The Vandals

The Vandals have gone down in history as the barbarians who helped bring down the Western Roman Empire. Their name became synonymous with violence and destruction, but who were they really? In this episode, Tristan Hughes is joined by Professor Andy Merrills to uncover the real story of the Vandals. From their migration across Europe to the conquest of Carthage, they explore how the Vandals emerged as a formidable power at the heart of Rome’s final crisis; what archaeology reveals about their rule, and whether the Vandals were really as destructive as their reputation suggests. MORE The Goths: Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-ancients/id1520403988?i=1000652619241 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/5PbZnN3xtQbLkcn2dPZPy2?si=i-gCg48sRFKFBajUlHs_Tw The Franks: Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-ancients/id1520403988?i=1000684396539 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/4QC1204r6BlSzWrV3EbYoe?si=b863492bf8524997 Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

  Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week, covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:44Tristan Hughes?

  Hello, I hope you are doing well and welcome to this episode of The Ancients. Now, the story of late antiquity, especially in Europe, is dominated by these various so-called barbarian groups that descend on parts of the Roman Empire, particularly in the Western Mediterranean. You've got groups like the Huns, you've got the Franks, you've got the Goths, you've got the Saxons in Britain. But you also have a group which are my personal favourites, the Vandals. The Vandals, from which we get the name, you vandal today, but a group that descended from the Rhine in the early 5th century into the Roman, Western Roman Empire,

• 1:27Tristan Hughes?

  went through France, down into Spain, and ultimately created a kingdom in North Africa. Think modern Tunisia, places like Carthage and so on. And who would ultimately go on to sack Rome in the mid 5th century AD? The story of the Vandals is a brilliant one, and we did an episode all about them three years ago now, at the end of 2023, when I headed up to Leicester to interview one of the leading experts on the Vandals, their archaeology, their story, Dr Andy Merrills. Now, this is a time, you know, still quite early on in the ancient story, but I was very much wanting to get out there and interview experts in person.

• 2:08Tristan Hughes?

  So I brought along my audio recording kit, headed over to Andy's house, and we did this episode all about the Vandals. I really do hope you enjoy. I'm glad that this episode is getting its time in the spotlight once again, because it was one of my favourites from 2023, and I really do hope you enjoy it. Let's go.

• 2:30Tristan Hughes?

  Andy, pleasure to have you on the podcast.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Very happy to be here.

• 2:33Tristan Hughes?

  And to talk all about the Vandals.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:35Tristan Hughes?

  Now, an extraordinary group of people who almost were the death knell for the Western Roman Empire, and yet they've fallen into relative obscurity in more recent times.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  That's true. I think to a certain extent, they've been overcome by the metaphor of their name in some ways. They're remembered, if at all, as being incredibly destructive. But in fact, lots of people are quite surprised to discover the Vandals were in fact a group who existed in the 5th and 6th centuries, rather than just being a bunch of people who smash up telephone kiosks.

• 3:03Tristan Hughes?

  And you mentioned 5th and 6th centuries, so their rise and their fall. It's also, it's pretty quick in the scale of things.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, relatively speaking, so the first accounts that we can really trust that we have of the Vandals date to the 3rd or 4th centuries. There are one or two earlier references in some Roman and Greek sources from the 1st and 2nd centuries, but they're just individual names among lots of names, and it's not completely clear where exactly they lived or what exactly the label referred to. So they first appear in a plausible way in the 3rd or 4th centuries, somewhere around the Middle Danube region, so roughly what's now Hungary. And then they rose to prominence with the creation of a kingdom in North Africa, what's now Northern Tunisia, in the early 5th century, lasted for about a century, and then more or less drop off the map.

• 3:45Tristan Hughes?

  So let's kind of also almost follow that route from Hungary all the way to North Africa. If we start in Hungary, so you say we've got these few references from those earlier centuries. Do we know much about their origins, about them living in that area of the world?

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Not really. So most of the accounts that we have are Greek or Roman accounts, so written from the perspective of the Roman Empire, talking about a whole range of different groups who are living all along that northern frontier of the empire. And there are lots of them. There are dozens of different barbarian names in these areas. It's rarely completely clear what form, what social or political forms these groups took. They're obviously bound up with the Roman army in these regions, and the presence of the Roman military along the frontier is also having a dramatic effect on barbarian populations living nearby. So lots of these groups are serving within the Roman army, either practically serving the Roman army or are kind of economically dependent on these large military populations in these regions. And the Vandals who appear as that name, or as a group called the Astingi,

• 4:44Speaker 01

  which is later on the royal dynasty of the Vandals, the Hasdings, are one name amongst lots in that kind of sphere.

• 4:53Tristan Hughes?

  So is it almost like with the Goths and how they kind of divide up into their own different groups? The Vandals is an overarching name for several different distinct groups in that area of the world?

• 5:03Speaker 01

  It's very hard to say. I think they're less important than the Goths. I think the Goths are a kind of illustrative example of a group who turn out to be really important and probably are quite important in the world of the 3rd and 4th centuries. The Vandals are one of the many small groups who are perhaps kind of hovering in their orbit and perhaps changing in that period as well.

• 5:22Tristan Hughes?

  And culture-wise, obviously the Romans see them as barbarian, but will we define them today as a Germanic culture? I mean, what do we kind of know about that?

