The capture of Carthage in ad 439 gave Geiseric access to the African merchant fleet and its shipyards, and he was quick to press home this advantage.2 By the spring of 440 the first Vandal attacks struck Sicily, and the emperor in Ravenna grew anxious that an invasion of southern Italy would follow shortly afterwards.3 By all accounts Valentinian III was right to be nervous. The city of Lilybaeum was besieged, and the Sicilian countryside was so devastated that Valentinian was later forced to grant substantial tax remissions to the farmers of the island, who took time to recover from the blow.4 Panormus (Palermo) too was attacked by the Vandals, although the locals were said to have put up stiff resistance.5
The imperial response to the new threat posed by the Vandals was commendably swift and apparently successful. On June 24 440, shortly after receiving news of the departure of the Vandal fleet, Valentinian III ordered that the vulnerable coast of Calabria be protected from this threat: ‘whose sudden excursion and fortuitous depredation must be feared by all shores’, and offered protection to merchant shipping in the area.6 The magister militum Sigisvult was charged with the organization of troops within the region, and the Patrician Aetius was recalled from Gaul, but Valentinian and his eastern colleague Theodosius encouraged the inhabitants of the region to do their part.7 One individual who responded to this charge was the great-grandfather of the prominent sixth-century statesman Cassiodorus, who had helped organize the defence of the coasts of Sicily and Bruttii (the ‘toe’ of Italy) during a Vandal attack at around this time - an accomplishment which his descendent remembered with some pride.8 This new defensive policy also left its physical mark on the landscape of southern Italy. The mid-fifth century witnessed a substantial period of urban fortification, both in the construction of new walls and the restoration of existing circuits. In Naples, an inscription of 449 ad commemorates the erection of new defences against unnamed threats from land and sea; the standing walls of Terracina further up the coast probably date from the same decade, and other fortifications in Calabria rose up in the years that followed.9
The response of the eastern emperor to this revived Vandal aggression took rather longer to organize. By spring 441, Theodosius II had organized an expeditionary force, formed of troops drawn from the Danube frontier and placed under the command of Areobindus, Ansilas, Inobindos, Arintheos and Germanus, and supposedly transported on 1,100 cargo ships.10 Impressive as these figures sound (and they are certainly a grotesque exaggeration), the campaign was never to engage with the enemy. Interrupted in his second year of campaigning by rumours of this expedition, Geiseric made immediate pleas for peace - a pattern of last-ditch diplomacy that was to serve him well over the decades that followed.11 But these overtures proved unnecessary. The expedition was delayed, and never got beyond Sicily.12 As the task force lingered, the situation in the east deteriorated rapidly. The Persian emperor Yezdegerd II and the Huns under their new leaders Bleda and Attila took advantage of the distraction in Sicily and launched independent attacks upon Mesopotamia and Thracia.13 A temporary peace with the Persians was bought through diplomacy, but the Hunnic attack on Thrace demanded the immediate recall of the eastern army.14 Deprived of this support from the east, Valentinian III was forced to deal with Geiseric through diplomatic channels.
The result of this short stand-off was the signing of the second treaty of 442 - a more lasting diplomatic agreement than the treaty of 435 in which the federated position of the Vandals was redefined.15 Precisely what this agreement entailed is something of a moot point; the treaty itself is lost to us (as are all of the formal diplomatic arrangements between the Vandals and their neighbours), and our major sources only hint at it in passing. It seems clear, moreover, that the relationship represented new ground in Romano-barbarian relations, so points of comparison are hard to find. The Vandals were recognized in their possession of Africa Proconsularis and its neighbouring provinces. A second feature of the treaty was the formal dynastic alliance of the Hasdings with the Theodosian house through the betrothal of the Vandal prince Huneric to Valentinian’s elder daughter, Eudocia. Huneric was sent to Ravenna as a hostage, where he was to make an anonymous cameo appearance in several of the celebratory verses of the court poet Merobaudes.16 Eudocia herself - who was only five at the time that the treaty was signed - was still some way short of her legal majority, but the very promise of a formal union with the imperial house proved to be a crucial diplomatic coup for Geiseric.
