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.

The migration arc

The Vandals enter the Latin record as one people among the many that the Roman Empire had learned to fear along its northern frontier, and they move at first the way such peoples moved: under pressure from behind, into a weakness ahead. On the last night of 406 a coalition of Vandals, Alans, and Sueves forded the frozen Rhine and poured into the Gallic provinces, which had been stripped of troops for the civil wars of the western court. For three years they crossed Gaul; around 409 they passed the Pyrenees into the Iberian peninsula and divided its provinces among themselves. There they might have stayed, a federate people settled on Roman land like a dozen others, had the Visigoths not been turned loose on them by the same imperial government that could no longer fight its own wars.

What changed the Vandals from a settled enemy into a maritime power was the decision of Geiseric — king from 428, and the architect of everything that followed — to abandon Spain altogether. In 429 he ferried the whole people across the narrow strait at the western mouth of the Mediterranean: warriors, families, the old, by the most quoted figure some eighty thousand souls, though the number is a chronicler’s round estimate and not a census. Africa was the richest and best-defended of the western provinces, the granary that fed the city of Rome, and the Vandals took it in stages. They moved east along the coast, besieged the great Roman city where Augustine had been bishop, and in 439 seized Carthage itself, the second city of the Latin West. Carthage became the royal seat, its harbor the base of a fleet, and the kingdom around it the only barbarian successor state to make the sea, rather than a stretch of land, the instrument of its power.

Rome treated with them because it could not beat them. A first agreement in 435 gave the Vandals federate standing; a second, in 442, conceded what the first had only postponed — the western emperor Valentinian III recognized the independence of a kingdom on what had been imperial soil, and ceded its richest districts outright. From Carthage the fleet ranged across the western Mediterranean, taking Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and the Balearics, holding the sea-lanes that Rome had counted on for grain. The Vandal kingdom was not a horde encamped on ruins. It was a functioning late-Roman state with a Germanic ruling caste, collecting taxes through the existing bureaucracy, minting coin, and maintaining the villa economy of the African provinces largely intact — a fact that sits awkwardly beside the destruction their name was later made to carry.

A quarrel over the nature of Christ

What gives the Vandals a place in religious history is not the migration but the creed they carried into Africa. They 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, a being whom the Father had brought into existence rather than one coeternal and of one substance with him. The doctrine itself, its Alexandrian origin and its long afterlife along the Germanic frontier, belongs to Arius, the presbyter from whose name the position took its label; the Nicene answer that the Vandals’ subjects held, and that became Latin orthodoxy, runs through Athanasius of Alexandria and, in the African church the Vandals inherited, through Augustine of Hippo, who had died as his city was under Vandal siege. The Vandals did not invent their Arianism. They received it, as most of the Germanic peoples received their Christianity, through the fourth-century mission to the Goths, and they kept it long after the empire that had once entertained it had gone over wholesale to Nicaea. By the fifth century the line between the two confessions had hardened into the boundary of orthodoxy itself, and the Vandals found themselves an Arian ruling caste set over a population that was, almost to a man, on the other side of it.

The kings did not merely tolerate that difference. At intervals they pressed their own confession hard. They claimed the great basilicas of Carthage for Arian worship, exiled or deposed Nicene bishops, left sees vacant by forbidding new consecrations, and in places leaned on the laity to convert. The instrument was less the pyre than the administrative screw: confiscation, banishment, the withholding of clergy, the slow strangulation of a church by denying it leaders. Geiseric set the pattern; his son Huneric, who reigned from 477, brought it to its sharpest point. In February 484 Huneric summoned the Nicene bishops of his realm to a public conference at Carthage with their Arian counterparts, staged as a debate and decided in advance, and followed it with an edict that turned the empire’s own anti-heretical laws back against the orthodox majority — the same statutes Catholic emperors had once written to suppress dissent, now recycled to suppress Catholics. Bishops went into exile by the hundreds.

How systematic the coercion really was, and how unbroken, is the harder question, and it turns almost entirely on a single book. The fullest account of the pressure is Victor of Vita’s History of the Persecution of the African Province, written about 484 by a churchman of the persecuted side, an eyewitness to Huneric’s reign and a partisan of its victims. It is a work of martyrdom literature as much as of history — vivid, particular, built around scenes of confessors maimed and exiles dying of thirst in the desert — and modern scholarship reads it as vivid and one-sided at once. The most influential recent reassessment argues that Victor did not so much record an existing persecution as compose one: that he gave a scattered and intermittent set of royal pressures the shape of a single, coherent, sustained campaign, and that the persecution paradigm later historians inherited is in large part his literary achievement rather than a neutral report of events. The pressure was real; the kings did exile bishops and seize churches. What Victor supplied, beyond the facts, was the frame that made them a war of faith.

