Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Vandals were an East Germanic people who originally lived between the Elbe and Vistula rivers in what is now Poland and eastern Germany. Archaeologists associate them with the Przeworsk culture, and Scandinavia is considered their probable homeland before the Migration Period.
The term vandalisme was coined in 1794 by Henri Gregoire, bishop of Blois, to describe the destruction of artwork during the French Revolution, drawing on the Vandals' reputation for their fourteen-day sack of Rome in 455 AD. Renaissance and early-modern writers had characterized the Vandals as prototypical barbarians, though modern historians note they were likely no more destructive than other invaders of the period.
The Vandals sacked Rome in 455 AD under king Genseric. According to the chronicler Prosper of Aquitaine, Pope Leo the Great met Genseric on the 2nd of June 455 and implored him to abstain from murder and fire, and to be content with pillage. The Vandals departed with vast valuables, and empress Licinia Eudoxia and her daughter Eudocia were taken to North Africa.
The Vandal kingdom collapsed in 533-534 AD during the Vandalic War, when Byzantine forces under the general Belisarius defeated king Gelimer at the Battle of Ad Decimum and the Battle of Tricamarum. Gelimer surrendered in 534, and North Africa was reconquered by Emperor Justinian I's Eastern Roman Empire.
Genseric, who reigned from 428 to 477, is regarded by historians as the most able barbarian leader of the Migration Period. He led the Vandals into North Africa in 429, captured Carthage in 439, established the first barbarian kingdom officially recognized as independent in former Roman territory, and concluded a perpetual peace with Constantinople in 476. He died on the 25th of January 477 at roughly 88 years of age.
The Vandals spoke Vandalic, believed to belong to the extinct East Germanic linguistic branch, related to Gothic. All Vandals known to modern historians could also speak Latin, which remained the official administrative language of their kingdom. Poets of Vandal North Africa wrote in the Latin tradition, and their surviving work is collected in the Latin Anthology.