The internal economy of North Africa remained robust under the Vandals. Changes certainly took place - as they always had - in the fabric of the cities and the exploitation of the land, but the historian or archaeologist would be hard-pressed to find any evidence of abrupt transformation or cataclysm with the arrival of the Vandals. The urban and rural landscapes of North Africa had undergone a constant series of changes over the centuries of Roman domination. New lands were brought under cultivation and others fell out of use; patterns of land-ownership and exploitation changed as emperors, senators and provincial aristocrats found new ways of exploiting their property holdings and as tenant farmers on the ground sought to improve their own lot. Patterns of urban life were also transformed in response to new social and economic needs; the prominent landmarks of many cities had begun to change in the later fourth century, and long-standing transformations were already well underway by the time of the Vandal occupation of Carthage in ad 439. The Vandal period of occupation, then, was just another chapter in this narrative.
Figure 6.2 Economic life in North Africa under the Vandals
Towns and industry
Towns and cities had a crucial economic function in the Late Antique world, and this was certainly true in Vandal North Africa.40 From the Roman period, towns (which could often be quite small) were scattered quite thickly across the African countryside. These urban centres acted as markets for the produce of the surrounding hinterland, and for other regional and inter-regional trade. Cities also had an important manufacturing role. Metalworking, pottery, and textile manufacture were common to all African towns and activities like fish processing and dyeing flourished in regions where this was possible. The available evidence suggests strongly that this manufacture continued with relatively few interruptions throughout the period of Vandal rule and into the Byzantine occupation. Inevitably, some towns - and some individual enterprises - proved to be more successful than others over the century or so of Vandal domination, and there are examples of once-flourishing towns which fell into abeyance before the Byzantine conquest. For the most part, however, North Africa remained a vibrant urban society throughout this period.
The availability of trustworthy evidence provides the major obstacle to the understanding of Vandal-period urbanism. Despite extensive recent excavation in Carthage, Caesarea and Leptiminus, the economic function of these settlements has only recently been analyzed. Markets are more difficult to assess in the material record than are churches or theatres: although the grand basilical buildings which commonly housed urban markets may be identified easily enough, the produce sold in these markets, their social importance and their relationship to the rural hinterland need to be considered with care. Urban light industry is rather more visible on the ground - through iron slag, pottery wasters, loom weights, murex shells and so on - but only when excavators are looking for it. Until relatively recently, urban excavation in Africa (as elsewhere) tended to focus upon the more glamorous cultural buildings and their gradual disappearance - a phenomenon which will be discussed more fully in a later chapter. In recent years, archaeologists have increasingly investigated the economic foundations which allowed these cities to thrive. The present chapter will discuss some of the major case studies.
Towns underwent a number of physical changes from the later fourth century, which could often be quite dramatic. A number of examples may be taken to illustrate the point. An inhabitant of Carthage, Uchi Maius or Bararus, who was born at the time of the Vandal occupation, or perhaps a little before, and who lived into old age, would have seen the familiar landmarks of her native city completely transformed over the course of her lifetime. In Carthage, the Kardo Maximus - once the grand boulevard of the classical city - was choked by the encroachment of shops and small houses over the course of the fifth century.41 Traffic could still pass through it, but it was not the great public space it had once been. The via Caelestis (the ‘Temple of Caelestis Road’) was probably a similar concourse, which Victor of Vita accuses the Vandals of having ‘destroyed’ at the time of their occupation. Quite what this entailed is unclear, but there can be little doubt that the urban spaces of the city had changed, even within Victor’s lifetime. The circus probably remained in use within the city, but the theatre, forum and several bath complexes were abandoned or turned to private housing by the Vandal period, if not before.
