The Vandals: a victim of Roman cancel culture?

But wanton destructiveness is far from an accurate descriptor of the Vandals. Once settled in North Africa they flourished through a mutually beneficial integration with the existing Roman and Berber population. Much like the Goths and Franks in Europe, they simply replaced the former Roman elites at the top of society with their own leaders, keeping existing political, economic and social structures intact. North Africa then prospered for a century. Eventually, the Vandals managed to navigate their only true point of contention with the local population: religion, learning to balance their own adherence to Arian Christianity with the locally dominant Catholic and Donatist churches.

Feeding the Roman empire

Retelling the story of the Vandals in North Africa also helps to reinterpret the history of the region in late antiquity. This was the richest part of the Roman empire – and continued to be supremely wealthy after the Vandal conquest. In particular, the region from Tunisia through to Morocco was the agricultural heart of the western Mediterranean, with a hugely fertile 250km strip that, in season, stretched north to south from the coast to the Saharan fringe.

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Picture the verdant Mediterranean shoreline; the lush green plateaus of the Atlas Mountains; the seasonally abundant high plains; and the purple-fringed valleys of the Aures mountains. It was an area that grew much of the agricultural produce that fed the wider Roman empire, even after the region fell to the Vandals. It was also home to some of the emperor’s biggest imperial estates, which Vandal nobles took over, and prosperous cities of all kinds.

A barbaric reputation

To the Romans, however, the Vandals were barbarians. This is a difficult word to use in our age; it is associated with a 19th and 20th century imperial trope which has a very clear ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality. This was unambiguously the case in late antiquity, too.

The Roman's attitude to the Vandals was perhaps more akin to xenophobia than racism. It’s important to remember that the Roman empire was very multicultural, spanning three continents. It was also Mediterranean in nature, with many of its inhabitants having different skin colours. No matter what your origins across the empire, if you were a Roman citizen (or peregrini in provinces outside of Italy until the AD 212 Constitutio Antoniniana under Caracalla) then you were part of the Roman project.

Wanton destructiveness is far from an accurate descriptor of the Vandals

Anyone not part of the empire was considered ‘other’ – and often in the most dehumanising of ways. The Vandals were no exception, and here the Romans had a particularly extreme view. This was largely because the Vandals beat the Romans in open battle more often than not and – with the conquest of North Africa – they inflicted a truly crippling blow on the western Roman Empire.

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We have little evidence for what the Vandals were like by their own account. Unlike their Germanic contemporaries in Europe (for example the Franks or Saxons), the Vandals have no surviving voice (such was the scale of their later defeat in the sixth century by the Byzantines under Belisarius, and the later scouring of Roman and Vandals culture in the region by the Arab conquest). Therefore, understanding how the Romans viewed barbarians (and specifically the Vandals) helps benchmark their reputation today – and also allows us to challenge it.

The real story

What do we actually know about the Vandals? At the point the Vandals are first mentioned in classical literature, they were resident in northern Europe. Their peoples featured two dominant branches – the Hasdingi and Silingi – and their early story is part of the complex narrative of barbarian incursions through the western Roman empire in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, by which time entire peoples from beyond the Rhine were beginning to settle on Roman territory. Here, we see the Vandals famously crossing the frozen Rhine on New Year’s Eve AD 406 along with their Alan and Suebi allies; this unlikely coalition then aggressively drove through prosperous Gaul, where they took advantage of the instability caused by the British usurper emperor Constantine III.

The Vandals then migrated en masse over the Pyrenees into Spain in AD 409, where they settled for two decades, until Rome cobbled together an alliance with the Germanic Visigoths to challenge them. The latter, under their King Wallia, almost wiped out the Silingi Vandals and the Alans who’d travelled south with them. Their survivors sought refuge with Gunderic, king of the Hasdingi Vandals, who finally managed to repel their Roman and German assailants in Baetica in southern Spain.

Mighty deeds

However, the story of the Vandals becomes truly fantastical when Gunderic’s brother and successor, Gaiseric, led his people even further south, this time to a different continent: Africa. This was the only region of the empire yet to suffer the predations of Germans, Goths or Sassanid Persians.

