Mindless Barbarians?: The Real History of the Vandals

Mindless Barbarians The Real History of the Vandals Vandalism In the early summer of the year 455 CE, a cataclysmic event struck the Western Roman Empire. Already on its knees after two decades of staving off attacks by King Attila and his Hun armies in Central Europe, the Romans were shocked when a fleet of vandals landed at Ostia, the great port of Rome, and then proceeded to lay siege to the main city. These vandals were a Germanic people who had rampaged their way through Western Europe half a century earlier before eventually crossing to North Africa and carving out their own kingdom there in the 420s CE. Rome fell quickly to them in 455 CE, and two weeks of plundering of the city followed through to mid-June. Then the vandals went home, leaving behind their name as a byword for mindless destruction, vandalism. The development of the word is actually quite recent. While the Germanic tribes that conquered the Western Roman Empire had long been described as paragons of savagery and barbaric behavior, typically commentators had simply referred to the Goths and the Vandals, the two groups who sacked Rome in 410 CE and 455 CE, as groups. Their names were used as nouns. What changed was when a Frenchman and cleric by the name of Henri Baptiste Gregoire of Blois, writing in 1794 at the height of the French Revolution, adapted the word vandals and changed it into a verb which he used to describe people engaging in acts of seemingly mindless violence, vandalisme, the English vandalism. Yet despite Gregoire's statements, the term is actually something of a misattribution. The vandals plundered the city of Rome of its valuables for two full weeks after capturing it in 455 CE. There's no denying this. However, the available evidence indicates that they were markedly respectful of the city at the same time. They didn't engage in the mass murder of its people or other atrocities, and they were careful not to destroy any of the city, showing special regard to the great architecture of the Instead, they methodically went around the city robbing everything of value, piled it up in their ships, and headed home to Africa. For sure, this was theft on a huge scale, but it wasn't mindless vandalism. So this begs the question, if the story of the vandals engaging in mindless destruction isn't exactly true, then what else don't we know about the vandals? Who really were these people, and did they accomplish anything of benefit to the world of the Western Mediterranean? The Origins of the Vandals The story of the Vandals is a very long one, though they are usually only ever discussed in light of their role in the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century CE. Their origins can ultimately be traced back to Northern Europe in the 1st century CE. At that time, we find Roman writers like Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, and the Roman historian Tacitus in his Germania, referring to the Vandilii as being a Germanic people living around the southern shores of the Baltic Sea. It has consequently been speculated that they are related to the Wends, or Wendilii, who were viewed as still being a distinct group in what is now Northern Germany and Southern Denmark as late as the 11th century CE. Ultimately, these groups may have emerged from Norway as early as the 2nd century BCE. Whatever their precise origins, it is clear that two groups of Vandals, the Hasting and Seling, began migrating southwards in the 2nd century CE, a time when a wide range of Germanic and Asiatic tribes were moving closer to Rome's borders, realizing that there were rich lands to be plundered if they could break through the stoutly defended border defenses along the River Rhine and the River Danube. By the 4th century CE, the Vandals were one of several groups that were ensconced in Central Europe, around what are now Slovakia, Czechia, and Poland, a region which was in close proximity to the weakest point in Rome's northern border, the 200-kilometer stretch between the River Rhine and River Danube in Southern Germany, and further eastwards, where the Romans could not use either river as a natural defensive point. It was from here that the Vandals would commence a highly usual migration and series of conquests early in the 5th century CE. Sources for the Vandals. One thing which is unusual for the Vandals is how many sources we have for their actions and rule in North Africa. Often, when it comes to ancient history, we have to rely on fragmentary evidence or just one or two key sources for our information. That isn't the case with the Vandals. There are a whole slew of contemporary or near-contemporary historians and writers who wrote about them. One of the foremost for the earlier period and their conquest of North Africa was Saint Augustine of Hippo. Augustine was