The Vandals

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could you say Euro-Emonet? Frank? No. Frank. Hello, I hope you aren't doing well and welcome to this episode of The Ancient Snow.

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 Hunts, 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, the Vandals today, but a group that descended from the Rhine in the early 5th century into the Roman Western Roman Empire

went through France down in Spain and ultimately created a kingdom in North Africa, think

on day 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 Merals. 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, 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 favouris from 2023, and I really do hope you enjoy it. Let's go. Andy, pleasure to have you on the podcast. Very happy to be here.

And to talk all about the Vandals, now, an extraordinary group of people who almost were the death knell for the Western Roman Empire, yet they fall into relative obscurity in more recent times.

“That's true, I think, to a certain extent, they've been overcome by the metaphor of their”

name in some ways that 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 fifth and sixth centuries, rather than just being a bunch of people who smash up Tel Aviv and Kiosk suddenly. And you mentioned fifth and sixth century, so they're rising their fully, it's pretty quick

in the scale of things.

Yeah, relatively speaking, so the first accounts that we can really trust that we have

of the Vandals' date to the third or fourth centuries, there are one or two earlier references in some Roman and Greek sources from the first and second centuries, but they're just individual names among lots of names, and it's not completely clear where exactly they live, or exactly the label referred to. So they first appear in a plausible way in the third or fourth centuries, somewhere around

the middle, Danube region, so roughly what's now hungry. And then they raised a prominence with a creation of a kingdom in North Africa, what's now northern Tunisia, in the early fifth century lasted for about a century and then more or less drop off the map. So there's kind of almost a follow that route from Hungary, all the way to North Africa.

If we start in Hungary, so you've got these few references from those earlier centuries, doing no much about their origins, about them living in that area of the world. Not really, so most of the accounts that we have are Greek or Roman accounts are 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.

And 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

living in their bodies. A lot of these groups are serving within the Roman army, either practically serving the Roman army, or a kind of economically dependent on these large military populations in these regions. And the vandals who appear as that name are as a Greek or the Astingi, which is later

on the royal dynasty of the vandals, the Hastings, or one name amongst lots in that kind of sphere. 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? It's very hard to say.

“I think they're less important than the Goths, so the Goths are kind of illustriously”

example of a group who turn out to be really important and probably are quite important

in the world of the third and fourth 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. And counterwise, obviously the Romans, he didn't have this barbarian, but will we define them today as a Germanic culture? I mean, what do we kind of know about that?

So Germanic is a term that refers to the groups of languages that they spoke rather than to the peoples themselves. So they spoke in eastern Germanic dialect. It would see. There's a lot that we don't know about vandallic as a language, but it's probably related

to Gothic, which is in eastern Germanic language. Culturally speaking, it's really hard to say. I mean, there are an eye-nage community living within this Roman military sphere, so profoundly affected by both of those traditions, it's 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 pick up from the ground. So there are various different archaeologists working in Central Europe who've identified individual graves as being a vandallic 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. Well, as I do, and you're mentioning that, of course, you know, at that time within the Roman occupation in that area of the world, doing no much about that interaction between vandals and Roman soldiers who are living on that frontier of the Roman Empire in those earlier centuries.

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 Federer is being incorporated within the Roman army in a range of different ways, but we can't say very much at all about the vandall specifically in that world.

“If anything, they're 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 emperor's or incursions of barbarian groups, but that's about as far as it goes. And in some cases, I think that's past 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. So even early medieval historians, in fact, writing a hundred years or so after the fall of the vandall empire, or the fall of the vandall kingdom, suggested the vandals must have come from glorious origins in Scandinavia or something, as they suppose the ghosts did as well, but I think there's possibly a kind of false bit of reasoning, and the same

thing that 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. I think it's more interesting if, 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

the other level of some other perhaps tribes or peoples who lived in that area of the world, that you mentioned early fifth century beginning of the fifth century. Yeah.

“What happens then that makes the vandals almost go to the next level?”

So there's a crucial series of events that take place in the very first years of the

fifth century, so in the four hundredths that are related to crises within the east and west and halves of the Roman Empire, movements of troops around the western empire and particular in a succession of usepations 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, swaves, who are

another barbarian group, and the improbably named Allands, who are another barbarian group, all of whom supposedly cross the Rhine on New Year's Day 406, and come into Northern Gaul, so the Northern Territories of what's now France, 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 or a chronicler's

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 militarized.

