North Africa offered Geiseric a blank canvas upon which to create his own image of Vandal rule. According to Jordanes, writing in the 550s, Geiseric was the true progenitor of the Hasding monarchy, ‘the father and lord’ (pater et dominus) of the ruling house.54 Some 300 years later, the Byzantine chronicler Theophanes describes how Geiseric ‘proclaimed himself basileos after gaining control of the land, the sea, and many islands.’55 Geiseric established the platform for a monarchy based on Roman, African and Christian (as well as ‘barbarian’) precedent, and successive ideological layers were barnacled on by the kings who followed him.
Geiseric and his successors were heavily influenced by imperial precedent in the forms of rule that they adopted. Jordanes notes the importance of divine support behind Geiseric’s rule, stating that he claimed to receive his authority ‘from God himself’, a typical conceit of the later Roman emperors.56 Procopius implies that a similar sense of divine support propelled Geiseric’s foreign policy.57 More directly, religious policies also drew upon this imperial tradition of Christian pastoral responsibility. Bitterly ironic as it may have seemed to Catholic observers who suffered during the persecutions, the Hasdings regarded their promotion of Arianism as God’s work.58 The Vandal kings were confident that religious action was among the duties expected of a ruler. By the time Huneric came to the throne, religion had become a major point of political contention within the kingdom. Nevertheless, Huneric explicitly followed imperial precedent in his legal actions against the Nicenes, and attempted to establish himself as a protector of the Arian faith throughout the world.59 Victor himself accepted that the persecution of the Manichaeans fell within Huneric’s remit as a religious ruler, even as he lamented the same king’s actions against the Catholic Church.60 Few seem to have questioned the right of Huneric and later Thrasamund to convene councils of the African Church. In their discussions of the monarchy, Dracontius and Fulgentius both stress the need for Christian responsibility in the person of the king, regardless of his denomination.61
The appropriation of imperial precedent was also apparent in the Vandals’ attitude towards the Moorish powers which were developing to the south and west.62 During the imperial period, the elites of the African frontier had frequently derived their authority from the imperial power in Rome or Carthage; in some cases the kings or dukes of the region had been formally invested by the empire, in others less rigid forms of recognition nevertheless helped to formalize social hierarchies within these groups and secure their relation to the centre. Although many different Moorish polities arose within the political vacuum left by the empire, and their relations with Carthage certainly differed, the Hasdings provided a legitimating agent for these elites in some cases. Procopius famously describes a Moorish embassy to Belisarius shortly after the Byzantine capture of Carthage which highlights the long-standing relationship between the groups:
For all those who ruled over the Moors in Mauretania and Numidia and Byzacium sent envoys to Belisarius saying that they were slaves of the emperor and promised to fight with him. There were some also who furnished their children as hostages and requested that symbols of office be sent them from him according to the ancient custom. For it was a law among the Moors that no-one should be a ruler over them, even if he was hostile to the Romans, until the emperor of the Romans should give him the tokens of office. And though they had already received them from the Vandals, they did not consider that the Vandals held office securely.63
This passage highlights an important political symbiosis which probably continued throughout the Vandal period.64 Not only did alliance with Carthage help to secure the power of the Moorish princes who received their regalia from the city, the very act of political legitimation also underscored the Hasdings’ claim to imperial authority within their own kingdom. The Hasdings acted like emperors, to the benefit of all.
As the Vandal kingdom matured, the Hasdings appropriated other imperial ideologies for their own use. Huneric was a conspicuous innovator, a trait which he may have developed during his stay at the western imperial court or as a result of his marriage to Eudocia. It was Huneric who adopted the unmistakably imperial conceit of renaming an African city in his own honour (Hadrumetum was known as Unericopolis for the duration of his reign), and adopted the portentous honorific dominus (‘Lord’).65 From Gunthamund’s reign on, title dom-inus began to appear on silver coin issues, itself an important ideological declaration. Huneric, Gunthamund and Thrasamund all had panegyrics composed in their honour, in the best imperial tradition, and it is from one of these texts (the meretricious panegyric by Florentinus) that we hear of the annual oaths of loyalty, apparently introduced by Thrasamund.66 Under Hilderic, these pretensions grew still more pronounced. As the son of the princess Eudocia, Hilderic could claim direct descent from Valentinian III and the Theodosian house, and a poem dating from his reign suggests that he celebrated this lineage in the wall paintings of his new palace complex in the Carthaginian suburb of Anclae.67 Hilderic’s successor Gelimer is often presented as the sober proponent of ‘traditional’ Vandal values, yet he too embraced many of the pretensions of his family. Procopius’ account of the Vandal triumph of Belisarius clothes the deposed king in pseudo-imperial purple and states that Hasding queens commonly rode around in imperial carriages.68 Even if Procopius is exaggerating for effect, this was clearly a form of rule that had developed substantially from the early years under Geiseric.
Geiseric and his successors were not simply insipid mimics of imperial rule. The Vandal kings displayed an unusual sensitivity to the opportunities offered by North Africa itself in the justification of their rule. Shortly after the conquest of Carthage, Geiseric recalibrated the state calendar, declaring the occupation of the city in 439 to be the ‘year of Carthage’ - i. e. ‘year one’ of his reign, and of the kingdom as a whole.69 The evidence for this shift is disparate but striking. Apparently first used in ‘official’ inscriptions and coins, the earliest use of the dating may well be in a series of coins from the 440s. By the 450s and 460s, examples are known from inscriptions scattered throughout the kingdom, including one from the grave of a religious exile in Maduros. Later kings refined this system, preferring to see coins, inscriptions and official documentation dated according to the length of their own reigns, rather than to the year of Carthage. Neither system was adopted universally, but each was widely practised. Other methods of chronological reckoning continued to be used throughout Africa, but even the most resolute enemies of the Hasding regime, and even those living some distance from the Vandal capital at Carthage, found themselves falling into step with the royal calibration of time.
Florentinus’ panegyrics to Thrasamund reflect the close association that had developed between Hasding rule and Carthage by the early sixth century. In the poet’s words, Carthage - and not Rome or the distant settlements of Northern Europe - was truly ‘mother city to the Hasdingi’. The Vandals encouraged this association, and employed traditional Punic motifs in their copper coin issues, while evoking a glorious Carthaginian past in their diplomacy. Other poets in the Latin Anthology drew upon famous Carthaginian traditions, and may well have been encouraged in this by the court. When the Latin literati of Carthage sought to flatter their Vandal rulers, they did so through reference to their successes as the masters of Africa and the glories of the Punic heritage, not through accounts of the long-forgotten Vandal past. Both literally and figuratively, Geiseric regarded the occupation of Carthage as the true beginning of Vandal history.
All of these innovations were important in establishing the Hasding kings as respectable authorities on the wider Mediterranean stage. Indeed, in this sense, their adoption of the grammar of late Roman power was simply a reflection of their desire to communicate with their Roman, barbarian and Moorish neighbours, and to present themselves as legitimate new rulers. But these were not the only stages on which the Hasding kings performed. Equally crucial to Geiseric and his successors was the establishment of Hasding authority among the Vandals themselves, and this was by no means a straightforward process.
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