one of the great church fathers, the early church theologians whose writings, such as his Confessions and the City of God, shaped the nature of Christianity as a religion for centuries to come. A convert to Christianity who hailed from Hipporegius, a city in what is now Algeria, he became Bishop of Hippo in the late 390s CE and spent the remainder of his life as one of the leading church figures in North Africa. He lived down to 430 CE and his writings contain first-hand accounts of the Vandals' invasion of North Africa and even the siege of his home city shortly before he died. Another near-contemporary writer, the great Greek historian Procopius, writing in his History of the Wars around 550 CE, provided some of the most detailed accounts of the Vandals and their conquests. A more contemporary writer was Hydatius, a churchman from what is now Portugal, who was an eyewitness to the Vandal incursion into Hispania and North Africa and wrote about them in a chronicle he compiled from the 420s CE onwards. There were numerous other chronicles and histories written in the 5th and 6th centuries CE, either anonymously or by figures like Priscus, a Greek diplomat. Conquests. From all of these sources we have a very clear picture of the series of conquests that the Vandals engaged in during the first half of the 5th century CE. Around 400 CE, the Vandals were still living in the lands on the northern side of the river Danube around modern-day Slovakia and Czechia. They then began a remarkable migration. Joining with bands of two other Germanic groups, the Alans and the Suebi, they raided into what is now southern Germany and Austria. By 405 CE, they were advancing over the river Rhine and then penetrated into Roman Gaul, what is now France, one of the wealthiest parts of the Roman Empire. They managed to cross the Rhine while it was frozen in the winter of 406 CE and then spent the next three years moving through Gaul to the Pyrenees. In 411 CE, the Romans, who were badly shocked after the city of Rome itself had been sacked by Alaric the Goth, the leader of a separate band of Germanic warriors in 410 CE, agreed to allow the Vandals, Alans, and Suebi to settle in Hispania as federati, the name given to foreign warriors who fought for Rome and were given lands in return. Over the next 15 years or so, the Vandals, Suebi, Alans, and Visigoths became mired in a war amongst themselves for control of Hispania. Eventually, the Vandals, under their new king, a young warrior called Gaiseric, who became their leader in 427 CE, abandoned Hispania altogether and crossed the Mediterranean to North Africa in 429 CE. It is hard to understate how significant this was. While some of the Germanic tribes that were conquering the Roman Empire during the 5th century were naval powers, these were groups like the Saxons and Jutes who hailed from Denmark and had a long tradition of naval warfare. The Vandals seemed to have been the first Germanic group who had no such history of amphibious warfare who acquired a fleet and became a naval power in their own right. Having crossed to North Africa, they engaged in a ten-year-long campaign which brought Mauritania, Numidia, and finally Carthage under their control with the conquest of the city of Carthage in 439 CE. Gaiseric, building on the work of his forebears over several decades, had managed to carve out the first fully independent Germanic kingdom completely free of Roman interference. Moreover, Carthage was the second largest city in the western Mediterranean, second only to Rome itself. The Sack of Rome Having conquered Carthage, Gaiseric and the Vandals settled down and began to rule North Africa. Procopius suggests that some 80,000 Vandals had crossed the Mediterranean to North Africa back in 429 CE. While this was probably an exaggeration, there were nevertheless tens of thousands of Vandals now living between Mauritania and Carthage who constituted a significant ruling class. In order to solidify their position and bring peace, Gaiseric soon established a peace treaty with Valentinian III, the Emperor of the Western Roman Empire, in 442 CE. One of the terms of this was that Valentinian's daughter, Eudosia, would marry Gaiseric's son, Huneric, forging an unlikely alliance between the Vandals and the Romans. The marriage, though, could not be fully realized for many years to come, as Eudosia was just three of age at the time. By 455 CE, the time for them to marry was nearing. It was at this juncture that a conspiracy, most likely hatched by one Petronius Maximus at Rome, was entered into whereby Valentinian's Germanic bodyguards assassinated him. When news of this reached North Africa, Gaiseric sailed immediately with his armies towards Italy. The sack of Rome ensued. Thus, the Vandal attack on the Eternal City, far from being an act of mindless vandalism, was provoked. It would have