Crossing the Strait of Gibraltar to Mauretania Tingitana in AD 429, the initial Vandal expedition may have been at the behest of the Romans themselves, with Boniface – the comes Africae [a commander of Roman troops in Africa] of Rome’s North African diocese – allegedly inviting them over as foederate [allied] mercenaries. However, it soon became a flood of migrants, with 80,000 Vandals and Alans quickly arriving. When the Romans tried to resist this human tide, the Vandals fought back and overwhelmed them, forcing a treaty on Rome in AD 435. This ceded the provinces of Mauretania Tingitana, Mauretania Caesariensis, Mauretania Tabia, parts of Numidia Cirtensis and Numidia Militiana to Gaiseric.

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The Romans did retain a rump African territory in the old Carthaginian heartlands around the Gulf of Tunis and in Tripolitania, but when inevitably the treaty collapsed four years later, Gaiseric led his mounted warriors on a thunderous advance along the coastal plain to Carthage, capital of Roman Africa. This soon fell to the Vandals, ending the official Roman presence in the region.

The African Vandal kingdom was promptly declared, with Gaiseric its head. Here, the Vandal king’s achievement cannot be overstated: he had become the ruler of a vast and super-rich territory on which much of the Roman Mediterranean still depended for agricultural produce, and commerce more broadly.

The Vandals soon got to work assimilating local Roman political, economic and social structures with their own – though here, the Romans were clearly in denial, with Gaiseric’s kingdom not recognized in the west until AD 442, and the east until AD 472. It truly was a Vandal heaven, with the Germanic elite sitting atop a highly organised Roman administration with centuries of experience, extracting wealth from hundreds of kilometres of rolling green hills and plains (at least, in season) between the coast and the Sahara.

The decline of the Vandals

Sadly for the Vandals, this era of North African prosperity and harmony was not to last. The Byzantine Empire (the old Roman east) refused to give up its dream of reconquering what contemporary writers still called a verdant paradise. By the early AD 530s the recovery of North Africa had long been a fixation with the emperors in Constantinople. Eventually one emerged who not only had the ambition to succeed where others had failed, but also the means to achieve victory. This was the supremely ambitious Justinian I, a ruler obsessed with legacy, and his general Belisarius, the leading field commander of the age. After an audacious landing 16km from Carthage in AD 533, a lightning Byzantine campaign secured victory, with the last Vandal king Gelimer surrendering in AD 534.

A new power in the region

What followed was a brief, century-long interlude when the Byzantine empire tried to re-assert its rule on territory it now called the ‘Exarchate of Africa’. Many towns and cities from this period include one common feature: a rapidly built fort (some huge, but many tiny) made from recycling local building materials. In the former Roman colonia of Madauros in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains in southern Algeria, for example, a fort was constructed so quickly atop of the city’s old forum that its north wall is actually the old public theatre, built in the early third century AD by Septimius Severus.

Many of the Byzantine forts in North Africa feature row after row of stone-built internal water troughs, and have surrounding watchtowers, again all built from recycled stone. This has informed my view that the Byzantines spent much of their short re-occupation of the region in a defensive posture behind the walls of their fortifications, with flying cavalry columns darting here and there to pacify the local Berber population.

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This had huge implications. When the Arab Conquest swept through the region in the seventh century AD, many Berbers welcomed their new conquerors. Thus today, North Africa is not part of the western world, which still features many links to the period when the Romans dominated the Mediterranean, but instead part of the Arab world: an indirect result of the Byzantine reconquest of Vandal North Africa.

In my research I have tried to portray the Vandals in a new light, telling the story of a people of antiquity who were so much more than heathen warriors – the worst of the worst – and tackling 1,400 years of Roman cancel culture. Such was the power of the Roman empire, even in decline, with its ability to narrate the world they lived in – to the detriment of all others.

Dr Simon Elliott FSA is an historian, archaeologist and broadcaster. He has written numerous books on subjects related to classical history, with his most recent publication called Vandal Heaven: Reinterpreting Post-Roman North Africa (2024, Casemate Publishers)