Comparable changes happened throughout North Africa, as buildings and public spaces which had lost their social or cultural significance were gradually turned over to private housing or light industry. In Uchi Maius, a small town in the Medjerda Valley, an oil press was constructed in the forum during the latter part of the fifth century and further production complexes sprang up in the northern and eastern parts of town.42 Similar phenomena are apparent from throughout the kingdom. Inhabitants of Bararus in central Byzacena would also have seen their town square fall out of use, either after the earthquake of ad 365, or in the decades that followed. The fate of its forum was sealed during the fifth century when its paving slabs were robbed out for use elsewhere, and the discovery of two small cellars containing amphorae suggests the presence of a new oil-processing plant nearby. By the sixth century, the forum area as a whole was occupied with private housing.43
This industrialization of public space in North Africa had begun in the later Roman period, and was to intensify under the Byzantines, but the transformation continued under the Vandals. The re-occupation of bath houses was particularly common, thanks to the supply of water in such buildings, the substantial foundations upon which many were built and the ready adaptability of their marble basins for craft use. In Uthina, midway between Thuburbo Maius and Carthage, for example, a private bath complex that had been abandoned before the arrival of the Vandals was re-occupied as a small industrial centre in around ad 480. The discovery there of potters’ tools, punches and moulds suggest that the complex had been turned over to the small-scale manufacture of fineware. That this was something of a local specialty is suggested by the identification of a second ceramic workshop on the outskirts of the city.44
Figure 6.3 An oil press erected near the forum in Thuburbo Maius. The press itself is visible at the bottom left of the picture. Reproduced by permission of Professor David Mattingly
Two dedicated light industrial zones are known from Carthage. Unlike the examples discussed above, these had not been adapted from other uses and retained their function throughout Late Antiquity. A number of craft centres have been found in the so-called Magon quarter, for example, in the north-eastern part of the city, close to the coast road.45 More striking (and more fully excavated) are the city blocks immediately to the north of the circular harbour that had housed a mixed craft centre during the later Roman period, and included a focal formal building, perhaps a guildhall. The excavators of the complex tentatively identified it as an imperial gynaceum or textile manufacturing plant, but a variety of other craft and metalworking activities would also seem to have taken place on site. The complex did not survive unchanged through the fifth and sixth centuries, since the main ‘guildhall’ was subdivided into smaller rooms during this period, and the harbour-front porticoes seem to have been walled up in the sixth century. Importantly, these changes testify to continued use rather than abandonment, and craft working evidently continued on the site until the seventh century at least.46
Occupation and production in the North African countryside
Like the towns, the countryside of North Africa underwent a number of changes in Late Antiquity, few of which may be attributed directly to the Vandals. Roman patterns of land exploitation in North Africa had always been varied. Field survey, excavation and the fragmentary literary and epigraphic evidence are testament to nothing so much as the huge diversity of practices adopted.47 The best-known forms of exploitation were the great imperial latifundia of Africa Proconsularis and Numidia, huge estates which were primarily farmed by the tenants who lived on them. But even here systems of tenantry seem to have varied, and certainly changed over time and between regions. These estates were typically owned by the imperial state or by aristocratic landowners (who may or may not have lived on their properties), and administered by local middlemen or conductores, who were typically appointed on a quinquennial basis and were responsible for the day-to-day running of the estate. Farming itself would have been the responsibility of tenants (coloni) who typically paid rent on their lands in kind, and may well have been required to work on the central demesne land of the estate.
The first and most obvious point to make is that the Vandal occupation would have made very little difference to this system as it operated on the ground. The majority of farmland outside Zeugitana remained in the hands of its original owners, and doubtless continued to be exploited as it always had been. Even within the sortes Vandalorum, where the land distributions between ad 439 and 442 saw estates pass into the hands of the Vandals, the disruption upon them may not have been particularly marked. The majority of the new Vandal estates were probably carved out of the large imperial and senatorial landholdings which had once dominated the landscape of Zeugitana. As such, their transfer to the new military aristocracy would have had little effect upon the practicalities of farming within the region. Few Vandals can have been anxious to change agricultural practices which were working well for them, and most were probably content to retain the services of the con-ductores and coloni who had always worked their land.
