The Dark Ages Podcast

476 to 533

The Vandal Kingdom has had its ups and its downs since the fall  of the West. Four kings work to maintain Gaiseric’s legacy in the face of a hostile populace and a looming threat in the East.

Today’s episode is kind of a continuation of the last episode, bringing us up to date with what’s been happening in the Vandal kingdom between 476 and the death of Theodoric in 526. We really haven’t checked in with the Vandals much since Gaiseric kicked the Roman Governor out of Carthage and set up his kingdom. That means that we’ve got fifty years of material to catch up on. That’s one of the reasons I separated this episode from the Magical Tour. The other is that I wanted this information to be relatively fresh in everyone’s minds as we head into the next series of episodes, since we’re heading into the wars of Justinian, and facts on the ground in Africa are going to be very relevant.

I want to begin with a quick reminder about the geography of the region. Moving west to east, we talked about Mauritania in the last episode. Gaiseric, the first and greatest of the Vandal kings, maintained nominal sovereignty over the region, but the distance meant that his influence was weak, and eroded away quickly under his successors.

Moving east, the first section of Africa proper that we encounter is Numidia, centered on Hippo Regius, in modern Algeria. The land was fertile and pretty heavily settled by Vandal landholders, especially the eastern half. The center of the kingdom, Africa Proconsularis, contained mighty Carthage with its great port. It maps more or less onto the northern half of Tunisia, with a slice of Algeria to boot. This was the wealthiest chunk of the kingdom, and the area where Vandal settlement was most concentrated. Moving south, into what would become southern Tunisia, we find the region of Byzacena. Vandal settlement thins out considerably as we move south, with only a few garrisons stationed in these outlying areas. Lastly, along the coast of modern Libya, the strip of land called Tripolitania, centered on, guess where, Tripoli, hardly contains any Vandals at all, and is bound to Carthage mainly by fear of interference than actual administrative control.

Gaiseric

The Vandals’ great king, Gaiseric, outlasted the empire in the west by a few months. He had spent the last two years of his life shoring up his position and planning for the future. A peace treaty with Constantinople in 474 ensured security from that direction for the moment. He had ensured the stability of his own reign by promoting lower ranking Vandal families into important positions, bypassing and undercutting the traditional nobility. After more than 40 years, that policy had created an elite caste that was wholly loyal to Gaiseric, and ensured stability within the Vandal community.

Relations with the native Roman population were much less so. Gaiseric didn’t have the advantage of a Liberius or a Cassiodorus, as Theodoric the Great did. There was no talented Roman administrator willing to cross the line to aid the Vandal takeover. Or, alternatively, the Vandal elites were unwilling to allow the conquered people that much prestige in the new order. It may have been a combination of both. Either way, the land redistribution from Roman to Vandal elites were much more contentious than in Italy, partly because Africa contained less imperial land that could be divvied up. The religious differences between newcomers and native were also more difficult. While Theodoric’s religious policy was largely live and let live, the policy of the Vandal kings was in general much more hard line. Gaiseric himself seems to have mainly invoked religious differences when he sought to punish subjects who were politically difficult, but as we will see, several of his successors were much more ideologically motivated and sought to actively promote their Arianism at the expense of the Catholic majority. Remember that the Vandal kingdom and the army are essentially the same thing, Roman subjects bore little to no loyalty to the new rulers, and the Vandals’ aggressive Arianism seems to have kept the two communities even more segregated than was the case in the Ostrogothic kingdom. Also, the Vandal army was mainly settled in the especially rich areas of Eastern Numidia and Western Proconsularis. Byzacena and Tripolitania, as already noted, were very lightly garrisoned.

The greatest strength of the Vandal kingdom lay in its control of the sea. No other western power could compete with the fleet that Gaiseric had inherited when he took over the provinces. He wisely maintained that fleet and did everything he could to prevent others from threatening his control of the western Med. You remember how the Roman fleet put together by Majorian to take Africa back was surprised and burned in the harbor. The eastern empire was the only entity with the resources to mount a serious challenge, and after their defeat at the battle of Cape Bon, that threat was put to bed for nearly a hundred years. The successor states in the west certainly could not raise navies on the scale that would be needed, so there would be no need to worry about Visigoths or Franks, and while eventually the Ostrogoths would be capable of action in Sicily, they would never be capable of attacking Africa directly. Geopolitically then, the Vandal kings main concerns were the Moorish tribes in the mountains and deserts, the Eastern Empire, and internal discontent.

