The presence of a substantial Vandal army within North Africa threatened the stability of the Roman empire. By 429, Boniface had been formally restored with imperial favour, although personal reconciliation would have to wait. As comes domesticorum et Africae and the principal representative of imperial power, Boniface moved into action: first he attempted to parlay with the Vandals, and then met them in battle after these motions towards federation were rebuffed.136 The battle did not go well for the African governor, however, and Boniface was forced to seek refuge in the fortified city of Hippo.
The progress of the Vandals through North Africa was violent and bloody. As the barbarians marched east towards the capital, terrified bishops wrote to Augustine, their spiritual leader, for guidance on what course of action to take - to stay with their flocks and risk death, or to retreat and preserve the word of God in exile.137 Nor were these fears without foundation. Papal rescripts shortly after the invasion make it clear that the fate of those who chose to remain was often horrific, and one ruling alludes to the status of consecrated virgins who had been raped during the occupation.138 Those aristocrats and professionals who could afford to fled from North Africa, and many sympathetic individuals spent the next decade or so taking care of these refugees.139 Later historians list with mournful relish the brutality of the barbarians, particularly towards Nicene Christians. We read of persecutions throughout Mauretania Caesariensis, Numidia and the proconsular province, which reached a climax in 430 in the siege of Hippo, an assault upon the spiritual heart of Roman North Africa.140
Yet the Vandal invasion did not sweep all before it, and the worst of its furies eventually calmed. After 14 months, the Vandals abandoned the siege of Hippo.141 Thereafter, they continued to ravage Numidia and probably moved still further east into Africa Proconsularis and Byzacena. At around this time, imperial reinforcements arrived under the command of one Aspar and, combined with Boniface’s now revived Hippo garrison, undertook a second field campaign against the Vandals. Procopius’ account tell us only that this second campaign was again defeated, and that its two commanders left Africa, Boniface to patch up his differences with Galla Placidia (an attempt which led ultimately to his murder at the hands of Aetius), and Aspar back to Byzantium and a lifetime of avoiding further conflict with the Vandals.142
Before his departure, Aspar negotiated a peace treaty of sorts with Geiseric. In a peculiar passage, Procopius describes Geiseric’s encounter with a young Roman officer named Marcian who was later to become the eastern emperor, and the personal arrangement which the two men reached. Marcian, the historian claims, was freed on the understanding that he would never wage war against the Vandal kingdom.143 Procopius’ passage is best read as a pre-emptive explanation for Marcian’s later failure to retaliate to Geiseric’s sack of Rome in 455 - a hesitation which seems to have been met with some hostility at the time. But the diplomatic negotiations that provide the setting for this fable are likely to have been real enough. In any event, peace followed immediately afterwards, first through the cessation of hostilities, and then through the signing of the peace treaty of 435 with Valentinian III. The Vandals were acknowledged in their possession of Hippo Regius and the surrounding territory. Carthage lay just one short step away.
The final stage of the Vandal conquest came in 439 with the occupation of Carthage. With hindsight, this seems to have been inevitable after the contrived settlement of ad 435, and it provided the foundations for the consolidation of Vandal power in North Africa and the western Mediterranean. From a wider chronological perspective, however, the capture of Carthage is much more surprising, and seems a remarkable climax to a series of campaigns which began so inauspiciously around 35 years earlier. Having benefited - indirectly more than directly - from the political chaos of the early fifth-century west, the Vandals found themselves transformed from understudies to major players on the political stage.
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