Vandal Kingdom

The grain

Drafted from Miles, The Peoples of Europe (2010)formation

The Vandals crossed the Rhine in 406, moved through Gaul into Spain, and in 429 crossed to Africa — the whole group, with the Alans who had joined them, in a crossing the sources put at eighty thousand people and modern accounts treat with caution. Ten years later Geiseric took Carthage.

That is the moment the kingdom begins, because that is when a group moving through other people's provinces becomes a state holding the richest one.

What Carthage was

The annona was something in the order of two hundred thousand tonnes of grain a year, shipped from Egypt and North Africa to feed the city of Rome, in a state-contracted fleet, distributed free to a registered list of citizens.

Egypt had gone east with the division of 395. Africa went here, in 439, along with the shipyards and the fleet.

The western empire lost its food supply and a very large share of its remaining tax revenue in a single afternoon, and never recovered either. Everything in the last thirty-seven years of the western empire happens to a government that cannot feed its own capital or pay its own army.

A raiding economy

The kingdom lived on the land tax of Africa and on raiding, and the second of those was structural rather than incidental — not a windfall but a line in the budget.

Merrills and Miles argue exactly that. Geiseric's fleet raided the Mediterranean annually for decades, and the raiding produced not just movable wealth but tribute agreements, ransom payments, hostages and, in 474, a treaty by which the eastern empire recognised the kingdom and paid for peace. It is a foreign policy conducted by fleet, and the fleet was the state's principal revenue instrument for most of the reign.

The other half of the revenue was the Roman land tax, on the provinces that had not been distributed to Vandal families, collected through the surviving provincial administration in the same way the Goths were collecting it in Italy.

The difference from Italy

Both kingdoms paid their soldiers with land, and the difference in how is the whole reason one lasted ninety-five years and the other sixty.

In Italy the Goths largely took a share of the tax on land, which left the Roman landowning aristocracy in possession and gave it a reason to cooperate. In Africa the Vandals took the land — the sortes Vandalorum, carved out of the estates of the African senatorial class in the richest province, whose owners were dispossessed, exiled or reduced.

That produced a permanently hostile aristocracy, and when the quarrel over the church was added to it, a province with no reason at all to fight for its rulers. What that looked like in practice took ninety-five years to find out, and then took one campaigning season.

The fleet

Drafted from Caesarea, History of the Wars, Books III-IV: The Vandalic War (1916)expansion

The Vandals are the only one of the peoples who came into the western empire who solved the problem the others did not, which was money, and they solved it by taking the richest province in the west and then building a navy.

Procopius, who came to Africa with the army that destroyed them, opens his account with the century before he arrived. A Germanic people crossed into Africa in 429 under Geiseric, took the Roman provinces one at a time, and in 439 took Carthage — the second city of the western empire and the port through which the grain that fed Rome was shipped.

Everything afterwards follows from the harbour.

What a fleet bought

An enemy who has ships and is not on your border is a different kind of problem from one who is.

The Vandals raided Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, the Balearics and the coasts of Italy and Greece at will, and the empires could not reach them. In 455 a Vandal fleet came up the Tiber and took Rome itself, and held the city for a fortnight — methodically, without a massacre, and removing everything portable, including the gilded roof tiles of the temple of Jupiter and the treasures Titus had brought back from Jerusalem.

Then in 468 the eastern and western empires combined for the largest amphibious operation of the century, a reported hundred thousand men and a thousand ships, to finish the Vandal kingdom for good. Geiseric asked for a five-day truce, used it, filled ships with combustible material, and sent them downwind into the anchored Roman fleet at night. The expedition was destroyed. It reportedly cost the eastern treasury the equivalent of several years of revenue and the western empire the last credibility it had.

The Vandals were then left alone for sixty-five years.

The other half of it

What made the fleet possible was that the Vandals had taken a working province rather than a devastated one.

Africa Proconsularis was the granary and it was intact. Its estates, its olive presses, its export trade and its tax registers survived the conquest, because what the conquerors wanted was to own them. Geiseric expropriated the Roman landowners of the best districts and settled his own people on the estates as proprietors — which is a change of ownership rather than a change of economy, and the pottery and the oil kept going out.

That is the whole Vandal position: a small conquering population living on the revenues of a rich province, with a fleet paid for out of it, in a place two empires could not easily reach.

It worked for a hundred years, and then a single expedition of about fifteen thousand men ended it in a season.