By the time of his death in January 477, nearly 90 years old, Gaiseric had ruled the Vandals for almost 50 years. He had transformed their fortunes and remade their society. Few of his people would have been able to remember a time without him, but they knew that he had taken them from a wandering tribe with little power or prospect and made them into a power that could sack and humble Rome itself, and that had to be considered and included in the calculations of all the other players in the Mediterranean. He was the Vandal, revered in life, and after death a nearly religious figure. Who could replace such a king? 

He had a plan of his own, which he made very clear before his death. The kingship would remain in the hands of his clan, the Hasdings, but would not pass from father to son in a single line. He instituted a system that we call today agnatic seniority. The eldest of his sons would inherit the throne, and when he died, his eldest brother would take over. The oldest of Gaiseric’s descendants would be the heir, regardless of his exact descent. It was a variation on the Germanic principle of election from the noble pool, which avoided the dangerous periods that the Romans had suffered when their emperor was a minor, but kept the Hasdings in power. There would always be an experienced player in power. Whether there would always be a wise one, well, we’ll just see, won’t we?

Gaiseric had three surviving sons – Huneric, Theodoric (for crying out loud), and Genzon. Huneric was the eldest, and so the brass ring was his.

Huneric

Thanks to his father’s extraordinary longevity, Huneric was over 50 years old when he ascended the throne. He was married to Eudoxia, who you might remember was the daughter of Valentinian III, and had been taken captive during the sack of Rome in 455. Thanks to our entirely external sources, we don’t know much about his life before kingship. What we do know, in emphatic terms, is that Huneric was entirely committed to his people’s ancestral faith. Gaiseric had used religion as a tool, to keep power out of the hands of the disloyal, and to bind his own people closer together. Huneric, by contrast, seems to have been a true believer. In spite of that, he started off making some positive gestures toward Roman Catholicism, including allowing the election of a new bishop of Carthage. The see had been vacant for twenty four years. It only lasted a few years though. Perhaps pushed by what he saw as the continuing disloyalty of the populace, he set about promoting Arianism and denigrating and persecuting Catholics with a fervor that Gaiseric probably would have cautioned against. 

There was a political angle to the persecution as well, Huneric hadn’t abandoned that idea. By Gaiseric’s decree, when Huneric died he would be succeeded by his brother Theodoric (I know). Huneric swore to uphold his father’s wishes, and he held to that oath… right up to the minute his father died. Tell me you didn’t see this coming. Huneric called a meeting of his brothers and made a reasoned and impassioned argument that his own son Hilderic, should inherit the throne – I’m kidding, of course he didn’t do that. Instead he violently suppressed his brother’s family and supporters. Theodoric’s wife and eldest son were executed, while Theodoric himself was exiled, and died while away. Nobles who supported the unfortunate brother were executed as well. Not even the Arian clergy were immune, as Huneric amply demonstrated when he ordered the patriarch of Carthae, Iucundus, burned at the stake for his support of Theodoric.

Huneric was free to focus on his internal opponents thanks to the strong international position Gaiseric had left him. All the same, from this point on, the borders of Vandal Africa begin to contract. Moorish tribes raided deeper and deeper into the settled territories, and found smaller and smaller garrisons to oppose them. During the conquest, Gaiseric had demolished the walls of all the African towns except Carthage. That denied strongholds to potential rebels, but the trade offs were obvious, as outlying settlements were left much more vulnerable to Moorish attack. It would have more long-term consequences too, but we’ll get to those. Toward the end of his time in power, the Moorish kingdom in Arras successfully broke free from his control. I mentioned this one in the last episode.

It may be overstating it to call Huneric’s time on the throne a reign of terror – if you were outside of the targeted groups life probably seemed to pretty much carry on as normal after Geiseric died – be that as it may, it all ended suddenly when Huneric died without warning in 484. He was in his late fifties or early sixties, and had been king of the Vandals for seven tumultuous years. Thanks to his strenuous efforts to secure the throne for his son, Huneric was succeeded by his nephew Gunthamund, son of Genzon. Whomp whomp. 

