Possible Options in Identifying the Three Uprooted Horns

1. In the year 493, Odoacer, the Herulian king who in 476 had deposed the last Roman emperor in the west (thus becoming the first German ruler in Italy), was killed by Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, thus bringing Herulian rule to an end. If the Heruli are considered as one of the ten horns, they were the first to fall.

2. In the year 496, the Alemanni were conquered by Clovis, king of the Franks. The Alemanni people had never formed any kind of central government as a "kingdom." Clovis' conquest of them did not anhililate them as a people, it simply placed them under Frankish rule.

3. In 508, Clovis brought to a successful conclusion a major campaign against the Visigoths, driving them out of Gaul into Spain. The Visigoths were not destroyed at that time, but they were pushed out of the way. Their kingdom ultimately fell to the Moors in the year 711.

4. In 534, the kingdom of the Vandals, which had by then outlived the Western imperial line by more than half a century, was completely overthrown by Belisarius, a general under the Eastern emperor Justinian.

5. In the same year (but some sources say 532), the Burgundians were conquered by the Franks. Like the Alemanni, they were not anhililated as a people; but from that point on they were subject to the political authority of the Franco-German kingdom which for the next few centuries was sometimes united and sometimes divided.

6. In 538, the Ostrogoths, following an extended conflict with the forces of Belisarius, were driven from Rome, where they had been in power since 493. Fifteen years later, they were extinguished as a people.