The element which bound all of the Vandal kings together, and which distinguished them most clearly from the great mass of their subjects, was the Hasding lineage itself. In contrast to many of the other barbarian rulers of the fifth and sixth centuries, the Hasdings seem to have set little store by the propagation of improbable claims to ancient ancestry. But even if the circulation of fabulous genealogies and spurious histories held few fascinations for the Vandal elite, Geiseric became king because his father (and brother) had ruled before him. Geiseric and his ‘Hasding’ family may not have been the latest in a long chain of Vandal kings but they did recognize the importance of the familial name to their power.70
Geiseric was determined to ensure the continued power of his family. The favourable distribution of lands in 442 provided an economic grounding for this, but the king also took more direct action. The first of these was the vigorous pruning of his own family tree, in an attempt to limit succession disputes in the future. Rumours abounded that Geiseric was responsible for the death of his brother Gunderic, and that he had also killed his sister-in-law and nephews, for fear of the political threat that they posed.71 Brutal as these actions may have been, they appear to have been effective, since the king endured few challenges to his authority during his reign and none from Hasding pretenders. Anxious to pass these benefits along to his descendents, Geiseric adopted a further innovation, namely the implementation of agnatic seniority as the system of royal succession within the kingdom.72 According to this system, power passed to the eldest member of the Hasding family upon the death of a ruling monarch. The system had obvious advantages. While succession by primogeniture could often lead to the succession of a minor or a dispute between rival claimants, and partible inheritance often resulted in the division of a kingdom into warring parts, the system adopted by the Vandals would keep the regnum intact.73
On the face of it, this innovation was a resounding success. Geiseric’s eldest son, Huneric succeeded him, followed by Gunthamund, the son of Huneric’s brother Theoderic and the oldest living Hasding in 484. Gunthamund was succeeded by his younger brother, Thrasamund in 496, who was then followed in turn by Hilderic, Huneric’s eldest son and the eldest male member of the family. If the succession had been governed by the laws of primogeniture, Hilderic would have succeeded Huneric in 484, and would have come to the throne as a youth. Instead, he was crowned as an old man in 523 after the death of his cousin. Conventionally, the system is only thought to have broken down in 531 when Gelimer, himself the heir apparent to the kingdom through his descent from Thrasamund’s brother Geilarith, became impatient with Hilderic’s ineffectual rule and Byzantine sympathies and pre-empted the law of succession to seize power for himself.
In fact, two major political crises suggest that Geiseric’s law of succession only enjoyed inviolable ‘constitutional’ status when it was in everyone’s interest for it to do so. In 480 or 481, Huneric instituted a major purge of the Hasding family and some of its more prominent advi-sors.74 In a frenzy of persecution, the king exiled his brother Theoderic, killed Theoderic’s wife and son and publicly executed a number of important figures associated with them, including a prominent Arian bishop and some of Geiseric’s old advisors. According to Victor, Huneric suspected that a plot was developing around his ambitious sister-in-law and her (unnamed) son, an upstanding member of the royal family who had been educated in the classical Roman manner. Although Victor claims that Huneric’s suspicions were unfounded, it is clear from the king’s actions that he was responding to a political threat that he regarded as genuine. Theoderic’s son and his immediate entourage were all killed, and other prominent Vandals summarily exiled from the kingdom. Given the importance of Geiseric to the establishment of the Vandal kingdom, it does not seem surprising that his death put the courts of his sons in conflict with one another. Huneric’s indecisive foreign policy and confused religious ideologies doubtless increased these tensions, and a well-educated Hasding prince (as Theoderic’s son is described by Victor) might well have provided an obvious rallying point for dissatisfied factions. Arian church leaders and Geiseric’s advisors could have acted as power-brokers in such a situation, and Huneric’s purges of both groups may thus be placed in context.
It is within this context that Huneric’s attempt to overthrow his father’s law of succession needs to be viewed. According to Victor, Huneric assembled a number of prominent Nicene churchmen at the site of the Temple of Memoria in Carthage, and hinted that they might be afforded freedom of worship if they would support Hilderic’s succession to the throne.75 The bishops rejected these overtures, and there the matter rested; when Huneric died, he was succeeded in due course by Gunthamund, as the eldest living Hasding, and not by his son. But the timing of Huneric’s scheme remains interesting. Conventionally, the dramatic purges of ad 480/481 have been interpreted as the precursor of Huneric’s attempted elevation of his son, and this is certainly the impression which Victor would wish to give. But it seems more just to Huneric to regard the reformulation of the law of succession as a response to the earlier plot; the proposed elevation of Hilderic may have resulted as much from a desire to secure his own position from further revolt as from a genuine dynastic ambition.
Hilderic was the victim of the second major succession crisis. In 531, eight years after coming to the throne, Hilderic was deposed by a coup under the Hasding prince Gelimer.76 This coup was later exploited by Justinian as a justification for Byzantine intervention, and led to the collapse of the Vandal kingdom. But the rebellion was more than a futile gesture in the face of fate, and there is more to this political struggle than meets the eye. According to Geiseric’s law of succession, Gelimer stood to inherit the crown upon the death of Hilderic, his first cousin once removed. Given Hilderic’s likely age at the time of the coup (at least 59 and perhaps as old as 75 in 531), the impatience of the rebel seems extraordinary.77 Why did he not simply wait for his aged cousin to die, and avoid the need for a bloody revolt? The most likely explanation is that Hilderic himself had precipitated the rising by excluding his distant relative Gelimer from the succession. The evidence for this is circumstantial, but telling. A handful of references in the Latin Anthology indicate that Hilderic was particularly proud of his Roman imperial lineage, and sought to re-invent the Vandal royal house as a fusion of the Hasding and Theodosian families.78 It was in this light that the wall-paintings of the Anclae palace noted above were to be viewed. This heritage reflected not only on Hilderic, but also on his two nephews Hoamer and Hoageis, both of whom enjoyed some minor celebrity in late Vandal Carthage as military leaders and princes of the royal blood.79 Significantly, Gelimer, as the son of prince Geilarith and the grandson of Genton, could claim no such descent from the imperial house, and may well have regarded Hoamer and Hoageis as likely usurpers of his title. It is conspicuous that the brothers were targeted when the revolution came. Hoageis was killed outright, but Hoamer was blinded - a common punishment for defeated usurpers in both Byzantine and Persian politics.80
Neither of the Vandal succession crises is narrated particularly clearly within our sources. Victor does his best to obscure the political context in which Huneric’s purges took place. Gelimer’s rising is known only from the Byzantine accounts, and these, too, were anxious to present a complex succession crisis in morally straightforward terms as the background to Justinian’s ‘regime change’. But a close analysis of these episodes reveals the cracks within the fagade of Hasding rule. Geiseric’s law of succession often smoothed over difficult periods of political transition, but it did not form an inviolable political constitution. As the succession crises reveal, Hasding kingship was in a constant process of evolution, and in periods of crisis those in power adopted a variety of strategies for remaining there.
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