• 5:29Speaker 01

  So Germanic is a term that refers to the groups of languages that they spoke, rather than to the peoples themselves. So they spoke an Eastern Germanic dialect, it would seem. There's a lot that we don't know about Van代ic as a language, but it's probably related to Gothic, which is an Eastern Germanic language. Culturally speaking, it's really hard to say. I mean, they're an Iron Age community living within this Roman military sphere, so profoundly affected by both of those traditions is probably the easiest thing to say. But one of the difficulties is that it's really hard to associate any of these dozens of barbarian names with a precise material archaeological assemblage that we can dig up from the ground. So there are various different archaeologists working in Central Europe

• 6:11Speaker 01

  who've identified individual graves as being a Van代ic grave, which is fair enough as one interpretation, but I don't think we can be at all confident that the individual who happens to be buried there would identify themselves as a vandal, if that makes sense.

• 6:25Tristan Hughes?

  Well, yeah, absolutely. And you're mentioning that, of course, you know, at that time, within the Roman occupation in that area of the world. Do we know much about that interaction between Vandals and Roman soldiers who were living on that frontier of the Roman Empire in those earlier centuries?

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Not very much specifically at all. So we've got a decent picture of what's going on with the Roman military presence along the frontiers in general terms, and the degree to which barbarian federates are being incorporated within the Roman army in a range of different ways. But we can't say very much at all about the Vandals specifically in that world. If anything, they're an incredibly minor player, I think it would be fair to say, until the beginning of the 5th century, really. They're kind of cropping up as one name amongst many in occasional lists of victories of Roman emperors or incursions of barbarian groups, but that's about as far as it goes. And in some senses, I think that's posed a bit of a problem for scholars wanting to trace the origins of the Vandals, because they go on to become quite important. And there's a strong temptation to assume they must have had glorious origins.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  So even early medieval historians, in fact, writing 100 years or so after the fall of the Vandal Empire, or the fall of the Vandal kingdom, suggested the Vandals must have come from glorious origins in Scandinavia or something, as they suppose the Goths did as well. But I think that's possibly a kind of false bit of reasoning. And the same thing has sometimes happened with modern historians making this sort of similar claims of saying, these people became great, so they must have always had this kind of glorious origin from somewhere.

• 7:51Tristan Hughes?

  I think it's more interesting if it's the fact that actually in those earlier centuries, they were one of the more insignificant peoples. And as you say, if the Romans did not consider them on the other level of some other perhaps tribes or peoples who lived in that area of the world. But you mentioned early 5th century, beginning of the 5th century. What happens then that makes the Vandals almost go to the next level?

• 8:11Speaker 01

  So there's a crucial series of events that take place in the very first years of the 5th century, so in the 400s, that are related to crises within the eastern and western halves of the Roman Empire, movements of troops around the Western Empire in particular, and a succession of usurpations or rebellions within the western half of the empire. And this has a series of knock-on effects, the most famous and spectacular of which is the crossing of the river Rhine by a group of barbarians, including the Vandals-Swabs, who are another barbarian group, and the improbably named Allens, who are another barbarian group, all of whom supposedly crossed the Rhine on New Year's Day 406 and come into northern Gaul, so the northern territories of what's now France.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  And they're there for three years, occupy that region, then move south across the Pyrenees in 409, and those three groups basically divide up Spain amongst themselves. Or that's the claim that one or two chroniclers make. The crucial thing to remember here is they are having a dramatic effect on these regions, especially in southern Gaul and Spain, which have never been particularly heavily militarised. So having armed groups of people wandering around can make a massive difference to a previously relatively peaceful region. But simultaneously, you've also got various military power brokers, generalissimos, landlords who are deciding to go it alone, towns who are deciding that they need protection from these other groups of rebels or usurpers or barbarians who are wandering around the place.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  So effectively, the Vandals-Swabs and Allens are finding a place for themselves in this fragmenting world. One of the really interesting things, I think, about this is even during this period, where they're coming to the attention of writers from all over the Roman world. So Jerome, who's living in Bethlehem, Saint Jerome, guy who translates the Bible into Latin, living in Bethlehem at this time and is aware of the Vandals making their appearance in Gaul in the 400s. So this is news that's going around the world. But even in this period, they're still not this dramatic fighting force.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  That is winning entirely by force of arms. So we know of 10 historically attested battles that the Vandals fought in from that kind of dim and distant third or fourth century past, right through to the late 420s. These aren't particularly well attested battles, but we just hear of references to conflicts in the chronicles or the historians and so on. And of those 10 battles, the Vandals lose the first nine. So this is a world that's falling apart, but being an armed group still gives you some power in that, even if you're not necessarily winning your battle.

• 10:43Tristan Hughes?

  And other Vandals, are they losing their battles against what's left of the Western Roman Empire? Or is it against other groups that are now trying to make their mark in this area?

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Both of those things, effectively. So they're still being influential, but they are for the most part losing out in this kind of fight for supremacy, to the degree actually that there is one 5th century writer, a Christian writer called Salvian of Marseille, who referred to the Vandals as being almost a byword for not being very good at fighting. And within 20 years, that picture will dramatically change. But at that point, in this collapsing world, when they're still quite well known, they're still not overwhelmingly militarily successful. But this is not to underplay the fact that this is a large armed group of men and their followers who are moving around and, you know, creating a major bit of difference to the balance of social life in these regions.

• 11:33Tristan Hughes?

  Well, that's really interesting right there. I mean, the whole, the nature of this Vandal group that crossed the Rhine and then makes their way through Gaul and down into Spain. Should we just be imagining lots of young men, warriors or mercenaries? Or was this more of a migration and a whole Vandal people going west?