been viewed at the time as an action by Gaiseric in response to the murder of his ally. Incidentally, Petronius Maximus, who had claimed the imperial title after having Valentinian murdered, was stoned to death by a Roman mob while passing through the streets of the city after news of the imminent Vandal landing at the port of Ostia spread. Once Gaiseric had seized the city and plundered it, he and his men left, leaving the Romans to engage in another two decades of petty internal conflict before the Western Roman Empire collapsed altogether. Gaiseric and Attila There are many peculiar aspects to the history of the Vandals and how they are remembered. One of the biggest ones is surely the status of the Vandal king who sacked Rome in 455 CE. Gaiseric is hardly a household name today. He is, for instance, far less well known than his contemporary, Attila the Hun. Attila became ruler of the Hun Confederacy or Hunnic Empire in 434 CE, just a few years after Gaiseric had established himself as ruler of North Africa. The Hun leader ruled over a vast confederacy of Germanic and Asiatic lands, which controlled territory stretching from modern-day Hungary and Poland in the west all the way eastwards to the lands on northern side of the Black Sea. He engaged in wars against both the Western and Eastern Roman Empires and is usually identified as a key figure in the final decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire. But Attila was not as successful as Gaiseric. He died under suspicious circumstances in 453 CE, possibly after being poisoned, although there is no way to verify this. Within a year or two of his death, the confederacy he had brought together collapsed and his empire was divided up between competing warlords. Gaiseric, by way of contrast, continued to rule over the Vandal Kingdom of North Africa and expanded it. After sacking Rome in 455 CE, he conquered the islands of Sardinia and Corsica and added them to his Mediterranean Empire. Then, when the Romans had recovered from the threat posed by the Huns on their northern border after Attila's death and began making efforts to reclaim some of their lost lands from the Vandals, Gaiseric fended them off. For instance, when Emperor Majorian, an effective Roman ruler during this period, planned to launch a naval expedition to North Africa in 460 CE, Gaiseric struck first at the Roman fleet in the Mediterranean and prevented him from doing so. Then, in 468 CE, the Western and Eastern Roman Empires managed to coordinate their efforts to launch a joint amphibious invasion of North Africa to try and reclaim the whole region from the Vandals. Gaiseric launched his own fleet in response, engaging an armada reportedly of over a thousand Roman ships carrying more than 50,000 soldiers near what is now Cape Bon off the coast of Tunisia. By launching fire ships, which were effectively ships turned into missiles, by lighting them on fire and steering them at speed into the midst of the enemy armada, the Vandals created disarray in the Roman lines. Many ships were destroyed, thousands of men perished, and ultimately the campaign was abandoned. Vandal victory at the Battle of Cape Bon is viewed as a crucial event in the final collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE, as the Romans wasted their last available resources trying to reclaim North Africa, exposing them to further invasion by groups like the Ostrogoths in Italy itself. Gaiseric would reign for another nine years, agreeing peace terms with the Eastern Roman Empire towards the end of his rule, whereby the Emperor Zeno in Constantinople acknowledged the independence of the Vandal Kingdom. Gaiseric may be unknown today, but his reign of nearly half a century was much more successful than Attila's, and he handed over a powerful and stable kingdom to his son and heir, Huneric, when he died in 477 CE, unlike Attila, whose empire collapsed within a few years of his death. The Culture of the Vandals Gaiseric's consolidation of control over much of the Western Mediterranean and the ultimate defeat of the Western Roman Empire paved the way for several decades of relative peace in North Africa, during which the Vandal Dominions became one of the most culturally vital former parts of the Firstly, they furthered the Christianization of North Africa, as the Vandals had broadly adopted Christianity before they crossed to North Africa in 429 CE. They followed Arianism, a branch of Christianity which was based on the teachings of a 3rd century CE theologian named Arius, who preached that the Trinity of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit were not one being that was manifested as three different entities. Instead, Arianism held that God had primacy and that he had created Jesus and the Holy Spirit. This non-Trinitarian belief system was condemned as heresy by the church authorities