The Byzantine conquest of Africa brought the Vandal kingdom to an abrupt and surprising end. A kingdom which had once dominated the politics of the western Mediterranean was shattered within a matter of weeks by a small but well-organized imperial army. But the triumphal imperial rhetoric, which depicted Hasding power as a flimsy and tyrannical regime to be swept aside by the bold new rule of Justinian, could not disguise the long legacy of the Vandal kingdom. Most of the Vandals were deported immediately to the other side of the Mediterranean; those few who remained disappeared with the defeat of Stotzas’ rebellion in the later 530s. Yet the continuing Vandal influence on the political, economic, religious and cultural life of Byzantine Africa is undeniable. In the decades that followed, the newcomers from the east sought to bridge the religious and cultural divisions which separated them from a Romano-African elite which had been far more integrated into the Vandal regime than either side cared to admit.
If North Africa was ever to be a viable imperial province, the authorities in Constantinople needed the financial and political support of the Romano-African elite. The re-building programme that they instituted was thus concerned with the collective forgetting of a troubling past, as a well as the construction of a glorious new present. The imperial regime could portray itself as the great saviour of North Africa whilst the Romano-African elite basked in the invented memory of a courageous resistance to the heresies of their barbarous overlords. But the reality was more complex. The Three Chapters controversy and the military mutinies that blighted Africa for much of the 540s and 550s showed that there were limits to the extent to which grievances, both historical and present, could be smoothed over by the seductive re-writing of the Vandal past.
World History