Fourteen days

Drafted from Miles, The Peoples of Europe (2010)peak

In 455 a Vandal fleet appeared at the mouth of the Tiber. The western emperor had been murdered a fortnight earlier and his successor was killed by a mob as he tried to leave the city. Pope Leo met Geiseric outside the walls, and the terms agreed were that the city would not be burned and the population not massacred.

The Vandals then spent fourteen days removing everything portable. The gilded bronze roof tiles of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus. The treasures Titus had brought from Jerusalem in 71, which had been in Rome for three hundred and eighty-four years. Statues, plate, and several thousand people including the empress and her two daughters, one of whom was married to Geiseric's son.

The word

A French bishop, Henri Grégoire, coined vandalisme in 1794 to describe revolutionaries destroying churches and works of art, and the word has been doing this kingdom's reputation for two hundred and thirty years.

Merrills and Miles are direct about how unearned it is. Prosper of Aquitaine, the nearest contemporary source, says the city was not burned and there was no slaughter. The sack was systematic, negotiated and acquisitive — a fortnight of organised removal by a state that wanted the contents rather than the destruction, and by the standards of what usually happened to captured cities it is conspicuously restrained. A crusading army sacked Constantinople for three days in 1204 with considerably worse results and no word named after it.

What made the reputation was the confessional quarrel that came a generation later, which gave Catholic writers a reason to describe the regime as barbarous, plus the accident of Grégoire needing a term.

The armada

The kingdom's actual military achievement is thirteen years later and almost nobody has heard of it.

In 468 the eastern and western empires mounted a joint expedition against Carthage: over a thousand ships, an army under Basiliscus, and a cost the sources put at something like a hundred thousand pounds of gold — several years of the eastern empire's revenue. It reached Cape Bon. Geiseric asked for five days to consider terms, used them to prepare fireships, and destroyed the fleet at anchor.

The consequences ran three ways. The western empire, which had staked everything on recovering Africa, was finished within eight years. The eastern empire was bankrupt for a generation, which is a large part of why it spent the rest of the fifth century paying people to go away rather than fighting them. And the Vandal kingdom held the western Mediterranean unchallenged for another sixty-six years.

For its consequences it may be the most important naval battle fought between Actium and Lepanto, and almost nobody has heard of it.

The tongues

Drafted from Caesarea, History of the Wars, Books III-IV: The Vandalic War (1916)peak

Geiseric died in 477, and the son who followed him did the one thing his father had been careful not to do.

Procopius is brief and unambiguous about Huneric. During his reign the Vandals had no war with anyone except the Moors — and he showed himself the most cruel and unjust of all men toward the Christians in Africa. He forced them to change over to the Arian faith, and as many as he found not readily yielding he burned, or destroyed by other forms of death.

And then the detail that fixed the reign in memory:

he also cut off the tongues of many from the very throat, who even up to my time were going about in Byzantium having their speech uninjured, and perceiving not the least effect from this punishment.

Procopius saw them. He was writing about eighty years after the event and the men were old, and he does not treat the story as hearsay: they were walking about the capital, talking. He then adds, in the same breath and without any apparent sense that it undercuts what he has just called a miracle, that two of them saw fit to go in to harlots and were thereafter no longer able to speak.

That sentence is the whole of Procopius in miniature. He reports the wonder because he watched it, and he reports the exception because he heard it, and he does not reconcile them.

What the persecution was for

It was not an eccentricity of one king. It was the logic of the settlement arriving at its conclusion.

The Vandals had taken the land of the African senatorial class rather than a share of the tax on it, and they were Arians in a province whose bishops were the effective leaders of every city and whose congregations were the dispossessed. A regime in that position has two options: leave the church alone and live with a permanent alternative authority, or try to absorb it. Huneric tried to absorb it, at a moment when the kingdom was at the height of its power and had just been left unchallenged by both empires for a decade.

The cost did not fall due for fifty years.

Cyprian

Procopius tells one more story about Huneric's church policy, and he tells it in the wrong place on purpose — not in the century of Vandal history he opens with, but in the middle of the landing of 533, because that is where it pays off.

Cyprian, the third-century bishop and martyr, was the saint the Carthaginians revered above all others. They had built him a notable shrine outside the city on the sea-shore, and held a festival there every year called the Cypriana, at a season so reliably stormy that the sailors named the storm after the feast. In Huneric's reign the Vandals took the shrine from the Catholics by force, drove their priests out of it in great dishonour, and thereafter kept the festival themselves, saying that it now belonged to the Arians.