• 11:52Speaker 01

  This is a much debater topic. So different historians have different views on this. My view is that this is primarily best viewed as a relatively small warband, which can include lots of followers coming along with them. But it's important to bear in mind that the period between the crossing of the Rhine in 406 and their eventual crossing into North Africa in the late 420s is around about 25 years. So it's getting on for a generation. So there is a significant churn in terms of the people involved. There are other historians who think that this is a more significant migration of population. So we're actually looking at a big movement of people into Gaul and then into Spain. But actually, in some ways, I think both schools of thought agree that we're talking

• 12:36Speaker 01

  about a fairly similar order of magnitude of individuals here. The figure that's most frequently given is provided by two different primary sources for the number of people crossing from southern Spain into North Africa in the late 420s. And that's 80,000. And both of the sources say that this number is slightly exaggerated. And it's not completely clear if they're talking about fighting men or everybody. It's generally accepted that it's probably everybody and that the total number of fighting men is somewhere around 15,000 or 20,000, which is a relatively small number in terms of migrating populations coming into North Africa, which has a population of two or three million at this time. But that's still a relatively sized field army in the later Roman world.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  And again, moving into non-militarized regions like southern Gaul or Spain or North Africa, they can have a big effect.

• 13:29Tristan Hughes?

  And also these regions. So they're moving into these regions, as you say, that are less protected. But at the same time, they are also some of the wealthiest regions of the Roman Empire too. So for the Vandals, this is almost a double win. Not much to fight against and also a lot to take advantage of.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And that's not coincidental. The way the Roman Empire had always been organised was to have the army parked up in the northern regions, quite far away from the rich provinces. And the rich provinces would effectively be feeding the hungry army through taxation, which would be shipped northwards to the troops. But emperors were very keen to ensure that the breadbasket of the Roman Empire areas like southern Spain and North Africa didn't have a large military presence. So if generals did decide to revolt, they wouldn't be in the position to basically create their own little autonomous enclave, declare themselves independent of Rome effectively.

• 14:24Tristan Hughes?

  One other question on the Vandals before kind of focusing on how they'd become so prominent in southern Spain. Do we know how they fought? Are we, should we be imagining lots of horsemen or most people on foot? Or do we not have that information available?

• 14:38Speaker 01

  There is one or two suggestions in the sources that the Vandals depended very heavily on the cavalry. And the Allens, who are the, one of the groups that they allied with in 406 and were actually the most important of the three groups as they came into Spain, may have been a similar group to the Hun. So they may have originally been pastoralist nomads from the Ukrainian steppe, although it's not completely clear that this identity continued with them. But it's possible that cavalry was a significant part of the fighting force. But we have very little information on the actual battles that the Vandals were involved in.

• 15:09Tristan Hughes?

  Fair enough.

• 15:42Tristan Hughes?

  Are you looking for the perfect podcasts to hunker down with during the longer, colder, darker nights?

• 15:48Speaker 02

  Well, look no further than the award-winning After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal with me, Maddie Pelling.

• 15:55Tristan Hughes?

  And me, Anthony Delaney. We are historians and love all things gloomy and macabre.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  From Tudor executioners and ancient Egyptian death rituals to witch trials and folklore, feel transported back in time on After Dark. Out every Monday and Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 16:12Tristan Hughes?

  And guess what? We're also now on YouTube. After Dark, a podcast from History Hit.

• 16:33Tristan Hughes?

  Well, you've got the Vandals at that time in the 420s, not the late 420s yet, but they're in southern Spain. How do they become so entrenched in this incredibly rich, wealthy area of the Western Roman Empire?

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Well, initially, actually, they get this short straw. The Hasdins get the short straw when Spain is divided up between the various different groups. And it's the Allens who get the most important parts of Spain. And another group of Vandals called the Siling Vandals get the rich territory of Biataca in the south. And in fact, ironically, it's because there's a group of Goths, Visigoths, who are sent by the Western Roman Emperor into Spain to turf out these barbarians. And the general is successful in doing that, that actually clears the path for the Hasdins, this small group of Vandals who turn out to be this dominant group over the course of the century that follows. And in effect, they're able to occupy the vacuum that's left by the defeated Silings and Allens and then by the Visigoths as they move out of Spain again and are eventually settled in Acitaine in south-western France.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  So yet again, the kind of Hasdins find themselves the happy inheritors of this really complicated kind of Brownian motion of military activity and revolt and alliance that dominates the history of the Western Roman Empire in the early 5th century.

• 17:47Tristan Hughes?

  And if southern Spain is such a fruitful part of the empire that they now have for themselves, it does beg the question, why do they decide to then look across the Straits of Gibraltar to North Africa, when actually they've already got a really good place to live?

• 18:03Speaker 01

  That is a really interesting question and it's not completely clear what the answer to that is. The simple answer is that southern Spain was really rich. North Africa was even richer. And that sounds quite unlikely to modern ears, but actually the territories of Africa, Proconsularis and Numidia, so basically what's now northern Tunisia and north-eastern Algeria, were basically the richest part of the Western Roman Empire at the height of the imperial period. They had survived quite well through the social and political crises of the third and fourth centuries and continued to produce this vast surplus and were extremely under-militarised. So in some senses, it seemed presumably like ripe fruit for the plucking. There was a small military presence there.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  There's a general called Boniface, who through a variety of different political issues winds up falling out of favour with the ruling Western Emperor. And some later historians suggest that Boniface recruited the Vandals and brought them across to help in his revolt. This, it seems to me, is a kind of retrospective. It's a later explanation for how the Vandals managed to make it into North Africa in the first place. My answer would be that this is possibly partly opportunistic. North Africa is easier to defend than southern Spain, perhaps. It's hard to know.

• 19:20Tristan Hughes?

  And who is the figure who is leading the Vandals at that point?