in the 4th century CE, but that did not stop it from proliferating, particularly amongst newly converted Germanic groups. In spreading it further around the Western Mediterranean, the Vandals had a major impact on the religious landscape here, the one which was ultimately reversed by the conquest of the Maghreb by the Arabs and the Islamicization of the region in the 7th century CE. The Vandal Kingdom was home in the late 5th and early 6th centuries CE to some of the leading scholars of antiquity. One such was the poet Luxorius. An author of epigrams and other verses, he consciously imitated the earlier poet and satirist Martial and is considered to have been one of the finest poets of late antiquity. He was joined by several other anonymous poets from North Africa at the time whose verses found their way into the Latin anthology, a large compendium of poetry written in the Mediterranean world between the 1st and 6th centuries CE, several volumes of which survived through the Middle Ages. These highlight elements of life in North Africa under the Vandals during this time and point towards a conquering power that after consolidating their control was anxious to rejuvenate elements of Roman life here. One verse, for instance, describes the Vandals as restoring the Roman public baths that had fallen into disrepair. It was a strange journey the Vandals had taken, moving from Norway centuries earlier to find themselves overseeing the restoration of Roman baths in the heat of North Africa many, many years later. Finally, some of the foremost rhetoricians and grammarians of the era flourished under Vandal rule. One example is Fabius Plantiades Fulgentius, an individual who worked as a teacher of some sort here and composed numerous works on things like language construction and mythography. Byzantine Conquest The Vandal kingdom lasted for approximately a century. Its end came about owing to an unusual rejuvenation of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire based out of Constantinople. This side of the Roman Empire had survived the chaos of the 5th century CE and would exist for nearly another thousand years after the end of the Western Roman Empire. In 527 CE, Justinian became ruler of it, known today as Justinian the Great. Over a reign of 38 years, he revitalized the Byzantine Empire and began a very successful campaign to reconquer the provinces of what had been the Western Roman Empire. His general Belisarius would eventually conquer all of Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, southern Spain, and much of what is now Tunisia and eastern Algeria. He began this with a campaign against the Vandals in 533 CE. It was a swift campaign in which the Vandals were defeated in two engagements at Ad Decimum and Trichomarum. Years of internal fighting over the leadership of the Vandal kingdom had weakened it, and the Vandals had also alienated a large proportion of the Christian Berber population through their efforts to impose Arian Christianity above the Nicene Creed Christianity, which was favored by church authorities in Rome. Thus, the Vandal kingdom was brought to an end after a century, though the Vandal legacy lives on genetically in the region as significant intermarriage with the Berbers would have occurred by then. The Byzantines remained in control of this part of North Africa until the conquest of it by the Arabs in the late 7th century. Writing to his friend Sir Godfrey Neller in 1694, the great English restoration poet and playwright Sir John Dryden offered up a rhyme with a fairly typical view of the place of the Vandals in history. Till Goths and Vandals, a rude northern race, did all the matchless monuments deface. Dryden's appraisal of the Vandals was fairly typical, and it only became more cemented after Gregoire coined the term Vandalism in France a century later. Yet it's an unfair view. Certainly, the Vandals did pillage Rome in 455 CE, and they had spent decades conquering their way across Western Europe and North Africa prior to that. But then again, the Romans themselves were no saints when it came to conquering other people and pillaging their lands. What the Vandals did manage to do was carve out a large kingdom that dominated much of the Western Mediterranean for a century between the 420s CE and the 520s CE. During an era when the Huns were raiding into Gaul and Italy and the Western Roman Empire was collapsing on the European side of the Mediterranean, it was certainly better to live under Vandal rule than Roman rule. And as we have seen, there was a considerable cultural output from the Vandals, both in the writings of Luxorius and the other contributors to the Latin Anthology and the manner in which the Vandals preserved and restored Roman culture in North Africa in the 5th century CE. In short, the Vandals were about a lot more than just Vandalism.