At some point in the middle of the fifth century, an aristocrat called Arifridos died and was buried in the choir of a church in the African city of Thuburbo Maius. In 1917, archaeologists uncovered the remains of his tomb, and found nail fragments from a wooden coffin, a limestone plinth upon which the body had been placed, and the remains of Arifridos’ strikingly rich costume. A large, gold buckle ornamented his belt, and smaller fastenings decorated his shoes. A brooch of striped agate in a gold setting was also found with the body, and had probably originally held a large cloak. The splendour of this clothing was reflected in the prominence of the tomb itself. His burial was surely public, and was formally commemorated through a large funerary mosaic in the floor of the church which recorded his name.1
Arifridos’ grave highlights how complex personal identity could be within the Vandal kingdom. His name, which is certainly Germanic in origin, suggests that Arifridos would have regarded himself as a member of the ruling military elite within the African kingdom.2 Yet the means by which he asserted his status were remarkably conservative. Arifridos was buried within the choir of his church - a particular privilege reserved for few late Roman Christians. The use of a Latin funerary epitaph was also typical of North African practice, although again few would have been rich enough to enjoy such commemoration.3 Even Arifridos’ clothing is typical of the late Roman aristocracy. Although the prominent buckle and decorated shoes might have seemed out of place in the streets of Thuburbo Maius during the first or second century ad, by the fourth or fifth, the chic dressers among the Mediterranean aristocracy typically adopted such pseudo-military garb for everything from hunting to swaggering around town. Arifridos was a Vandal who dressed very much like a late Roman dandy.4
The Vandals Andy Merrills and Richard Miles © 2010 Andy Merrills and Richard Miles. ISBN: 978-1-405-16068-1
Arifridos is an individual who would be forgotten were it not for the chance survival of his epitaph and his surprising funeral dress, and this brings us back to the question of identity and ethnicity within the Vandal kingdom. This is an issue which was discussed briefly in the opening chapter, and which has lurked in the background throughout our discussion since: namely what made a ‘Vandal’ a ‘Vandal’ in the Hasding kingdom of North Africa? At first glance, this might seem like a straightforward question, and indeed it was rarely asked by historians until the scholars of the later twentieth century turned their attention to the complex identity politics of the early Middle Ages. Their work has demonstrated that political, social and ethnic affiliations were in a constant process of flux.
It is clear from our textual sources that the warband that followed Geiseric into North Africa in ad 429 was a mixed bunch; the group was heterogeneous and probably included Alans, Sueves, Hispano-Romans and Goths, as well as Vandals, among the king’s followers.5 Geiseric’s army was a peripatetic collection of soldiers and their entourage, which numbered in the low tens of thousands, and had come together as a more or less unified group only within the 420s. Yet within a few years of the crossing into Africa, the textual sources are agreed that this disparate band had become a coherent ‘Vandal’ group. As Procopius saw it:
... by their natural increase among themselves and by associating other barbarians with them they came to be an exceedingly numerous people. But the names of the Alans and all the other barbarians, except the Moors, were united in the name of the Vandals.6
The ‘Alans and other barbarians’ may not have lost their own distinct sense of separateness, but they were increasingly included within a broader ‘Vandal’ ethnicity. This identity was not set in stone, then, but proved to be a broad church in which many different groups could gather. But how did this come about?
Equally significant were the relations between the evolving Vandal people and the different groups already resident in North Africa. The Vandals were, after all, a relatively small group, and came into a region with a total population somewhere between two and three million.7 Subsumed within this world, the circumstances in which the Vandals lived, and the means by which they distinguished themselves can only have changed over time, particularly during the second and third generation of settlement. At the time of their first arrival it was probably easy enough to distinguish the hostile barbarians who spoke a strange language from the rest of the population, but these rough edges would be smoothed off soon enough. As the barbarians settled, interacted politically and economically with their neighbours, and as they slowly transformed from the motley barbarians of ad 429 into the ‘Vandals’ identified by Procopius, the manner in which they marked out their identity, or how they put such needs to one side, must have changed. Diet, dress, social and sexual behaviour and even speech are likely to have changed, perhaps substantially, during the century of Vandal occupation in North Africa, as the epitaph of Arifridos reminds us. When viewed within such a context, the politics of identity within the Vandal kingdom were clearly a complex business.
The present chapter seeks to examine closely what it was to be ‘Vandal’ within the North African kingdom, and argues that this cannot be understood without an appreciation of the other forms of social identity within North Africa at that time. It suggests that ‘Vandalness’ is best viewed as an ethnic identifier which lent meaning and significance to Geiseric’s military aristocracy. It was often articulated in ways which were strikingly different from the familiar forms of identity in the late Roman world, but in many cases it drew heavily upon social categories which had developed in the region long before the arrival of the Vandals. Vandalness was profoundly shaped by late Roman notions of masculinity and political status.
World History
