In ad 171 a barbarian group called the Astingi entered the Roman province of Dacia. They were led by two kings, named Raus and Raptus, and arrived in the empire in search of alliance, not plunder. This was a difficult period for the Roman empire of Marcus Aurelius; for five years the emperor had been campaigning along the Middle Danube frontier against the Marcomanni and Quadi, but from ad 170 these wars threatened to spill over into the provinces downriver.1 In Dacia, the one Roman province beyond the Danube, the governor Cornelius Clemens was faced with the problem of balancing the interests of several barbarian peoples - the Lacringi, the Costoboci and now the Astingi. According to the historian Cassius Dio, our principal source on these events, Clemens encouraged the Astingi to attack the Costoboci, but then stood aside as the Astingi were attacked in turn by the Lacringi. Suitably chastened, the Astingi formally submitted to the emperor and proved themselves to be useful allies thereafter.2
In its frustrating mixture of detail and ambiguity, this brief episode is typical of the earliest fragments of Vandal history. It is generally assumed that the Astingi were Vandals - the name was later adopted by the royal family of the Vandals between the early fifth century and the collapse of the African kingdom in the 530s - but we cannot say much more than this. We do not know what linked this group to other ‘Vandals’ in the Danube region, if indeed there were any at this time. We are unable to say why this group of barbarians were ruled by two kings, and what the relationship between them might have been. Equally frustratingly, we have very little sense of what happened next to the Astingi within Roman Dacia. The History of Peter the Patrician states that the Astiggoi and the Lacringi were among Marcus Aurelius’ allies in this period, and Eutropius lists the Vandals among those peoples defeated by the emperor.3 Dio himself goes on to note that the next emperor Commodus made a treaty with the Marcomanni which forbad them
The Vandals Andy Merrills and Richard Miles © 2010 Andy Merrills and Richard Miles. ISBN: 978-1-405-16068-1
From waging war with the lazyges, Buri or the Vandals and later states that, in around ad 212 or 213, Fabricius Luscinus provoked the Vandals and the Marcomanni into making war on one another, as a way of strengthening his own hand in the imperial borderlands.4 But these are tiny fragments of information within the huge military and political upheaval of the Danube frontier.
The textual sources for the early history of the Vandals in this region are notoriously problematic. We know of two texts which addressed the military and political chaos of the Roman Balkans - one of these is Dio’s Roman History, the other the Skythica of Dexippus - and only fragments of these works survive.5 Later historians provide a rather fuller narrative, but create more problems than they solve. The Historia Augusta, for example, consists of a number of colourful biographies of second - and third-century emperors, many of whom campaigned along the northern frontier. But these lives were written in the fourth century, and many of their more informative passages were evidently fabricated by later authors with particular axes to grind.6 Much the same is true of Jordanes’ History of the Goths (commonly known as the Getica), written by a minor civil servant in Constantinople during the 550s. Jordanes vividly evokes the political danse macabre on the fourth-century Danube, and has provided crucial support to many modern reconstructions of these events, but his perspective was resolutely that of a sixth-century historian with a particular interest in celebrating the ancient glories of the Goths. The Getica describes a large Vandal kingdom to the north of the Danube, which was crushed in the early fourth century by the Goths of King Geberich, and dissipated as the defeated Vandals fled across the Roman frontier.7 Tempting as it would be to follow Jordanes’ narrative of the power-politics on the edge of the empire, this is clearly his own invention. The description of the phantom Vandal kingdom is entirely typical of Jordanes’ geographical rhetoric and could not have been drawn from earlier sources.8 No other historical text makes any reference to this kingdom, or to the large number of refugees said to have been settled in the empire.9 The archaeological evidence from the Middle Danube also argues against the idea that the Vandals of this period were gathered into a coherent political community. The Goths and the Vandals were bitter enemies, but this was in the fifth and sixth centuries, not in the third and fourth. Rather than engage with the hopelessly confused political situation of the late Roman frontier wars, Jordanes simply retrojected recent historical patterns onto the more distant past.10
When we assemble the disparate fragments of historical and archaeological evidence which relate to the Middle Danube region between the
Figure 2.1 The Danube frontier at the time of the Marcomannic wars
Mid-second century and the end of the fourth, it is clear that the Vandals were only very small characters in a grand - and tremendously complicated - drama. If all of the texts are considered together, we could draw up a list of around 50 different barbarian groups of different sizes who were active on the frontier in this period. Some were undoubtedly important: the Marcomanni and Quadi were a constant concern to the commanders on the frontier and the Goths were to rise to an unprecedented prominence over the course of this period. Other groups appear only once or twice before fading into obscurity. The Vandals were not quite in this last group, but they were far from being a major influence along the frontier: they do not appear on the famous fourth-century ‘Verona List’ of Rome’s barbarian neighbours, and clearly were not among the major concerns of commanders on the frontier. Conventionally, modern studies have either overlooked this relative obscurity, or have explained the absence of the Vandals in Greek and Roman sources by stating that the centre of the group’s influence lay far from the frontier of the empire. Unfortunately, there is no positive evidence to support this argument. The Vandals were to rise to extraordinary prominence during the fifth and sixth centuries, but we should not follow Jordanes in assuming that they were always so important. On the contrary, the texts and archaeological evidence suggest that their earliest history was far from auspicious.
We have to wait almost a century after the Dacian expedition of Raus and Raptus for the next appearance of the Vandals in our textual sources. In the late summer of ad 270, a Vandal warband crossed the Danube into imperial territory near Aquincum, near the modern city of Budapest.11 The band harassed the countryside of northern Pannonia, but did not pose a significant threat to the towns; the emperor Aurelian ordered that livestock and crops be taken into fortified settlements in the expectation that this would preserve them from the attackers. Apparently weakened by this strategy, and perhaps unable to scavenge sufficient food for themselves as the winter drew in, the Vandals were then decisively defeated by the emperor. A fragment of Dexippus’ History summarizes the treaty which followed this defeat, and explains that the Vandals were forced back over the frontier, having surrendered their booty and pledged 2,000 cavalrymen to the Roman army.12 Dexippus further relates that some Vandals sought to renege on the terms of the treaty, but were easily suppressed by Aurelian while he supervised the retreat. Within the wider context of Roman imperial troubles on the Danube, this short raid was of little significance. Throughout the 250s and 260s groups of Alamanni and Marcomanni had repeatedly tested the weakening Roman military presence around the Rhine-Danube re-entrant, and had twice penetrated into Italy.13 Further east, the pressure on Dacia was such that Roman control of the province was eventually formally relinquished. Aurelian’s reign was a period of particular military crisis, but the Vandals could claim only a very small responsibility for this.14
The Byzantine historian Zosimus refers to a third engagement in which the Vandals were involved some ten years later.15 Again, the group were very much the supporting cast within a wider drama, this time as a third act in the emperor Probus’ campaigns against various German tribes and Frankish groups on the Rhine. According to Zosimus, Probus engaged a mixed force of Burgundians and Vandals along a river - probably the Lech in the western Bavarian Alps. Zosimus’ narrative of the battle is not clear, but Probus seems to have been victorious, despite being outnumbered. Zosimus then states that the barbarians were attacked again for refusing to surrender their plunder and prisoners.
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