• 19:23Speaker 01

  The leader of the Vandals at this point is a king called Gaiseric, who is the first king of the Vandals that we know a lot about. We know a little bit about his brother. Apparently the two of them ruled together. But effectively, he's ruling on his own from at some point in the mid 420s for basically another 50 years. He dies in 477 and over the course of that 50-year reign, effectively fashions a North African kingdom for himself, finds a position, if you like, at the top table of Western Roman politics in the middle of the 5th century and is certainly one of the most influential military and political figures of that time. And this is, bearing in mind, this is exactly the same time that Attila the Hun lived. He had a comparable influence on the unfolding of the Western Empire in that period.

• 20:07Tristan Hughes?

  Yes, it's interesting. When you look at the Huns compared to the Vandals, you have one which is very prominent in our mindset today and the other which has fallen out a bit. And it's the same with Attila and Gaiseric. And we'll, we'll talk more about Gaiseric because come on, let's delve into the details of the Vandal conquest of North Africa, because this isn't swift, it's bloody and it's brutal.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  It is bloody and it's brutal and it takes, yeah, it does take a long time. So the first landing seems to have taken place in about 428 or 429. The Chronicles disagree, but it's possible that it took quite a long time. And they moved their way from basically what's now the northern coast of Morocco, along the northern Algerian coastline and into the rich territories of Numidia and Africa, besieging the city of Hippo Regius, where the famous bishop Augustine was on his deathbed, and eventually receiving the city in a peace treaty with the Western Empire in 435, and Hippo became their first capital. There was a peace treaty at that point between Geyseric and the Emperor Valentinian III, which Geyseric seems to have broken. He moved further east and captured Carthage in 439.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  And it was the capture of Carthage, which is the sort of metropole, the most important city by far in North Africa, one of the most important cities in the whole of the Roman Empire, certainly in the Western Roman Empire, that really marks the start of the Vandal Kingdom. And in fact, on later coins and documents, Geyseric dated his reign from the capture of Carthage, not from his accession to power about 10 years earlier. So this really was the year zero of the Vandal period.

• 21:38Tristan Hughes?

  And we should also clarify, this is a very, a Roman-looking Carthage. This isn't any Phoenician influence of back in the Punic times or anything like that.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  No, so the Phoenician city of Carthage had been destroyed at the end of the Third Punic War in 146 BCE, so around about half a millennium earlier. It was refounded as a Roman city in 46 BCE and then rose again to become an incredibly important centre for Roman trade and administration in what, as I said, became a very important economic part of the Roman Empire. So it was basically a Roman city, pretty cosmopolitan city. And there were certainly populations in the region who were still speaking Punic languages, so the old languages of the Carthaginians, mixed with Latin, Greek, a range of other Libyan languages as well. And actually, a lot of the population would have been kind of part of a floating mercantile population across the Mediterranean as a whole.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  And as a result of that, there was a huge range of different religious practises, social practises, cultural practises, which were apparent in Carthage and some of these other cities.

• 22:38Tristan Hughes?

  It's always amazing to think how central and cosmopolitan and important cities like Carthage were at the time of, in late antiquity, at the time of the Western Roman Empire and the arrival of figures like Geyseric. You mentioned how, following the fall of Carthage, it's almost year zero for the Vandal Kingdom. But how long does it take for the Vandals to almost kind of implement their own ways, to kind of form the kingdom, to put their administration right there in the front?

• 23:04Speaker 01

  It sort of depends what you mean. It takes Geyseric a little while to establish his royal rule over North Africa. And partly this is because he's essentially overseeing a transformation of them from being a mobile war band or a migratory people, depending on who you agree with, to being a settled elite within a kingdom. So where the elites have their own lands, where they have a fixed army, where they're collecting taxation and so on. That takes a little bit of time. And Geyseric sets about doing that by, for example, distributing some of the lands available to him, to his Vandal followers, taking some land for himself and his sons and thereby kind of distinguishing the royal family from the other Vandals,

• 23:49Speaker 01

  the other aristocrats who are following him. So in that sense, this takes a few years. And there are one or two passing references in the sources that we have that suggest that there were some teething troubles. So there's a bit of a pushback from some of the Vandal aristocrats. There's a passing reference to a revolt of the Vandal aristocracy in 442. And that's actually the year when Geyseric signs his second and much more lasting peace treaty with the Western Empire. So in some senses, 442 represents the point at which there's a kind of constitutional starting point for the Vandal Kingdom, if that makes sense. It's equally important to recognise that although many of the wealthiest landowners fled North Africa at the time when the Vandals arrived,

• 24:32Speaker 01

  lots of the landholdings were imperial or senatorial landholdings, so were people who had never really lived regularly in Africa anyway. And lots of the local aristocracy actually chose to remain within North Africa because they didn't really have anywhere to go and more or less found a place for themselves within the running of the Vandal Kingdom. So one of the striking things about Geyseric's reign, and actually much of the Vandal period, is the degree to which lots of members of the late Roman aristocracy found a place for themselves within the Vandal Kingdom. So the language of government within North Africa was Latin. There are lots of individuals that we see in the sources who are holding what would seem to be offices that are very similar to the old provincial system that governed the Roman Empire and so on.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  Essentially, Geyseric, I think, recognised that this was a system that was working really well and didn't want to rock the boat too much, because that would have been madness. But at the same time, needed to find a place for himself and his followers within North Africa. So it takes a few years for that to be established, but for the most part, we can see strong patterns of continuity rather than abrupt political change.

• 25:39Tristan Hughes?

