The Vandal kingdom of Carthage was not born fully formed. The Vandals came not as colonizers, nor as imperialists. The movement of the group through Europe, and perhaps even into Africa, had been determined by the wider strategic initiatives of a succession of Roman generals, generalissimos and usurpers. Vandal culture, such as it was, had been moulded by a full generation of military activity (and inactivity) within the western empire, and their political systems similarly were created from the immediate needs of this peripatetic mercenary lifestyle. In purely demographic terms, the Vandals, numbering only in the low tens of thousands at the most, were little more than a conspicuous minority within a North African population of between one and three million inhabitants.
The political history of the Vandal state in North Africa is one of perpetual negotiation between different groups: between the Vandal king and his family members, between the Hasding clan and the Vandal aristocracy, and between the Vandal minority and the Roman majority. This drama was played out on a number of different stages, not only in the entourage of the king, and among the various courts which surrounded other members of his family, but also in the governmental palaces and provincial courts, in the debating chamber and in poetry recitals, and (ultimately) on the foreign battlefields of the western Mediterranean. The results were dramatic, and led to the foundation of a politically stable and economically flourishing state that lasted for almost a century, and the gradual recognition of what it meant to be ‘Vandal’, ‘Roman’ or ‘African’ within this kingdom. Effectively, the Vandal state was always a work in progress; this was a project in which all members of the kingdom - invader and invaded alike - had a role to play.
The Vandals Andy Merrills and Richard Miles © 2010 Andy Merrills and Richard Miles. ISBN: 978-1-405-16068-1
World History