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,

that they need protection from these other groups of rebels or usepers or barbarians who are wandering around the place, so effectively the vandals, swaves and Allands, 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 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.

The art particularly well attested battles, but we just hear of references to conflicts in the chronicles of the historians and so on, and of those 10 battles, the vandals lose the first 9. 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.

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?”

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 fifth century writer, Christian writer called

Selvian 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.

This is not to end the play the fact that this is a large armed group of men and their followers who are moving around and creating a major bit of difference to the balance of social life and these regions. Well that's really interesting right there. I mean the whole, the nature of this vandal group that's crossed the line and then makes

their way through golden 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?”

This is a much debated topic, so different historians have different views on this. My view is that this is primarily best viewed as a relatively small war band, 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 4020s 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 integral and then into Spain. But actually in some ways, I think both schools have thought agree that we're talking about a fairly similar order of magnitude of individuals here, that 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 4020s 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 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 still is relatively sized field army in the later Roman world, and again moving into non-militarised regions like southern gold or Spain or North Africa, they can have

a big effect. 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.

Absolutely, and there's not going to the way the Roman Empire had always been organized

to have the army parked up in the northern regions quite far away from the rich provinces. 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 to 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 enclaves to clear themselves independent of Rome effectively. One other question on the Vandals before, kind of focusing on how they'd become so prominent

Do we know how they fought?

Are we should we be imagining lots of horse men or most people on foot, or do we not have that information available? There is one or two suggestions in the sources that the Vandals depend on very heavily on the cavalry, and the islands, one of the groups that they are allied with in 406, and

“we're actually the most important of the three Greeks as they came into Spain, may have”

been a similar group to the Hunts, and they may have originally been pastoralist, no match from the Ukrainian Stepp, although it's not completely clear that this identity continued with them, but it's possible that cavalry was a significant part of fighting force, but we have very little information on the actual battles that the Vandals were involved at fair enough.

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From Chuda Executioners, an ancient Egyptian death ritual to which trials and folklore feel transported back in time on After Dark, out every Monday and Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts. "And guess what, we're also now on YouTube, After Dark, a podcast from History Hit." "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?" "Well, initially actually, they get the short straw. The Hastings get the short straw when Spain is divided up between the various different

“groups, and it's the islands who get the most important parts of Spain.”

And another group of vandals called the Siling vandals get the rich territory of Biotica in the south. In fact, ironically, it's because there's a group of Goths of Visigoths who are sent by the Western Roman Emperor into Spain to turf out these barbarians, and the generalists are customary doing that, that actually clears the path of the Hastings, this small group of vandals

who turn out to be this dominant group over the course of the century of the follows, and in effect, they're able to occupy the vacuum that's left by the defeated silings and islands, and then by the Visigoths as they move out of Spain again, and are eventually settled in acutéing in southwestern France. So yet again, the kind of Hastings find themselves the happy inheritors of this really

complicators, kind of brownie and motion of military activity and revolt and alliance that dominates the history of the western Roman Empire in the early 5th century. And if Southern Spain is such a fruitful part of the empire that they now have for themselves, there's a big question, why do they decide to then look across the straits of Gibraltar

“to North Africa when actually they've only got a really good place to live?”

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 totes of Africa pro-Consularis

in New Media, so basically what's now Northern Tunisia and North Eastern Algeria, we're

basically the richest part of the Western Roman Empire for the height of the Imperial period. They had survived quite well through the social and political crises of the 3rd and 4th centuries, and continued to produce this vast surplus and were extremely undemilitarized. To in some sense, as it seemed presumably like right for the plucking, there was a small

military presence there, as a general called Boniface, who through a variety of different political issues winds up falling out of favor with the ruling West and Emperor, and some later historians suggest that Boniface recruited the vandals and brought them across to help in his revolt. This seems to me as a kind of retrospective, it's a later explanation for how the vandals

managed to make it into North Africa in the 1st 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. And who is the figure who is leading the vandals at that point?

the vandals that we know a lot about, you know, a little bit about his brother apparently

“the two of them rule 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 in North Africa and kingdom frameself, finds a position if you're 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 mine, 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. Yes, it's interesting. When you look at the Huns compared to the vandals, you have one which is very prominent in art. And today and the other which has fallen out a bit and it's the same with the Tila and

Geyserick and we'll talk more about Geyserick 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. It's 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 move their way from basically what's now the northern coast of Morocco along the northern Algerian coastline and into the rich territories of New Midia and Africa, besieging the city of hipo Regis where the famous Bishop Augustine was on his deathbed and eventually receiving the city in a peace treaty with the western empire of 435 and hipo became their first capital.