The evidence provided by the Segermes field survey supports this assumption and reveals a landscape which continued to flourish under the Vandals. Lying some 40 kilometres south of Carthage, and situated on the major trunk roads between Thuburbo Maius and the coast at Pupput and Hadrumetum, the Segermes Valley probably lay well within the limits of the sortes Vandalorum, and many of the surveyed lands may have been among those distributed to Geiseric’s followers. Any Vandals
Figure 6.4 The arcades of a Vandal-period church in the Kasserine survey region. Reproduced by permission of Professor David Mattingly
Who occupied the valley would have found a mixed agricultural region. At the start of the fifth century, the landscape was dominated by a small handful of relatively modest villas, as well as a number of working farms and agricultural villages. The staple crop was probably grain, but the evidence for widespread oil processing throughout the valley is impressive, and several sites had multiple presses, suggesting a high level of surplus production and export. Noticeably, patterns of occupation within the valley were little affected by the Vandal conquest; if anything, the density of settlements suggest a slight increase in population over the course of the fifth century.
The landscape of south-western Byzacena provides a further illustration of economic continuity (and even vibrancy) under the Vandals. A substantial field survey in the hinterland of the Roman towns of Cillium and Thelepte, in the Kasserine region, has revealed both the diversity of settlement types in the late Roman period, and the strong continuity of occupation through to at least the first decades of the Byzantine occupa-tion.48 This was far from the most intensively cultivated region of Byzacena in either the pre-Vandal or Vandal periods, and was of course a long way from the main area of Vandal settlement.49 Nevertheless, the evidence of the survey is instructive. In many cases, the patterns of land occupation are familiar enough: in the upland landscape to the south of Kasserine, for example, were found the terraces, field walls and irrigation channels typical of agricultural practice from elsewhere in North Africa, where farmers struggled to exploit the seasonal (and often violent) wadi inundations.50 But this was not solely a landscape of small farms: dotted around the landscape are a variety of larger production centres, including a small town at Ksar el Guellal to the north-east of Cillium. This complex may well have originated as a military outpost, but the presence of a massive pressing facility indicates that oleiculture dominated here from the third century. By the Vandal period, the settlement was also furnished with an aqueduct, a small bath complex, a Christian basilica and a circuit wall, but the prominence and size of the pressing facility suggests that this was an economic centre (or ‘agroville’ in the modish terminology of the surveying team), rather than a city in the traditional sense.51 Ceramic evidence indicates that the town manufactured amphorae and finewares on a scale unrivalled elsewhere in the region. It continued throughout the Vandal period, with some indication of an expansion in ceramic production during the later fifth century.
Less substantial than the agroville at Ksar el Guellal, but perhaps more typical of the Vandal countryside as a whole, are several large farms throughout the survey area which were equipped with oil presses (often more than one), and which occasionally exhibit signs of ceramic manufacture or metalworking. Two larger oil-processing plants were discovered around 400 metres apart in the southern part of the survey area, which include large pressing rooms, as well as stock enclosures and perhaps the residential quarters for a slave labour force. The utilitarian architecture of these complexes would suggest that they were not the permanent residences of elites, but the villa at Henchir el Guellali may well have been. Equipped with its own bath, this structure was clearly an important cultural landmark, but the surrounding array of small farm buildings, which were used for olive processing, ceramic manufacture and perhaps metallurgy, testify to a considerable economic role.