The fleet that held Rome

The episode that fixed the Vandal name in memory came in 455. The western court had collapsed into murder and usurpation, and Geiseric, who had bound his house to the imperial family by marriage and now saw the bargain torn up, sailed a fleet up the Tiber to the walls of Rome. The city had no army to defend it. What met the Vandals at the gate was not a general but a bishop — Leo, the Roman pope, who had turned back Attila two years before and now negotiated again, securing a promise that the people would not be massacred and the city not burned. On those terms Rome was opened. The Vandals held it for two weeks, from the second of June to the sixteenth, and stripped it methodically: the gilded roof-tiles of temples, the imperial treasury, the spoils that an earlier emperor had carried home from the sack of Jerusalem, and a long train of captives, including the widowed empress and her daughters. They did not raze the city. They emptied it. The distinction was lost on later memory, which heard in Vandal the sound of mindless ruin and read the sack backward into the word — but the sack of 455 was an organized removal of wealth by a state that wanted the treasure, not the rubble.

The reconquest

The kingdom outlasted Geiseric, who died in 477 after nearly half a century on the throne, and passed through four more kings: Huneric, Gunthamund, Thrasamund, and Hilderic, the last of whom relaxed the pressure on the Nicene church and was deposed for it by his cousin Gelimer in 530. That coup gave the eastern emperor Justinian I the pretext he wanted. From Constantinople — the surviving Roman empire, the Byzantine Empire of later usage — Justinian launched a war to recover the lost western provinces, and sent his general Belisarius across the sea with an expedition far smaller than the risk seemed to warrant. It was enough. The Vandals were broken in two battles within a single season: at Ad Decimum, ten miles south of Carthage, in September 533, where Gelimer’s plan to trap the imperial army came apart in its own complexity; and at Tricamarum that December, where the Vandal host was scattered and the king took flight. Gelimer surrendered the next year, was carried to Constantinople, and walked in Belisarius’s triumph — the last Vandal king led through the streets of the city his people had once thought to rival. The Vandals as a distinct people did not survive the conquest. Their fighting men were drafted into the eastern army and posted to the Persian frontier; the rest were absorbed into the African population they had ruled. Within a few years there was no Vandal nation left to speak of, and Africa was a Roman province again.

Scholarship and sources

Almost everything that can be said about the Vandals is filtered through hostile or interested witnesses, and the modern study of the kingdom has largely been a labor of reading those witnesses against the grain. The indispensable contemporary source for the religious history is Victor of Vita’s Historia persecutionis Africanae provinciae, available in John Moorhead’s annotated English translation, Victor of Vita: History of the Vandal Persecution (Liverpool University Press, Translated Texts for Historians 10, 1992), which prints the text with the documents Victor embedded in it, including Huneric’s edict of 484. The narrative of the conquest and the kingdom’s fall comes chiefly from the eastern historian Procopius of Caesarea, who accompanied Belisarius and devoted the first books of his History of the Wars to the African campaign; his account is the foundation of every modern reconstruction of the battles of Ad Decimum and Tricamarum.

The standard modern synthesis in English is Andrew Merrills and Richard Miles, The Vandals (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), the first full-length scholarly history of the people in the language, which gathers the textual, numismatic, and archaeological evidence and presses hardest on the gap between the Vandals of the sources and the Vandals of the word. Its companion piece on the afterlife of the name is Merrills’s article “The Origins of ‘Vandalism’” (International Journal of the Classical Tradition 16.2, 2009, 155–75), which traces the coinage to the French Revolution rather than to antiquity. The word was minted in 1794 by Henri Grégoire, the constitutional bishop of Blois and a member of the National Convention, who in a report to the Convention on the destruction of monuments and books called the wreckers of revolutionary France vandales and their work vandalisme. The term was a polemic of its own moment, reaching back across thirteen centuries for an insult; the people it borrowed had been gone since the sixth, and the sack of 455, careful and bargained-for, bore little resemblance to the mindlessness the word came to mean. The scholarly turn against Victor’s persecution narrative belongs to the same revisionist current, which reads the North African evidence as the record of a confessional state managing a hostile majority, not the chronicle of an exterminating fury.

What the kingdom held open

The interest of the Vandals 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 · Arius · Christianity · Roman Empire · Byzantine Empire · Justinian I · Augustine Of Hippo · Athanasius · Gaul