Writers of the fifth and sixth centuries were both entranced and appalled by the prodigious wealth of Vandal Carthage. Procopius repeatedly revisits the stuffed coffers of the Hasding capital: twice he describes the plunder brought back to the city following the sack of Rome in 455, and in one long passage he recounts the attempts by Gelimer to save the royal treasury from the Byzantine re-occupation. So rich was the kingdom, Procopius insists, that all of Belisarius’ ingenuity was needed to prevent the imperial troops from stripping the rich countryside bare in their surprise and delight.1 Victor of Vita exhibits a similar fascination, but his emphasis is on the greed that brought the Vandals such wealth - the occupation of estates, theft of senatorial riches, despoliation of Catholic churches, imposition of harsh taxation, collection of impossible ransoms and - of course - widespread piracy throughout the Mediterranean.2 Accounts like these tend to stick in the memory; consequently the Vandals became closely associated with piracy and plunder - and with the material rewards that came with them.
The Vandals were rich, but most of their wealth came from the continued prosperity of their kingdom, and not from the ill-gotten gains of their campaigns and raids. North Africa was affluent in the fifth and sixth centuries, just as it had been under the Romans, and the Vandals benefited from this success. But the Mediterranean world was changing during Late Antiquity, and North Africa changed along with it. Long before the Vandals first set foot in region, its towns and rural estates had started to adopt unfamiliar forms. From the later fourth century, social and political developments, reforms of taxation and coinage and changes in patterns of land exploitation all had an effect upon the economic life of the Mediterranean. With the slow disintegration of the western empire in the middle decades of the fifth century, still greater transformations
The Vandals Andy Merrills and Richard Miles © 2010 Andy Merrills and Richard Miles. ISBN: 978-1-405-16068-1
Were set in motion. The whole of the ancient world was influenced in different ways by these changes, but Africa - as a central cog in the late imperial machine - was particularly affected.
The present chapter explores the effect of the Vandal occupation of Africa upon the economy of the region, and the importance of economic considerations to the development of the Hasding kingdom itself. To do this it will be necessary to change the focus of our investigation slightly, and to look in detail at the nature of the North African economy that the Hasdings inherited. This will involve a brief discussion of the position of North Africa within the later Roman Mediterranean, before looking at how these trading patterns changed during the fifth and sixth centuries. The chapter will then consider economic activity within North Africa itself, both in the cities and in the countryside.
Inevitably, the Vandals themselves will occasionally lurk only in the background to this survey. In some cases they have only a peripheral relevance to the topic under consideration, in other cases, general economic trends will be discussed which can only be approximately associated with the period of the Hasding occupation of Carthage. Changes in towns and in the countryside were rarely sudden, and still more rarely can they be dated with great confidence to a specific year or decade. After all, the Vandal occupation spanned a period of some considerable transformation which neither began nor ended with the conquest and eventual loss of Carthage. In the final section of the chapter, however, the Vandals will again occupy centre stage. This section will explore the fiscal and monetary policies of the Hasding kingdom: that is the taxation and other revenues from which Geiseric and his successors benefited, and the role which coins played within the economy of the period.
World History