Farm settlements of this kind were the mainstay of production in Roman North Africa and continued to be so under the Vandals, despite some considerable changes in their economic orientation. Some of these settlements fell out of use in the fifth and sixth centuries, but the dominant image provided by field surveys is one of general continuity of occupation with some economic diversification from the fifth century. At Sidi Marzouk Tounsi in northern Byzacena, and at several complexes in the Sahel, estate centres seem to have undertaken their own amphora manufacture.52 From the mid-fifth century, in other words, olive oil and wine were no longer transported to the coast in skins, to be decanted at designated collection points, but were bottled at source. This transition was by no means uniform, and happened at different rates in different parts of Africa. As a result, it is very difficult to associate these changes with a conscious Vandal ‘agricultural policy’ - as some scholars have suggested.53 Instead, these changes in practice, and the further diversification of estate production, are better regarded as localized responses to the decline of the annona system. Without a state bureaucracy to manage the collection of surplus, landowners may well have felt that their economic interests were best served by bottling and transporting their goods themselves. Naturally, landowners adapted more or less quickly to these challenges, and different regions of the Vandal kingdom changed more or less dramatically. But at the very least this variety testifies to a vibrant landscape and a class of land-owners anxious to respond to changing economic circumstances.54
Other estates diversified through the intensification of fineware production. Smaller research projects in the Vandal heartland of Zeugitana, including those in the hinterland of Carthage, the Dougga Valley and El Mahrine have detected a new economic impetus in many of these settlements.55 Sidi Marzouk Tounsi again provides a good illustration: here, a particularly distinctive form of ARS was manufactured in some volume down to the beginning of the sixth century. While vessels manufactured at Sidi Marzouk are common in Central Italy, they are almost unknown in Africa itself: few examples are known from either the Kasserine Survey area or the Dougga Valley, despite the relative proximity of both. This suggests that the finewares produced on the site were made almost exclusively for an export market.56 Inhabitants of the neighbouring regions largely dined on tableware of local manufacture, while the owners of estates like that at Sidi Marzouk Tounsi exploited the distant markets which remained open throughout the Vandal period.
The Albertini Tablets
The so-called ‘Albertini Tablets’ cast further light upon the functioning of the late fifth-century countryside.57 This collection of 34 documents on 45 wooden panels (each roughly the size of an A5 piece of paper), was found in the early twentieth century in rather mysterious circumstances, buried in a small pot, at the foot of a wall in the Djebel Mrata, some 75 kilometres from the area covered by the Kasserine survey. These tablets reflect the economic activities of a group of tenant families, their conductores and landlords in the last years of the fifth century. The majority of the documents record land sales, or more precisely the sale of the right to farm small blocks of marginal land on the edges of a large estate called the fundus Tuletianos, owned by one Flavius Geminius Catullinus and managed on his behalf by three of his kinsmen or freedmen. These parcels of land were exchanged according to the lex Manciana, a first-century ad Roman law by which tenants could undertake to farm uncultivated marginal land.58 Where this was successful, more land would be brought under cultivation. Where these initiatives failed, the Mancian law provided some financial protection for the cultivator, and determined that land-owners should ‘buy back’ such plots. The parcels of land in question are often rather small, and frequently contain fewer than ten trees - one records the transfer of a plot containing just two olive trees, which cannot have represented much more than a tiny terraced field.59 The most frequently farmed crop on these lands was certainly the olive, although some documents also refer to fig and almond trees.
These tablets allow us to glimpse the lives of peasants in rural communities in a way which field surveys and excavations do not. They provide a rare - if brief - view of families who were clearly struggling to make ends meet. Several texts record the transactions of Processanus and Siddana, for example, an illiterate married couple who seem to have expanded ambitiously into the marginal regions of the fundus Tuletianos only to find themselves in difficulty. Documents from October 493 and November 494 record their disposal of several parcels of land which included fig trees as well as olives. At some point in the next two years, the couple also sold their olive press, again to their landlord. Within another two years, Processanus then passed away. According to Mancian law, rights over the cultivation of the remaining lands passed to Siddana and her sons Quodvultdeus and Fortunatianus, but their difficulties seem to have continued; in 496 a further six or seven plots were sold to Geminius Felix for the rather meagre sum of one gold solidus.60
Different accounts of frustrated ambition may be read in the other tablets of the collection, but this is neither the story of economic collapse, nor of a rapacious landlord exploiting the misfortune of his tenants. Processanus and Siddana certainly evoke sympathy, but their misfortune also illuminates a surprisingly vibrant agricultural world. The couple had their own olive press and a broad portfolio of lands which had been rendered partially cultivable through the addition of water channels and other irrigation systems. The Mancian law protected them from destitution when these initiatives failed, but more significant fact is that their attempts were made at all. Comparable attempts at upward mobility may also be found in other actions recorded on the tablets. Donatianus and Saturninus, two neighbours of Processanus and Siddana, sold a young slave by the name of Fortinus to Geminius Felix for a substantial fee in the summer of 494. While it is hard to say what particular duties Fortinus may have had, we may again glimpse a relatively economically active peasantry at work.61 The prospects for Fortinus may have been bleak on the edge of the Vandal kingdom, but Donatianus and Saturninus (and even Siddana and her sons) would have enjoyed some legal support for attempting to better their lot.