  It makes a lot of sense. You see it with Alexander the Great and his successors with the Persian administration, which was affected and so they kept Nads as well.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Absolutely, or Rome coming into Egypt, there's a sort of very similar series of patterns. The significant change that does happen in 439 is that the Vandal occupation of Carthage means that the taxation, which had traditionally gone out of North Africa up to Rome to feed the Roman administration, to feed the Roman army, suddenly stops. And that, in some ways, has always been the backbone of the Roman economic system in the Mediterranean. That starts again to a degree, those exports continue after the treaty of 442, but it's no longer held together as this kind of central economic crux. And if the Vandals are responsible for the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, and there is a case to be made that they are, it's for doing that.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  It's for breaking the taxation system that had always held things together. There's a lot of archaeological evidence to suggest that trade continued, but I think the political and economic glue, in some ways, had really started to become brittle after 442.

• 26:41Tristan Hughes?

  Geyseric must have known how influential and powerful he was to have that control over that grain trade. As you say, when he's agreeing that treaty with the Roman Emperor in 442. But it also feels like Geyseric, he's not the most trustworthy guy. If you have a peace treaty with him, especially if you're a Roman Emperor, it's not guaranteed he's going to abide by it for very long.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  That's true. I'm not sure there were that many particularly trustworthy individuals of any stripe who are living or operating in the kind of Game of Thrones world of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century. Valentinian, who was the Roman Emperor at the time, did what he could to include Geyseric within his circle, including the betrayal of his daughter Eudocia to Geyseric's son Huneric. So in that sense, he's bringing him into the imperial family in some senses. And that proves to be relatively successful. At least the peace holds for another 13 years until 455. And it's only really with the death of Valentinian and the political collapse that comes with that, and the threat that somebody else is going to marry Eudocia, that causes Geyseric to turn against the Western Empire again.

• 27:44Tristan Hughes?

  And how does he turn against the Western Roman Empire?

• 27:46Speaker 01

  He turns against the Western Roman Empire quite spectacularly by launching a series of attacks on various different Western Mediterranean islands, so Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and crucially, on the Italian mainland as well. This was something that he had been doing after 439. So between the capture of Carthage and the first peace treaty, Geyseric had basically been threatening the western and eastern halves of the empire with these maritime attacks. Because one of the things he got when he captured Carthage was also a large fleet, the merchant fleet he was able to use for these maritime attacks. And he resumed these after 455. And crucially, and most famously, in that year, he also launched an attack on Rome and put Rome to the sack, plundering a huge amount of wealth from the city,

• 28:28Speaker 01

  including lots of plunder that the Romans themselves had taken during their expansion throughout the world. Famously, this included the treasure from the Temple of Jerusalem, which the Romans had taken in the, in 70. Geyseric took it back in 45, well, took it in 455 and brought it back to Carthage. But along with that portable wealth, he also took a large number of Cuman hostages, including the princess Eudocia, who he brought back to Africa to marry his son Huneric, finally.

• 28:55Tristan Hughes?

  Wow, okay, that's pretty insane.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  It was a spectacular statement of his own power, effectively.

• 29:02Tristan Hughes?

  Absolutely, and we all hear of the Gothic sack of Rome by Alaric, but the Vandalic sack of Rome, once again, it's overshadowed, you don't know. And yet, the significance of it, maybe arguably, is more significant than the Gothic sack, but because it happened afterwards, it's lesser focused on.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Gothic sack sent greater shockwaves around the world simply because the Eternal City hadn't been sacked for 800 years at that point. The Vandal sack also proved to be extremely significant. And after that, we don't really have a meaningful and powerful Western Roman Emperor again. There's another 20 years or so of different people occupying that position. But after 455, the political centrality of Rome, which has just about been holding on over the course of the last generation or two, really starts to get eclipsed. And Geyseric actually involves himself in some of the political machinations around these later emperors. And one of the people who briefly holds that position, who was an aristocrat called Alibrius, was actually among the hostages who were brought back to Carthage by Geyseric, apparently with the aim of installing one of his puppets as Western Roman Empire, Emperor.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  So the guy is thinking, he's playing four-dimensional chess here in some sense.

• 30:07Tristan Hughes?

  Absolutely, and also let's remember, so the Vandals... The origins in Hungary region, near the Danube, now controlling this massive North African empire. But you've also mentioned their raiding, attacking these various islands of the Mediterranean and the Italian mainland. It almost seems like the Vandals, they developed a really powerful naval arm to their empire too. And that's fascinating, considering their origins and where they came from.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, there is no trace whatsoever of any type of maritime skill in Vandal history before the 420s. So in the middle of the 420s, they attacked the Balearic Islands. Later 420s, they're crossing into North Africa. But it's only really with the occupation of Carthage, the capture of the Carthaginian fleet, that they really make the most of this. They occupy Sardinia and Sardinia remains effectively Vandal with a short interruption until the end of the Vandal Kingdom. Bits of Sicily remain Vandal throughout that period as well. Corsica does too. So presumably, this is a Mediterranean kingdom, rather than just a North African one.

• 31:05Tristan Hughes?

  Do you think they gained a reputation for piracy? Or is that just hostile sources attacking the Vandals there?

• 31:11Speaker 01

  It's both. I mean, it's hostile sources certainly attacking the Vandals, but it's reasonable enough to accuse them of being this dramatic new force on the Mediterranean stage. The Mediterranean hasn't actually seen a lot of widespread naval combat since the start of the Roman Empire, really. And so contemporary commentators look at this new Vandal powerbase with some horror. And in fact, one contemporary writer who's writing in the middle of the 5th century in Gaul, a poet called Sidonius Polinaris, describes this as being a fourth Punic War. So there is a genuine fear of this and all sorts of weird references to fears of Vandal attacks, even in some quite far flung regions of the eastern Mediterranean as well. And actually, that's one of the few areas in which the Vandal name really is preserved later on.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  And there are some references in an early Anglo-Saxon poem that refer to the Mediterranean as the Vandal Sea, which may be some weird folk memory of this earlier period.