Gunthamund

Gunthamund’s reign is extremely poorly recorded. What we can say for sure is that he seems to have eased off on the religious persecutions. Why isn’t clear, he was certainly just as much an Arian as Huneric had been. It may simply have been down to general antipathy to everything his uncle had done. There is some evidence that zealous Arian clergy may have carried on a-persecutin’ on their own initiative though, and Gunthamund did very little to stop them. It was on Gunthamund’s watch that Theodoric overthrew Odoacer. Gunthamund moved to take advantage of the chaos by launching an attack to increase Vandal territory in Sicily, we know very little about how that campaign played out, but not well for the Vandals was certainly the short version. The Vandals were driven off the island completely, giving the Ostrogoths the resources to maintain the kingdom we’ve already heard so much about. The mysterious reign of mysterious Gunthamund ended mysteriously in September of 496, when he died. It’s not known exactly how old he was when he died, and had ruled the Vandals mysteriously for about 12 years. 

Thrasamund

There was no fiddle-faddle with the succession this time. 

Gunthamund’s brother Thrasamund became the next king of the Vandals, just as Gaiseric would have wanted.

Thrasamund was another true believer. He believes in the Arian creed and believed that other Christians were in error. His religious policy was less brutal repression and more coerced conversion. He seemed to want converts to Arianism, and there were some, to do so because they truly believed that the creed had won the argument. It’s impossible to say how many Romans converted to Arianism during the Vandals rule. It was enough to be concerning to the Catholic Church at large though. Some probably converted to avoid persecution, others to find advancement, and a few may have genuinely changed their minds. Thrasamund offers incentives for conversion, tax relief or official positions, for example, and the rate of conversion during his reign increased. Let’s not get carried away though, Arians were still very much in the minority. 

While he held out a carrot with one hand, the other still kept a stick hidden behind his back. Catholic bishops who made a nuisance of themselves would be exiled and not replaced. Those who passed on were also not replaced, a general policy of attrition worked its way through the catholic hierarchy, to the point nearly of crisis.

In 508, sixty bishoprics around Africa defied the royal ban and elected new bishops. All sixty were rounded up and shipped off to Sardinia – still a Vandal territory. Sardinia was far enough away to keep these churchmen from making trouble for Carthage, but also far enough away that Carthage had little practical control over them. With these sixty, and the dozens that had come before them, Thrasamund thus inadvertently established the island as a center for Christian thought. The community even produced a Pope, Symmachus, who was one of the popes involved in the Acacian Schism. Oddly, while suppressing bishops and priests, Thrasamund left monasteries alone, several new ones were founded and old ones grew in size and influence during his reign. We’ll talk about the growing phenomenon of monasticism sometime in the relatively near future.

Theodoric the Great sought to create a web of alliances to keep his kingdom safe and spread his influence through the Germanic Kingdoms. I’ve talked about this ad nauseam, of course, and here we are again. In 493, Amalafrida, the widowed sister of the Ostrogothic king arrived in Carthage and married king Thrasamund. As a dowry she brought the port of Lilybaeum, on the very western tip of Sicily. She was accompanied by 5,000 soldiers as well. The last time we talked about this, I suggested that these men were here as an implicit threat to keep Thrasimund in line, and that’s one interpretation found in the scholarship. There are other problems with this though. How could the commander of these soldiers communicate effectively with Theodoric, which would be necessary for any kind of police action to work in a timely way. It’s possible that Amalafrida was well enough acquainted with her brother’s mind to act as his representative to them. There’s a few lines in Cassiodorus’ letters that suggest that she was well versed in Ostrogothic policies and prepared to offer her opinion when asked. When Thrasamund warmly received the exiled Visigothic Prince Gesalic, he received a diplomatic earful from Theodoric, including the rebuke: “We are sure that you cannot have taken counsel in this matter with your wife, who would neither have liked to see her brother injured, nor the fair fame of her husband tarnished by such doubtful intrigues.” The glimpses offered of Amalafrida, fleeting though they are, give the impression of a woman well aware of her own position and confident in her opinions.