The Africans were angry and at a loss. But Cyprian, they said, kept sending them a dream: that there was not the least need for the Christians to be concerned about him, for he would in time be his own avenger. The story went round the whole province, and everyone expected some vengeance to come on the Vandals because of that festival, and nobody could imagine how.

Belisarius landed in the summer of 533. The day after the first battle was the day of the Cypriana. The Arian priests, with the Vandal army marching out to meet the invasion and no reason yet to think it would fail, had cleaned the whole sanctuary, hung up the finest of the votive offerings, made the lamps ready, brought the treasures out of the storerooms, and arranged everything exactly as it should be for the feast.

The battle at Decimum went the other way. The Arian priests fled. The Catholics of Carthage walked into a shrine prepared for them by the men who had taken it, lit every lamp, and kept the festival as they had always kept it.

Procopius files it among the omens, which is where a sixth-century reader would want it. It works equally well as a description of what the persecution had bought: a province in which the population's first act on the arrival of a foreign army was to repossess its own church, and an Arian clergy that had prepared the building for them without knowing it.

The pretext

Drafted from Caesarea, History of the Wars, Books III-IV: The Vandalic War (1916)contraction

The Vandal kingdom was destroyed because of a family quarrel that a foreign emperor was invited to have an opinion about.

Hilderic, great-grandson of Geiseric, came to the throne in 523. He was unlike his predecessors in two respects that turned out to matter. His mother was a Roman princess — a daughter of the emperor Valentinian III, taken to Carthage after the sack of Rome — and he was, in Procopius's account, a very particular friend of Justinian's, the two having corresponded and exchanged gifts before Justinian came to the throne.

He was also, Procopius says, unwarlike and not willing even to hear of war, and he left military matters to a kinsman.

That kinsman was Gelimer, and Procopius describes him as the ablest warrior of his time and already, in the popular reckoning, second only to the king. He did not wait. He gathered the Vandals who were dissatisfied, took the throne while Hilderic was still alive, and put him and his relatives in prison.

The letter

Justinian wrote to him. Procopius gives the substance of the exchange, and it is worth noticing what each side thought the argument was.

Justinian's position was that Geiseric had laid down that the throne should always pass to the eldest surviving male of his line; that Gelimer would in due course have had it anyway; and that he should therefore leave the old man alone and be content to wait, holding the power in fact while Hilderic held the title. Take the reality, in effect, and leave the form.

Gelimer's reply was that he had not seized the throne by violence but had been given it by the Vandals, because Hilderic was plotting against the house of Geiseric; that this was an internal matter; and that the emperor of the Romans would do better to mind his own kingdom.

He then had Hilderic put to death.

What the correspondence really was

Neither man was writing to persuade the other.

Justinian had spent five years looking for a way into Africa and could not justify a war of aggression against a kingdom the empire had recognised by treaty. What he needed was a legitimate Vandal king, wrongfully deposed, whose restoration could be the object of the expedition. Gelimer supplied one, and then removed him, which improved the case further.

By the time Belisarius sailed in 533 the war had a rationale that could be stated in a sentence: the emperor was restoring the lawful heir of Geiseric against a usurper. That the lawful heir was dead by then was not an obstacle.

The other weakness

The reason it worked so completely is that the Vandals had spent a century making enemies of the population they lived on.

They were Arians ruling a Nicene province, and unlike the Ostrogoths in Italy they had not left the matter alone. Catholic bishops had been exiled, churches confiscated, and at intervals the persecution had been severe. Hilderic had begun reversing it — which is part of why the Vandal nobility removed him.

So the invasion of 533 arrived in a country whose landowners had been dispossessed, whose church had been persecuted, and whose king had just killed his predecessor. Belisarius landed with about fifteen thousand men, three months' sailing from home, against a kingdom that had beaten a force ten times that size sixty-five years before.

He was in Carthage in under two weeks.

534

Drafted from Miles, The Peoples of Europe (2010)end

Belisarius landed in Africa in the summer of 533 with about sixteen thousand men, which is not a large army by the standards of the expedition the Vandals had destroyed sixty-five years earlier. He beat the Vandal army outside Carthage in September, took the city, beat it again at Tricamarum in December, and Gelimer surrendered in the spring. The kingdom lasted one campaigning season.