• 32:05Tristan Hughes?

  It is really, really interesting to delve into. And if you were someone visiting Vandal Carthage, a trader, or maybe from the eastern Mediterranean, as you're walking down those streets, I mean, would you still see in use that the Roman architecture that had been there for hundreds of years previously? Would the amphitheatre still be being used for Roman style games? I mean, how much of those traditions do we think were continued by Geisrich and the Vandals, you know, decades after they create this Vandal Kingdom?

• 32:31Speaker 01

  That's an excellent question. And in some senses, the changes that were taking place in Vandal Carthage are likely to have been mirrored elsewhere. So it's partly to do with the changes of the uses to which cities were put in the 5th century, rather than the presence of the Vandals changing anything specifically. So one or two of our texts refer to moments of destruction at the time of the Vandal occupation. But it's also pretty clear that many of the most important public buildings remain in use throughout this period. There are some changes, so the large bathhouses, for example, increasingly get turned over to light industry, but that's a pattern that we can see across the former Western Empire. Equally, interestingly, there's a body of Latin poetry that survives from the start

• 33:11Speaker 01

  of the 6th century, so writing in and about Vandal Africa, especially Vandal Carthage, which describe, for example, various different pantomimes, various different actors, chariot races and gradatorial games taking place within the amphitheatre and the circus. Whether or not these actually happened is again a moot point, but it seems that the traditional patterns of civic living were still carrying on through the Vandal period. Schools are still continuing. Latin poetry survives in Vandal Africa in as robust a form as we see anywhere in the 5th and early 6th century. So for the most part, culturally, it's maintained this cosmopolitanism, it's maintained this

• 33:52Speaker 01

  vibrancy, it continues to be extremely wealthy throughout the Vandal period.

• 33:57Tristan Hughes?

  We're talking about wealth. Do we know much about the Vandal economy or how they ran it?

• 34:01Speaker 01

  Essentially, what we know about the Vandal economy comes from archaeology. So the vast amounts of ceramics and the pottery that was clearly made in North Africa and was shipped around the Mediterranean world. So some of this is the remains of Amphrey, which transported wine and olive oil. And in other cases, we have kind of fine ware vessels, which are plates and other vessels which seem to have been shipped alongside grain and olive oil and wine and so on. These can often be dated quite precisely, and they allow us to trace the patterns of trade and the state of production within Vandal period in North Africa. It's evident from all of this that it continues in pretty robust shape throughout the 5th century and into the early 6th century.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  It dies off a bit at the start of the 6th century and it drops off more significantly with the eastern Roman occupation in the 530s, which we'll talk about in a bit. But for the most part, the pattern is of continuity. And when we can talk about production, it's also pretty clear that this continues in more or less the way that it always had during the Roman period. Archaeology of individual farm sites and one or two other sources also suggest that, although there are some changes in the way farms are run, for the most part, it's a pattern of continuity.

• 35:18Tristan Hughes?

  You mentioned how the 530s, we're definitely going to get to there very soon, don't you worry. But I feel before we get there, we've got to also talk about Christianity, because this is such a massive part of the Vandal story. When the Vandals reached North Africa and they forged their kingdom, as almost background to this, I mean, how prominent, how embedded is Christianity in this part of the Roman Empire?

• 35:40Speaker 01

  So North Africa is one of the most important Christian regions within the Empire. It had converted to Christianity, or bits of North Africa had converted to Christianity relatively early, as it's clearly attested in the 2nd century. And some of the most important Christian thinkers were North African in origin, including St Augustine, who I mentioned earlier, possibly the single most prolific author of this period, bishop of Hippo on what's now the Algerian coast of North Africa, and a really important spokesman, redefining what it was to be Roman, what it was to be Christian at the end of the 4th century and the beginning of the 5th century. But that Christian presence had brought with it also a history of persecution. So this is a region that was unusually intensely persecuted during the last period of pagan persecution at the start of the 4th century.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  And then equally, once the Empire itself became Christian during the reign of Constantine and his successors, there was a period of sectarian persecution within North Africa itself. This is sometimes called the Donatist controversy, as a group of sort of African church decided that it disagreed with the central organisation of the Catholic Church or the Nicene Church. And this created around about a century of tensions within the region. So Christianity is very deeply embedded within Africa, and so too are stories and narratives of martyrdom and persecution. And that proves to be a really toxic inheritance for the Vandals to come into.

• 37:01Tristan Hughes?

  Because when the Vandals do come into this area of the world, I mean, are they already Christian or do they have their own beliefs? How do they interact with the Christian church in North Africa?

• 37:10Speaker 01

  So the Vandals were Christian. It seems extremely likely that the vast majority of Vandals professed a form of Christianity that we conventionally call Arian Christianity, or sometimes Homoian Christianity. Now, this is as distinct from Nicene Christianity or Homousian Christianity. They're essentially two different ways of thinking about the relationship between Christ and God. I won't go into lots of detail here, it gets extremely confusing. But the important thing to bear in mind is both of these different professions had been followed by different emperors in the 4th century. But as we get into the 5th century, it's the Nicene or Catholic or Homousian form of Christianity, which is the dominant form within the Empire. And the Vandals are Arians or Homoians.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  And this creates some difficulty. They're not by any means the only Homoians, this is extremely, or the only Arians. This is extremely common amongst barbarian groups in this period and extremely common in the military in this period. But they find themselves as professors of Arian Christianity in a population that is both predominantly Nicene and also extremely shaped by these traditions of martyrdom and persecution, as I was just saying. And those two things create some pretty significant tensions over the period that follows.

• 38:28Tristan Hughes?