There was a peace treaty at that point between Geyserick and the Emperor Valentinian III, which Geyserick seems to have broken. He moved further east and captured Carthage in 439 and he was a 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, Geyserick 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 as a vandal period.

And we should also clarify, this is a very Roman looking Carthage.

“This isn't any Phoenician influence of back in the Punic times when I think like that.”

No, so the Phoenician city of Carthage have been destroyed at the end of the third Punic war in 146 BC. It is around about half millennium earlier. It was re-founded as a Roman city in 46 BC and then rose again to become an incredibly important center 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 are 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.

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

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 Western Roman Empire and the arrival of figures like Geyserick. You mentioned how following the full of Carthage is so much the year zero for the Vandal Kingdom. But how long does it take for the Vandal's to almost kind of implement their own ways to kind of

“form the Kingdom to put their administration right there in the front?”

It sort of depends what you mean. It takes Geyserick 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 warland, warband 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 Geyserick 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 Vandal's, 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 Geyserick signs his second and much more lasting peace treaty with the Western Empire.

So in some sense, as 442 represents the point of 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

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 Geyserick'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 latter in

there are lots of individuals that we see in the sources who are holding what would seem to be officers that are very similar to the old provincial system that govern the Roman Empire and so on.

“Essentially Geyserick, 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 a blocked political change. And thanks a little to Sensei, see it with Alexander the great in his successes with the Persian administration, which was affected and so they kept

ads as well. Absolutely. All Rome coming into Egypt, the 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, it's for breaking the taxation system that it 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. Geistering 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 always feels like Geisterick, he's not the most trustworthy guy.

If you have a piece treaty with him, especially if you're a Roman Emperor, it's not guaranteed he's going to abide by it for very long. 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 5th century. Valentinian, who is the Roman Emperor at the time, did what he could to include Geisterick within his circle, including the

betrothal of his daughter, you do see her to Geisterick's son, Hunterick. So in that sense, he's bringing him into the imperial family, and that proves to be relatively successful, at least the

“piece 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 Edocia, that causes Geisterick to turn against the Western Empire again. And how does he turn against the Western Roman Empire? He turns against the Western Roman Empire quite spectacular, 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 in the 1st piece treated, Geisterick 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,

clundering a huge amount of wealth from the city, 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 70s, Geisterick took it back in 455 and brought it back to Carthage, but along with that portable wealth he also took a large number of human hostages, including the princess Edocia, who he brought back to Africa to marry his

son, Unerick finally. Wow, okay, that's pretty insane. It was a spectacular statement of his own power, if I took it. I absolutely, I need to. We all hear of the Gothic sack of Rome by Allerick, but the Vandalic sack of Rome once here, it's overshadowed, you don't know, and yet the significance of it may be arguably is more significant than the Gothic sack, but because it happened afterwards, it's less a focus on. Yeah, the Gothic sack sent greater shock waves around the world

simply because the Eternal City hadn't been psyched 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

occupying that position, but after 455, the political centrality of Rome, which is just about

been holding on over the course of the last generation or two, really starts to get a clips. And guys, we're actually involved in self in some of the political machinations around these

“later emperors, and one of the people who briefly holds that position, who's now a secret called”

Alibrius, was actually among the hostages, who were brought back to Carthage by Geiserick, apparently with the aim of installing one of his puppets as Western Roman Empire. Emperor, so the guy is thinking he's playing four dimensional chess here in some sense. Absolutely, and I want to let you remember, so the Vandals, the origins in Hungary region near the Danube, now controlling this massive North African Empire. We've also mentioned they're

raiding attacking these various islands of the Mediterranean and the Italian mainland.

It always 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. Yeah, there is no trace whatsoever of any type of maritime skill in Vandal history before the 420s, so the middle of the 420s they attack the Baleric Islands. Later 420s they're crossing into North Africa, but it's only really with the occupation of Carthage, the capture of the Cartagenean fleet, that they really made the most of this. They occupy Sardinia and Sardinia

remains effectively Vandal with a short interruption until the end of the Vandal kingdom, bits have Sicily remained Vandal throughout that period as well. Corsica does too. So, plausibly this is a Mediterranean kingdom, rather than just in North African woman.