An alternative view though, makes the gift of these five thousand seem like a much more altruistic gesture, but to explain it, I need to tell you about the revolt of Cabaon.

Cabaon’s Revolt

Cabaon was a Moorish chieftain whose homeland was Tripolitania. This easternmost of the Vandals’ territories occupies the narrow coastal strip in what is now western Libya. Cabaon put together a coalition of tribes – we don’t know whether by diplomacy or coercion or both, and launched a rebellion against Thrasimund’s rule. Procopius, a writer we’ll talk about in a little bit, describes Cabaon ordering some pretty first rate intelligence work. When he heard that Thrasamund was assembling a large army to move against him, he sent spies to shadow their movements. Knowing the Arians’ general disdain for their Catholic subjects, he ordered his agents to observe any actions the Vandals took against catholic settlements along their route, and once they were gone, to approach the settlements and do the opposite.

The Vandals did not disappoint. Procopius tells us that they

“led their horses and their other animals into the temples of the Christians, and sparing no insult, they acted with all the unrestrained lawlessness natural to them, beating as many priests as they caught and lashing them with many blows over the back and commanding them to render such service to the Vandals as they were accustomed to assign to the most dishonored of their domestics.”

Once they left, the moors appeared and

“straightway cleansed the sanctuaries and took away with great care the filth and whatever other unholy thing lay in them, and they lighted all the lamps and bowed down before the priests with great reverence and saluted them with all friendliness; and after giving pieces of silver to the poor who sat about these sanctuaries”.

It was both excellent intelligence work as Cabaon learned the disposition of Thrasamunds army, and a lovely demonstration of soft power. Procopius implies that most of Cabaon’s people were still pagan by the way. On a tangentially related note, if anyone’s in Washington DC or heading there soon, the International Spy museum is one of the best I’ve ever been to, the sheer density of information in every room is amazing and totally makes up for the totally dismal parking situation. 

Anyway where was I?

The Vandals had, for their entire history, been a cavalry army, who fought with lance and sword at close quarters. It had worked for them for two hundred years, and why should they change now? Cabaon knew this. He also knew that horses are not at all fond of camels. Did you know that? Apparently they really hate the way camels smell and you know I can’t really blame them for that. Knowing that, Cabaon prepared for battle. His intelligence operation meant that he could choose the field, and he found a flat open plain. Normally that would be to the mounted Vandals advantage, but Cabaon arranged his baggage and camp followers in the middle of the plain and surrounded it with every camel he could get his hands on, all tied together in an enormous circle. Between the camels he placed his army on foot, with large shields and armed with bows, javelins, and slings. When the Vandals came upon this extraordinary arrangement, their horses shied away from the camels and their stench, and the Vandal riders couldn’t get close. They circled the Moorish position, all the time being peppered with projectiles. Every now and then a rider might overcome his mount’s reluctance and manage to charge toward the enemy, but lone men or small groups only made themselves targets for concentrated fire, and were quickly killed or driven back. As men and horses fell, the Vandals’ courage wavered, and they soon turned and fled. When Cabaon saw that he allowed his men to mount up and give chase; as was always the rule, the greatest slaughter came as the routing men were chased down and killed. We have no numbers for this battle, but Procopius tells us that an exceedingly small number of Vandal fighting men returned to Carthage.

Cabaon’s success inspired other Moorish tribes to rise in revolt. The rebellion became general, and soon Thrasamund was forced to evacuate the farmers from the southern part of Byzacena.

We don’t have a good chronology for this war, in Procopius’ narrative it seems to come late in Thrasimunds reign, but it may have been much earlier. It’s therefore possible that it was this defeat that led Thrasamund to seek military aid from Theodoric the Great, and the 5000 men that came along with Amalafrida were intended to shore up Vandal strength while the native army recovered. That’s certainly a more positive spin to put on the wedding deal. The lack of chronological clarity also means that I don’t have a nice resolution to the story. After the battle, Procopius’ makes no further mention of Cabaon, we don’t know what ultimately happened to him. So it goes.

 In spite of the setback, Thrasamund was accounted the most powerful Vandal king since Gaiseric, in part because of his good relationship with Theodoric and with the East – especially Anastasius. These two relationships were often at odds with each other, and Thrasamund failed to come to Theodoric’s aid when Imperial forces were raiding the coasts, which in turn prevented Theodoric from aiding the Visigoths against the Franks.

