Vandals

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The Vandals were an East Germanic people who, in the early fifth century, crossed the Rhine, moved through Gaul and Spain, and in 429 ferried under their king Geiseric across the strait to North Africa, where they built a kingdom centered on Carthage that lasted just over a hundred years. Their name survives chiefly in a word coined long after they were gone: vandalism, an eighteenth-century French invention for wanton destruction, fixed on a people who were by then little more than a byword. The historical Vandals are harder to see clearly, in part because almost everything written about them came from the Roman provincials they conquered.

What gives them a place in religious history is a quarrel over the nature of Christ. The Vandals were Arian — followers of the teaching, condemned at the Council of Nicaea in 325, that the Son was created by and subordinate to the Father, rather than coeternal and of one substance with him. The Roman population they ruled was overwhelmingly Nicene, or Catholic, holding the opposite. The Vandal kings did not merely tolerate this difference; at intervals they pressed their own confession hard, exiling Nicene bishops, closing churches, and in places compelling conversion. The fullest account of that pressure, Victor of Vita’s history of the persecution, was written by a partisan of the persecuted, and reads accordingly; scholarship treats it as vivid and one-sided at once. How systematic the coercion really was remains debated.

In 455 a Vandal fleet sailed up the Tiber and took Rome, holding the city for two weeks and stripping it without the slaughter that the later word would imply. The kingdom endured until 533–534, when the eastern emperor Justinian sent the general Belisarius to reconquer Africa; the Vandals were defeated in two swift campaigns and, as a distinct people, effectively vanished from the record soon after.

Their interest for the history of religion lies less in any doctrine of their own than in what their rule preserved: a working case of one Christian confession holding political power over another, in the western Mediterranean of late antiquity, at the moment the Arian–Nicene division was hardening into the line that would define Latin orthodoxy. The Vandals left no scripture, no school, and no esoteric current. They left a kingdom that, for a century, made the difference between two readings of the same creed a matter of who held the throne.

→ Related: Gnosis