  So what do these tensions result in? Is there an attempt for them to almost live side by side? Or do the Vandals very much want to promote their own version, this Arian Christianity?

• 38:39Speaker 01

  So Geisrich, for the most part, seems pretty content to have allowed the two groups to rule side by side or sit side by side. So the Arian Christianity is dominant within Carthage and is the one that he prefers his immediate Vandal followers to profess. But for the most part, he seems to have allowed Nicene or Catholic Christianity to continue elsewhere in North Africa. Again, it's a case of probably not wanting to rock the boat too much. And he doesn't seem to have been particularly evangelical. He's not bothered about converting everybody else to his form of Christianity. There are certainly moments of persecution, and we have texts that were written by members of the Catholic Church who were themselves persecuted, which naturally make a big deal of this, understandably.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  But these often included, for example, removing people from their office if they refused to convert to Arianism. So he wants the people in his court to be Arian for the most part, but that's about the limit of it. Things change a little bit in the reign of his successor Huneric. And during the late summer and autumn of 484, there is a period of pronounced and active persecution in which Huneric sets about persecuting the Nicene or Catholic Christians, especially within Carthage and the surrounding provincial area. And that includes both closing churches, putting some Catholics to death and exiling others.

• 40:06Tristan Hughes?

  Are you looking for the perfect podcast to hunker down with during the longer, colder, darker nights?

• 40:12Speaker 02

  Well, look no further than the award-winning After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal with me, Maddie Pelling.

• 40:18Tristan Hughes?

  And me, Anthony Delaney. We are historians and love all things gloomy and macabre.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  From Tudor executioners and ancient Egyptian death rituals to witch trials and folklore, feel transported back in time on After Dark. Out every Monday and Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 40:36Tristan Hughes?

  And guess what? We're also now on YouTube. After Dark, a podcast from History Hit.

• 40:56Tristan Hughes?

  Does it feel like from the surviving sources that those successors of Geyseric, they almost struggled to live up to this great titan who was the first ruler of the Vandal Kingdom? And these successors are the ones who are more beset by problems, whether it's religious problems or foreign affair problems, but they can't really live up to the good times almost of Geyseric in North Africa.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  To an extent, yeah, we know more about Geyseric than we do about his successors, partly because he lived for a long time. Huneric we only know about because of the narratives of his persecution really, so we have a very negative picture of him. And the two kings who came afterwards, or the next king, who was Huneric's nephew, was an individual called Gunthermann, we know almost nothing about beyond the fact that he issued a bunch of coins in new denominations, which is interesting and strange, but we can't say much beyond that. But the next king was a ruler called Thrasymond, who ruled basically at the turn of the sixth century, from the last years of the fifth century down to about 523. His rule was remembered partly for another period of persecution, where he exiled lots of prominent Catholics, especially to Sardinia, but also for an intellectual inquiry.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  So the, one of the Catholic writers who describes Thrasymond's rule and describes his persecution is an individual called Fulgentius, who also describes debating these theological topics with the king. So this is a king who was interested in this kind of stuff. He wasn't just stamping his authority on his Catholic subjects. And this is also the period where we really see that efflorescence of Latin literature, including lots of poems that were written celebrating Thrasymond's benevolent rule. So there is a tendency within the scholarship as a result of that to see Thrasymond as being a kind of Renaissance man and overseeing this late cultural flowering of the Vandal state. His position on the foreign policy stage was significantly weaker than Geyseric's, and that was definitely true.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  After Geyseric's death, the Vandals are much less influential on a global stage. But Africa's still doing okay under several of his successors.

• 42:56Tristan Hughes?

  Okay, so following Thrasymond, this almost Renaissance prince for some of the scholars that you mentioned there, what happens? It doesn't feel like the Vandal Kingdom lasts much longer.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  That's right. So there are two really interesting chapters to come before the denouement, if you like. And the first is the rule of an individual called Hilderic. Now, you may remember earlier that I mentioned Geyseric's son Huneric was married to a Roman princess called Eudocia. They had a son called Hilderic. But because of the obscure nature of the Vandal rule of succession, where the next king was always the next oldest member of the family, rather than following a system of primogeniture, where it always goes to the eldest son of the ruling monarch, Hilderic had to wait for quite a long time before he became king. He only became king in 523, possibly when he was around about 60.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  So he wasn't your traditional king at the peak of his military powers, but equally, he could claim descent both from Geyseric on his father's side and from the Roman Emperor Valentinian III on his mother's side. And he made quite a lot of this. He was both a Hasding and a Theodosian and saw himself as being a natural ally of the Eastern Emperors, especially the Eastern Emperor Justinian, who came to the throne about the same time. So those two were quite closely bound to one another, or he certainly presented himself as an ally of the Eastern Emperor. But it seems likely that this caused some discontent amongst other members of the Vandal aristocracy. And eventually in 530, there was a rebellion under a Vandal prince called Gelama, who

• 44:30Speaker 01

  would, in the normal scheme of things, have become the next Vandal king anyway, but was a distant cousin of Hilderic. But he decided to hasten things along, overthrew Hilderic and seize power for himself. And this then created a whole series of military crises across the different parts of the Vandal Kingdom, which is still pretty big at this point, but there's a revolt in Sardinia, there's a revolt in the coastal town of Lepkis Magna, which is on the coast of modern Libya, and also some problems with Berber and Moorish groups living in the interior. Gelama sets about trying to deal with all of these problems. And while he's doing that, the Eastern Emperor Justinian recognizes his chance, takes it and sends an expeditionary force under his great general Belisarius in the late summer

• 45:14Speaker 01

  of 533, originally just to go to North Africa and reinstall Hilderic as the rightful king of Africa. But in fact, he winds up taking out Gelama and the Vandals reoccupying Carthage within about two weeks and eventually finally defeating Gelama the following spring in 534. So the Vandal Kingdom, which has lasted almost 100 years and has actually resisted a number of fairly significant imperial efforts to take it back in 442, 458 and 468, finally, under a relatively small army of about 15,000 men under Belisarius in 533, is taken out in a fortnight. And that's basically the end of the Vandal king.