Thrasamund died in 523 at the ripe old age of 73 or thereabouts, having ruled the Vandal kingdom mostly successfully for 27 years, longer than any king other than his grandfather Gaiseric. The succession passed to Hilderic, eldest son of Huneric, finally rising to the position his father had wanted for him so badly. Turns out he just had to wait 39 years. We will leave Hilderic for another day, though.

Procopius

Instead, I’m going to use my remaining time to introduce our primary source for this period, pretty much the only historical source for the Vandal kings, and much else besides. I’ve said his name before, but now let’s have an official welcome for Procopius of Caesarea.

It will do us good to thoroughly introduce Procopius, because he is one of the most important sources for the reign of Justinian specifically, and for much of the sixth century in general, and we will be referring to him probably about as much as we used to refer to old Jordanes. (We’re not done with Jordanes, by the way, oh my no.) 

Procopius was born around the year 500 and was raised in Caesarea Maritima, in Palestine. Today it’s the center of an Israeli National Park, but in Roman times it was a provincial capital and major port. His family was of senatorial rank, so he received a thorough education in the standard curriculum, rhetoric, grammar, and logic. He went on to study law, possibly in Beirut, which was famous for its law school at the time. Like most individuals of the time, we can’t say much else about his early education and background.

In 527 Procopius got his career-making break. He was appointed as legal advisor to a general who we will come to know well, Belisarius. Belisarius was one of a handful of young military commanders around the newly minted emperor, and would become by far the most famous. I’m not going to detail Belisarius’ career, since much of it will form the meat of upcoming podcast episodes, but Procopius accompanied him on most of them. He wrote detailed and vivid accounts of the wars and campaigns that he saw and heard about, collected now as The Wars, which is sometimes broken down into its constituent parts, The Persian War, The Vandal War, and The Gothic Wars. Spoilers, I guess.

In addition to those, two other works survive. Buildings is a panegyric praising the many ambitious construction projects undertaken by Justinian, and its polar opposite, The Anecdota, which sounds like “Anecdotes” but is usually translated as The Secret History. In the Secret History Procopius cuts loose. While some of the Wars and most of Buildings has to be read while keeping Procopius’ bias in favor of his employers in mind, if anything, we have to go the other way with the Anecdota. There is gossip, accusations, and revelations about the very uppermost crust of Roman society, very much including the emperor and empress, some of it bordering on pornographic. Procopius may have intended it to only be circulated around a small group of his friends, or stipulated that it not be published until after his death, since if it ever came to light, the consequences would be dire indeed. I’ll be using both as we work through the century, and I will try my best to note when a tidbit comes from the Secret History, just so we can keep our biases in mind.

I’ve seen Procopius called the last Roman historian, because he’s the last of the historians who followed the tradition of earlier writers Polybius and Thucidides. Procopius wants to tell a good story. The detailed and colorful description of the Vandals’ battle against Cabaon, for example, comes from his work. His histories are secular in their focus, and aimed at an educated and skeptical audience. He wrote in Attic Greek, the same dialect that Plato had written in, so it was formal and obsolete in daily life, but which would have been familiar to his audience. Like Ammianus Marcelinus, he writes about events that he himself has experienced directly, along with recounting the work of his predecessors. His histories are readable, and like a lot of Greek and Roman writers, much more relatable than the medieval authors that would come after them. The triumph of Christianity and death of secular Civil society in the West meant that most writers of history were Churchmen, and all their work is intended to demonstrate the workings of God’s plan in human history, and sometimes to point out the shortcomings of their own rulers by comparison to the brave and upright rulers of the past.

With Procopius, especially when reading The Wars and The Secret History side by side, we get a gorgeous, three dimensional view of the people and struggles of the Sixth Century.

Sources

The Complete Procopius Anthology: The Wars of Justinian, The Secret History of the Court of Justinian, The Buildings of Justinian. 2013. N.p.: Bybliotech.

Jacobsen, Torsten Cumberland. 2012. A History of the Vandals. Yardley, PA: Westholme Press.