The traditional answer and the better one

The traditional answer is decadence: a warrior people softened by ninety-five years of African luxury, described by Procopius in a famous passage about baths, banquets, gardens and dancing girls.

Merrills and Miles do not accept it. The Vandal army of 533 was not obviously worse than the one of 468; what had changed was that the earlier one was defending a fleet at anchor in home waters against an amphibious assault and the later one was fighting a first-rate general on land, having just lost its own fleet and best troops to a revolt in Sardinia that Belisarius's timing exploited.

The structural answer is the settlement itself. A regime that had dispossessed the provincial aristocracy of the land — rather than taking a share of the tax on it, as the Goths did in Italy — and that had spent a century enforcing Arianism against the Catholic hierarchy of a Catholic province, had no reserve of loyalty anywhere outside its own people. Procopius has the African cities opening to Belisarius. They had no reason not to.

The Visigoths reach the same conclusion from the other side: the one post-Roman kingdom that converted to its subjects' church outlasted the ones that did not by a century and a quarter.

The succession law

Geiseric legislated his own: the throne was to pass to the eldest surviving male of the royal house rather than from father to son. That is a written succession rule, which is rare enough anywhere to be worth noting, and rarer still in a kingdom of this kind.

It worked, in the narrow sense that the kingdom had orderly successions for ninety-five years, which is more than either of the other Gothic kingdoms managed. It also meant that the man on the throne in 533 was Geiseric's great-grandson by seniority, who had taken it in a coup two years earlier from a cousin friendly to Constantinople — and that coup was Justinian's stated pretext for the invasion.

A succession law that produces orderly successions for a century and then hands the throne to a usurper at the worst possible moment is a fair note to end on.

And afterwards

Africa was a Byzantine province for a century and a half, and Arab and Berber dynasties held the same ground afterwards. Nobody ever claimed to be continuing the Vandal kingdom, and very little was left to claim.

Vanity of vanities

Drafted from Caesarea, History of the Wars, Books III-IV: The Vandalic War (1916)afterlife

Before the final battle at Tricamarum, Gelimer drew his people up inside a stockade with everything they owned piled in the middle of it, and made a speech. Procopius gives it, and its last clause is the one to keep.

If we win, he told them, we shall either live among good things or, dying gloriously, leave prosperity to our wives and children — while the name of the Vandals will survive and their empire be preserved.

They lost. He fled to a mountain, was besieged there through a winter, and surrendered.

The triumph

He was brought to Constantinople and led in Belisarius's procession with the Vandal treasure — including, Procopius notes elsewhere, the vessels Titus had taken from the temple at Jerusalem, which had been carried to Rome, then to Carthage by Geiseric, and were now going to Constantinople.

Procopius watched Gelimer walking in it. Seeing what condition he was in, he writes, the king neither wept nor cried out, but kept saying over the words of the Hebrew scripture: Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

At the emperor's seat they stripped the purple off him and made him fall prone and do obeisance to Justinian. Belisarius did the same, as a suppliant of the emperor alongside him.

The settlement

Then the extraordinary part, and it is entirely characteristic of how Rome disposed of defeated kings when it was in a good mood.

Justinian and Theodora gave the children of Hilderic, and the surviving descendants of the emperor Valentinian, sufficient sums of money. To Gelimer they gave estates in Galatia — Procopius says lands not to be despised — and permission to live there with his family.

He was not, however, enrolled among the patricians. He was offered it and he would have had to become a Nicene Christian to accept, and he would not give up the faith of Arius.

That is the last recorded act of the last Vandal king: declining a Roman senatorial rank, on an Anatolian estate, rather than change his confession.

What survived

Almost nothing, and the completeness is genuinely unusual.

The Vandals had been in Africa for a hundred and five years. Their fighting men were shipped east and put into the Persian war; their women married into the occupying army; their estates went back to the church and to the empire; their church was dismantled. Within a generation there was no Vandal community in Africa, no Vandal language, no Vandal law, and no successor claiming the name.

Gelimer had told his people that if they fought well the name of the Vandals would survive. It survived exactly once more, in French, thirteen centuries later, as a word for people who smash things — invented by a bishop during the Revolution, on the strength of the fortnight in Rome, about the one western kingdom that had made a policy of taking things away intact.