On a different social scale, the documents hint at the mixed cultural identities of major landowners. Famously, all of the documents are dated by reference to the reign of Gunthamund in Carthage. The landlord Flavius Geminius Catullinus is repeatedly referred to as a flamen perpetuus (the priest of the sacred flame), an important position in Roman civic society.62 But if the landlords of the fundus Tuletianos were scrupulous in their deference to Vandal political authority as well as anxious to parade their traditional credentials, their African roots also show through. The most famous document in the collection is a dowry for Ianuarilla of the Geminii, presumably the sister or daughter of the landowner. Alongside a lump sum of silver, Ianuarilla took a substantial and varied trousseau with her to the altar - a pure African dalmatica dress to the value of 2,000 folles, a veil or mafors worth 400 and a mysterious garment called a colussa worth a further 200. Taken together with an eclectic collection of 50 torques, bracelets and rings, a hundred bull skins, shells, earrings, slippers and a loom, these are not the conventional accoutrements of a Roman bride.63 Roman in name and civic status, ‘Moorish’ (or ‘African’) in dress, and deferential to Vandal rule in Carthage, the Geminii nevertheless seem to have owned an estate that was governed on strictly imperial lines.
A slightly different image of estate management from the same period is provided by the agrarian accounts on the five ‘Bir Trouch ostraka’, found in the Wadi Mitta at the eastern end of the Aures Massif.64 Like the Albertini Tablets, the Bir Trouch ostraka are concerned with marginal land on the edge of the Vandal kingdom, and they too are formally dated by the regnal year of King Gunthamund. Where the ostraka differ from the Albertini Tablets, however, is in the transactions they describe. The documents themselves are rather formulaic and record the quantities of barley (and perhaps other crops) that the landowner Messiesa derived from his pars dominica: the ‘lord’s portion’ of the estate.65 The significance of this term is uncertain. The pars dominica may well be comparable to the medieval demesne, which was typically a small portion of an estate owned directly by the landholder, but farmed by his tenants through a certain number of days’ labour each year. Alternatively, the ‘lord’s portion’ may have been a region farmed on behalf of the landlord in return for wages, or perhaps simply a designated fraction of the rent from the estate. Regardless, the documents from Bir Trouch hint at an agricultural accounting system which is comparable in detail, if not in form, to that of the fundus Tuletianos.
Remarkable as these rare ostraka and wooden tablets are as historical documents, their most important feature may well be the sheer mundanity of the transactions that they record. Even if we cannot be sure of the circumstances of their production and deposition, it is at least clear that landowners and tenants in the far south of Byzacena and Numidia continued to exploit marginal land, and to cultivate estates, much as they always had. They did so using laws that seem to have been customary in Roman North Africa for generations, and even illiterate farmers took care to document their transactions. Their crops included olives, nuts, fruit and barley, and they apparently paid for their land-rights in coin (or at least calculated their debts in such terms). No other comparable documentary sources have survived from Vandal Africa, but scattered ostraka and tablets from the later Roman and Byzantine periods do suggest that records of this kind may have been the rule, rather than the exception.66 If this system was the norm in the quieter backwaters of Vandal Numidia and Byzacena, and in the foothills of the Aures Mountains, it seems reasonable to assume that similarly sophisticated transactions - and similar patterns of exploitation - were being carried out in similar lands throughout the kingdom.
World History