“Do you think they gain reputation for piracy or is that just hostile sources attacking the Vandals?”

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 power base with some horror, and, in fact, one contemporary writer who's writing in the middle of the fifth century in

Gaul, a poet called Sardinia's Polynaris describes this as being a fourth-punic wall. So, there is a genuine fear of this, and also to weird references to fears of Vandal attacks, even in some quite far-flung regions of eastern 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, 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. He's really, really interesting still of into, and if you were someone visiting Vandal Carfish, a trader or maybe from the eastern Mediterranean, as you're walking down the streets, I mean, would you still see in use that the Roman architecture that had been there for

“hundreds of years previously, would the amphitheater still be being used for Roman style games?”

I mean, how much of those traditions do we think were continued by guys, Rick and the Vandals, you know, decades after they create this Vandal kingdom? There's an excellent question, and in some instances, the changes that we're 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 fifth century, rather than the presence of the

Vandals changing anything specifically. So, you wanted to have 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

to 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 of the 6th century, so writing in and about Vandal Africa, especially Vandal Carthage, which describe, for example, various different pantomime, various different actors, tariot racers, and grandeurs, or real games, taking place

within the amphitheater and the circus. Whether or not these actually happened is, again, a move 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 fifth and early 6th century. So, for the most part, culturally, it's maintained this cosmopolitanism, it's maintained this vibrancy,

it continues to be extremely wealthy throughout the Vandal period. We're talking about wealth, do we know much about the Vandal economy or how they ran it? Essentially, what we know about the Vandal economy comes from archaeology. You said the vast amounts of ceramics or the pottery that was clearly made in North Africa and was shipped around the Mediterranean world. So, some of this is the remains of amphory, 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,

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. 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. Occundity of individual farm sites and wanted to other

sources also suggest that although there are some changes in the way farm to run for the most parts of the continent. We mentioned how the 530s were definitely going to get to their very soon don't you worry, but I feel before we get there, we've got to talk about Christianity, because this is such a massive part of the Vandal story. When the Vandals reach North Africa and they forge their kingdom, as almost background to this, how prominent, how embedded is Christianity

“in this part of the Roman Empire. So North Africa is one of the most important Christian regions”

within the Empire. He had converted to Christianity or bits of North Africa, had converted to Christianity relatively early. He's clearly attested in the 2nd century, and some of the most important Christian

thinkers were North African in origin, including saying 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 and 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. 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 organization of the Catholic church

other than nice scene 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 modern and persecution, and that proves to be a really toxic inheritance for the vandals to come into. 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? So the vandals work Christian. It seems extremely likely that the vast majority of vandals professed a form of Christianity that we conventionally call Aryan Christianity, or sometimes Homoian Christianity. Now this is as distinct from nice scene Christianity or Homocian 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 fourth century. But as we get into the fifth century, it's the Nicene or Catholic or Homocian form of Christianity, which is the dominant form within the empire, and the vandals are Aryans or Homoians, and this creates some difficulty. They're not by any means the only Homoians, this is extremely, or the only Aryans, 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 Aryan Christianity in a population that is both predominantly nice scene and also extremely shaped by these traditions of modern and persecution, as I was just saying. And those two things create some pretty significant tensions over the period that follows. 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 of this Aryan Christianity? So guys, 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 Aryan Christianity is dominant within cathage and is the one that he prefers his immediate vandal followers to profess, but for the most part he seems to have allowed by seeing 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 vangelical. 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, and understandably, but these often included, for example, removing people from their

office if they refuse to convert to Aryanism. So he wants the people in his court to be Aryan for the most part, but that's about the limit of it. Things change a little bit in the

