Vandals

Few ancient peoples have had their name turned into an everyday insult as thoroughly as the Vandals, a group of Germanic tribes who travelled from central Europe across Gaul and Spain to North Africa in the early fifth century. There, under King Genseric, they built a kingdom centred on Carthage that controlled the western Mediterranean islands and sacked Rome in 455, until the East Roman Empire conquered it in 533–534.

Pliny the Elder, writing around 70 CE, used the name Vandili for one of the great groupings of Germanic peoples, and Tacitus mentions them in a passage on Germanic origin legends. They seem then to have lived between the Elbe and the Vistula, and archaeologists link them with the Przeworsk culture of what is now Poland, which probably covered several peoples. Two branches stand out later: the Silingi, perhaps in Silesia, and the Hasdingi, who entered Dacia as Roman allies during the Marcomannic Wars of 166–180. Their language, poorly known, belonged to the East Germanic branch alongside Gothic. Medieval links between Vandals and Wends, and various Scandinavian homelands proposed for them, are not accepted by modern scholarship or remain unproven.

Pushed by the Goths, Alans and Huns, Vandal groups moved west in the early fifth century. After heavy losses against the Franks, they crossed the Rhine with the Alans on 31 December 405, probably over the frozen river, and ravaged Gaul. On 13 October 409 they crossed the Pyrenees, and Roman authorities settled the Hasdingi in the north-west and the Silingi in the south. The Visigoths, fighting on Rome's behalf, crushed the Silingi in 417 and the Alans in 418, and the survivors placed themselves under the Hasdingian king Gunderic. Later Vandal rulers called themselves King of the Vandals and Alans.

In 429 Genseric, king from 428, led his people into North Africa. Procopius put their numbers at 80,000; Peter Heather estimates an army of perhaps 15,000 to 20,000. Augustine died in besieged Hippo Regius in 430, and a treaty in 435 gave the Vandals part of Numidia and Mauretania. In 439 Genseric broke it and took Carthage on 19 October, reportedly while its people were at the races. His fleet seized Sardinia, Corsica and the Balearics and raided widely. In 455, after the murder of Valentinian III, the Vandals sacked Rome for two weeks and carried off the empress and her daughters. A huge joint Roman expedition was defeated off Cape Bon in 468, and in 476 Genseric secured a lasting peace with Constantinople.

The Vandals were Arian Christians, and their kings at times exiled Catholic bishops and confiscated property, while others, such as Hilderic, allowed religious freedom. Latin remained the language of government, and Vandal-era poets worked in Roman traditions. Ancient writers described widespread destruction, but archaeology at Carthage shows continuity in streets and buildings and a thriving trade in African pottery.

Defeats by Berber neighbours weakened the kingdom. When Gelimer deposed Hilderic in 530, Justinian I intervened. Belisarius won at Ad Decimum and at Tricamarum in December 533, and Gelimer surrendered in 534. Some Vandal men were enrolled in cavalry units sent to the Persian frontier, some settled among the Berbers, others joined the Gothic kingdoms or married Byzantine soldiers, and the Vandals ceased to exist as a separate people.

Writers who idealised Rome blamed the Vandals for its ruin, though historians doubt they were more destructive than other invaders. In 1794 Henri Grégoire, bishop of Blois, coined "vandalisme" for the destruction of art during the French Revolution, and the word spread across Europe. The kings of Denmark and Sweden long carried a Latin title as kings of the Vandals, meaning the Wends, until 1972 and 1973.

Our 500 map draws the Vandals' North African realm, an approximate outline around Carthage in today's Tunisia and eastern Algeria, with the islands it held, opposite the Ostrogoths in Italy.