters of Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia and most of the other islands of the western Mediter- ranean. They made, in fact, a sea empire very similar in its extent to the sea empire of Carthage seven hundred odd years before. They Tvere at the climax of their power about 477. They were a mere handful of conquerors holding all this country. In the next century almost all their territory had been reconquered for the empire of Constantinople during a transitory blaze of energy under Justinian I. The story of the Vandals is but one sample of a host of similar adventures. But now there was coming into the European world the least kindred ana most redoubtable of all these devastators, the Mongolian Huns or Tartars, a yellow people active and able, such as the western world had never before encomitered.