• 45:54Tristan Hughes?

  Wow. But what happens to the Vandal people after Belisarius takes their capital, takes Carthage?

• 46:01Speaker 01

  It's a kind of surprisingly anticlimactic end to quite an impressive history in some senses. So Gelama continues to resist for about another six months before eventually he surrenders and is brought back to Constantinople in Belisarius's triumph, along with a lot of the plunder, which includes, incidentally, the plunder that Geyseric had taken from Rome in 455 and which the Romans had taken from Jerusalem in the first century. In Africa itself, some of the individuals who are left behind marry into the occupying army, but for the most part, we don't hear very much of them after a brief military rebellion that they seem to have been behind in 536. And beyond that, we don't hear very much of the Vandals at all.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  There are one or two funerary epitaphs, so basically tombstones, that are erected to individuals with conspicuously Germanic names that continue to appear into the late sixth century, but they're rarely identified specifically as Vandals. And occasionally in one or two of the religious disputes which continue to go on throughout the Byzantine occupation, references are made to bishops of the Vandals, possibly referring to their Arianism or their Homoeanism. And so that debate seems to have continued, but for the most part, the Vandals simply drop off the map. It's, the story is now about the Romans, the Africans and the various different Libyan or Moorish groups who are also rising to prominence in this region.

• 47:23Tristan Hughes?

  It is fascinating, as we mentioned right at the start, you know, their brutal rise and their time and the limelight, and then this sudden disappearance and fading from view. Why is it that today the name Vandals as these ancient people is more put to the side compared to the Huns and the Goths? And yet the word Vandal and vandalism has come about and is so prominent?

• 47:46Speaker 01

  Essentially, I think it's because their kingdom was in North Africa. And that basically meant that following the Islamic conquest of North Africa in the seventh century, Africa basically fit into its own grand story and not one that's widely taught in European schools. That's not true of many of these different barbarian groups who established their kingdoms in the European regions of the Western Empire. So in some senses, we see the fifth and sixth century as being the time when England was founded by the Angles and the Saxons, the time when France was being founded by the Frankie, and the time when the Burgundians established themselves in South Eastern Gaul and so on. Equally, some of the other peoples who were prominent in that period, like the Goths, lent their name to other things over the course of the medieval period, especially

• 48:30Speaker 01

  Gothic architecture, for example. So in that sense, all of the other barbarian groups of the period had their names associated with different things, with regions, with kingdoms, with other different cultural traditions. The Vandals didn't, and they kind of hover in this, in the accounts that are written in the medieval period and the early modern period, where people are aware of them, but they're always slightly peripheral to the big story. That changes actually in the aftermath of the French Revolution, when there's a period of cultural destruction, basically, which happens around about the time of the terror, where lots of the artwork that's associated with the church and associated with a king gets plundered and destroyed. And there are attempts by the revolutionary government in France to try and curb that.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  And there's one individual who's put in charge of an inquiry, trying to explain precisely what's going on and curb this destruction. This is a churchman called Gregoire, the Bishop of Blois, and he coins the term vandalism for what he sees. And effectively what he's doing there, he's using vandalism with a capital V, but he's using this as a metaphor. He's basically saying, you people are behaving like the Vandals, who you'll remember had come into northern Gaul at the beginning of the fifth century and according to the historical accounts that he had, had caused a huge amount of destruction. Because he was a churchman, he was also familiar with all of these accounts of the Vandals persecuting the true Catholic Church. And so this was a really helpful label for him to stick on these destructive individuals,

• 49:54Speaker 01

  certainly much more helpful than the Frankie who are associated with the French or the Goths who are associated with different types of architecture. So in that way, vandalism really stuck. It was also, it's also quite a euphonic word. It sounds quite nice, vandalism. And it circulated really quickly in the aftermath. It appears for the first time in English and German dictionaries within a few years of Bishop Gregoire coining the term. And then over the course of the 19th and into the 20th century, it basically loses its capital letter and becomes the metaphor that we have today. This idea that you're a vandal, that's something that stands for itself. I'm not comparing you to one of these barbarians of the fifth century. And in fact, we've frequently forgotten that these were originally fifth century barbarians.

• 50:36Tristan Hughes?

  Last but certainly not least, you have written a book all about the Vandals, which is called?

• 50:41Speaker 01

  The Vandals, which I wrote with my colleague, Richard Miles, a few years ago. And a couple of weeks ago, I also published a book called War, Rebellion and Epic in Byzantine North Africa, which deals with the early years of the Byzantine conquest.

• 50:53Tristan Hughes?

  Brilliant. Andy, with that, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  Thank you, it's been fun.

• 51:04Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was Professor Andy Merrill from Leicester University talking through the story of the ancient Germanic group known as the Vandals. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you want to learn more about these groups that were a threat to the Roman Empire in late antiquity, well, we've got episodes on the Goths, we've got an episode on the Franks, also on the Saxons as well. So we'll put a link to all of those episodes in the show notes so you can listen to even more about these so-called barbarian groups, these barbarian threats of the late Roman Empire. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Ancients.

• 51:47Tristan Hughes?

  If you're enjoying the show, please make sure to follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us, you'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, well, we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week. Sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe. That's all from me. I'll see you in the next episode.