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“Does it feel like from the surviving sources that those successes of guys, Rick,”

they almost struggle to live up to this great Titan who is the first rule of the Vandal Kingdom,

and these successes are the ones who are more besets by problems, whether it's religious problems, or foreign affair problems, but they can't really live up to the good times almost of guys, Rick, and North Africa. To an extent, yeah, we know more about guys, Rick than we do about his success, it's probably because he lived for a long time. Hunterich, 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, he was a hunterich, nephew is an individual called Guntherman. 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 rule called Thrasamund, who ruled basically at the turn of the 6th

century, from the last years of the 5th century down to Route 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. To the one of the Catholic writers who describes Thrasamund's rule and describes his persecution, an individual called Fogentius, who also described 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 subject. And this is also the period where we really see that effleressence of Latin literature, including lots of poems that were written celebrating Thrasamund's benevolent rule. So there is a tendency within the scholarship, as a result of that, to see Thrasamund 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 Geiserix, and that was definitely after Geiserix death. The Vandals are much less influential on a global stage, but Africa is still doing a care under several of his success. Okay, so following Thrasamund, this one which renaissance prince for some of the scholars that you mentioned there, what happens? He doesn't feel like the Vandal kingdom lasts much longer. That's right, so there are two really interesting chapters to come before the day no more,

if you like. And the first is the rule of an individual called Hilderick.

“Now, you may remember earlier that I mentioned Geiserix's unhunteric”

was married to a Roman princess called Udocia. They had a son called Hilderick.

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 primogenesia, where it always goes to the eldest son of the ruling monarch, Hilderick 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. So he wasn't your traditional king at the peak of his military powers. But equally, he could claim descent both from Geiserix 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 atheodocian. And saw himself as being a natural ally of the eastern empress, especially

closely bound to one another, 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 Gelemma, who would in the normal scheme of things have become the next Vandal king anyway, but was a distant cousin of Hilderick, but he decided to hasten things along, overthrew Hilderick and seized power for himself. And this then created a whole series of military crises across the different parts of the Vandal kingdom. We're still pretty big at this point, but there's a revolt in

Sardinia, there's a revolt in the coastal town of Leipzig's magna, which is on the coast of modern Libya, and also some problems with Berber and Mourish groups living in the interior. Gelemma 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 Belosarius in the late summer of 533, originally just to go to North

Africa and reinstall Hilderick as the rightful king of Africa. But in fact, he winds up taking out

Gelemma, and the Vandal's reoccupying cathage within about two weeks, and eventually finally defeating

Gelemma the following spring in 534. To 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 Belosarius in 533 is taken out in a fortnight, and that's basically the end of the Vandal King. Wow!

“But what happens to the Vandal people after Belosarius takes their capital takes cathage?”

It's a kind of surprisingly anti-climactic end to quiet and impressive history in some centres, so Gelemma continues to resist for about another six months before eventually he surrenders, and is brought back to Constantinople in Belosarius as triumph, along with a lot of the plunder which includes incidentally the plunder that Geiserick 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 married into the occupying army, but for the most parts, 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 Vandal at all. There are one or two funery appetizers, basically, two stones that are erected to individuals with conspicuously Germanic names that continue to appear into the late 6th 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 arionism or their homoionism, 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 Maurish groups, who are also rising to prominence in this region. It is fascinating as we mentioned right at the start, they're brutal rise and they're time in the limelight and then this sudden disappearance and fading from view. Why is it back today? The name vandals as these ancient people is more puts the sides compared to the huns and the Goths, and yet the word "avandal and vandalism" has come about and is so prominent.

“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 7th 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 5th and 6th century as being the time when England was founded by the angles and the Saxons. The time when

France was being founded by the Francky and the time when the Burgundians established themselves into Afghanistan 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 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 in the early modern period where people are aware of them,

but they're always slightly peripheral to the big story. That change is 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 art work that's associated with the church and associated with a king gets plundered and destroyed and there are attempts by the Revolutionary

inquiry trying to explain precisely what's going on and curb this destruction. This is a

churchman called Gregwar, the Bishop of Law, and he coins the turn 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 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. Certainly much more helpful than the Frankie who are associated with the French or the Goths who are associated with

different types of architecture. To 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 in German dictionaries within a few years of Bishop

Gregwar 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's standard for itself. I'm not comparing you to one of these barbarians of the fifth century. And in fact, we frequently forgot that these were originally fifth century barbarians. The last facility not least, you have written a book all about the vandals,

which is called 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. Brilliant. Andy, with that, you just go to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come to the podcast today. Thank you, it's been fun. Well there you go. There was Professor Andy Merrill's from Lester 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, where we've got episodes on the Goths. We've got an episode on the Franks also on the Saxons and 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 sort of barbarian groups. These barbarian threats of the late Roman Empire. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the ancients. If you're enjoying the show please make sure to follow us on Spotify or

wherever you get to a podcast. That really helps us you'll be doing us a big favor. If it be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, what we do 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. (engine revving)