At Tricamarum in December 533, Belisarius broke the last Vandal field army. Gelimer's brother Tzazon was killed and the kingdom collapsed.
Tricamarum was fought in December 533, some twenty miles from Carthage, and it destroyed what remained of the Vandal kingdom.
Gelimer had spent the autumn rebuilding, and this was a real army rather than the improvised force of September — reinforced by the veteran troops his brother Tzazon had brought back from Sardinia.
It lasted a matter of hours, and was decided by the Roman cavalry alone.
After Ad Decimum, Gelimer withdrew inland and set about assembling everything the kingdom still had.
Tzazon had been suppressing a revolt in Sardinia with the best of the Vandal army, and had been recalled the moment the Romans landed. His return gave Gelimer a serious force again.
Gelimer also attempted to buy the Hunnic contingent out of the Roman army — a real danger, since their loyalty was genuinely uncertain, and Belisarius took considerable trouble to keep them.
The two armies met across a small stream. The Roman cavalry, arriving well ahead of the infantry, attacked without waiting for the rest of the army to come up.
Three assaults went in across the stream. The Vandals held the first two, and in the third Tzazon was killed at the head of his troops.
The Vandal line broke immediately after and fled to their camp, and when the Roman infantry finally arrived the camp was taken with the royal treasure in it. Gelimer had already ridden away.
The victory was cheap in Roman lives and total in effect. The Vandal kingdom had no army left, no treasury and no king in the field.
Gelimer fled to Mount Papua in the Numidian highlands with a body of followers and was besieged there through the winter, surrendering in the spring of 534.
Procopius, who was present, was more struck by the plunder than by the fighting, and his account of the Roman army losing its discipline among the Vandal camp's wealth is one of the sharper passages in the Wars.
It ended the Vandal kingdom. Between the landing in June and the surrender the following spring, a state that had held the richest provinces of the west for a century ceased to exist.
It also confirmed a pattern that ran through Justinian's wars: a small, well-handled professional force could beat a larger one decisively, provided it was commanded by someone of the first rank.
That lesson was drawn too confidently. Italy proved that the same approach against a more determined opponent produced twenty years of ruinous war rather than nine months of triumph.