The betrothal between Eudocia and Huneric forced the Vandal king to sever other dynastic ties, and led to a major realignment within Vandal politics. According to Jordanes, Huneric was already married at the time of the betrothal, to the unnamed daughter of the Visigothic king Theoderic.17 This union, which had probably taken place in the previous decade, would have provided a valuable bond between the new rulers of Carthage and the Visigoths - then the major political and military power in south-western Gaul - but clearly stood in the way of Geiseric’s aspirations to associate with the imperial family. Geiseric’s solution to this dilemma was swift and brutal. Accusing the princess of plotting to poison him, the king had her physically disfigured, and sent back to her father in disgrace. It is possible, of course, that the humiliated princess actually had been involved in a plot against her overbearing father-in-law, and was perhaps even involved in the minor aristocratic rebellion which Prosper dates to the same year.18 In citing poisoning as grounds for divorce, Geiseric followed imperial legal precedent, but the suspicion remains that his primary motivation was to insult the Visigothic monarch and to destroy the value of a diplomatic playing piece for which he no longer had any use himself. The Hasdings certainly benefited from the imperial match - and it was to shape Geiseric’s political actions for the next 13 years - but in making it they had aligned themselves against the Visigoths.19
The years which followed were relatively quiet within the Mediterranean. Procopius omits the period entirely within his discussion of Vandal history.20 Priscus alludes to some unrest in the eastern Mediterranean in ad 447, which some scholars have associated with the Vandals, but this is far from conclusive.21 The only major campaign known to have taken place in this period is a Vandal attack on Turonium in Gallaecia in 445.22 Quite what prompted this show of force, however, is unclear. Hydatius states that the Suevic state had been in the ascendancy within the Iberian Peninsula since the a successful campaign in Baetica in 439. It is possible that Geiseric retained interests in southern Spain, and wished to fire a warning shot across the bows of his former neigh-bours.23 Perhaps more likely is that Geiseric’s coastal raid was connected to the imperial campaigns against the Sueves and Bacaudae of northwestern Spain. Imperial expeditions were sent to the area in ad 442,
443 and 446, and Aetius may well have enlisted Vandal naval strength to support imperial authority in the area. It is possible, of course, that Hydatius wrongly attributed attacks on the coast to the Vandals, or it may be that this was simply the only one of many raids to have been recorded. At the very least, the reference demonstrates that fear of the Vandals had spread even to the Atlantic coast.
This, in itself, is an important point. The diplomatic leverage provided by Vandal sea-power throughout Geiseric’s reign was based as much on the threat of action as it was on its execution. This was to become still more evident after 455, when raiding from Carthage became widespread throughout the Mediterranean, but the effects of this new strategy were felt even in the 440s. Hagiographic tropes of the time provide some indication of the extent to which the Vandals exerted a psychological hold over the wider world. Nestorius’ Book of Heraclides, written in 451 and surviving only in Syriac translation, alludes to Vandal assaults on both Italy and Rhodes - a historical reference which would be more trustworthy if the text did not state elsewhere that the Vandals even attacked the area of the River Ganges.24 A similar theme is evident in the anonymous Life of Daniel the Stylite, written towards the end of the fifth century. This Life describes how the inhabitants of Alexandria feared attacks from Carthage - an anxiety that would seem to have been very real, despite the fact that no Vandal actions are known to have taken place in Egypt.25 Even Pope Gregory the Great reflects this fear in his Dialogues - a collection of Italian hagiographies in Socratic form from the late sixth century. At the opening of the third book, Gregory includes an impossible account of Paulinus of Nola’s experience as a captive of (and sometime gardener for) a Vandal noble in North Africa, and discusses the saint’s ransoming of hostages taken during the 455 campaign and his actions in converting his barbarian master.26 In fact, Paulinus died some 14 years before the Vandal assault on Rome, but the environment in which he lived, and in which stories about his life later circulated, were thoroughly infused with the spectre of Vandal aggression, even when it occurred relatively rarely. In many ways, of course, traditions such as these are not unique to the Vandals - Goths and Franks also turn up in countless hagiographic traditions in more or less ‘barbaric’ guise - But this ‘shock and awe’ was a major tool in Vandal foreign policy, and it was this perceived power which provided them with the time to establish their position in the Mediterranean.
It was the Huns, not the Vandals, who posed the greatest threat to the western empire in the middle decades of the fifth century. Like Geiseric, Attila, the king of the Huns, gained much of his political leverage from a vigorous diplomacy based as much upon the threat of violence as upon violence itself. Aetius - who had himself been a hostage of the Huns early in his life, and had maintained close bonds with the group - was able to use their fearsome reputation in his dealings with other barbarian leaders within the western empire. In return, Attila was granted the honorific title of western magister militum, and happily exchanged embassies with both imperial courts.27 By the late 440s, however, the alliance upon which Aetius had founded so much of his power was starting to crumble. In 449 or 450, Attila claimed his own title to the western throne on spurious grounds and in 451 launched his climactic invasion of Gaul.28 This campaign fractured the fragile diplomatic peace of the western empire and led directly to the collapse of Aetius’ power and, ultimately, to that of Valentinian III.
Geiseric remained an interested spectator to the dramatic events that unfolded in the north, but was not directly involved: the suggestion that the Hasding king was responsible for inviting the Huns to attack the west was almost certainly the invention of a later historian.29 There was no place for the Vandals in the bench-clearing brawl which saw Aetius, Avitus, the Visigoths of Theuderic and sundry Gallic barbarians halt the advance of the Huns, Gepids, Rugi and Burgundians at the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields in ad 451. But the events which followed were crucial to Hasding interests. Attila was defeated in 451, of course, and while his invasion of Italy in the following year created further difficulties for the reeling western state, his death in 453 ended the long-standing threat from the north. The repercussions of the defeat were long lasting, particularly within the court at Ravenna. The estrangement between Aetius and Attila had deprived the Roman generalissimo of both a diplomatic tool and a military ally, and his own position became increasingly un-stable.30 In 454, in an effort to compensate for this loss of influence Aetius arranged the marriage of his son, Gaudentius, to Valentinian’s younger daughter, Placidia.31 While this arrangement was accepted at court, Valentinian and his advisors increasingly viewed Aetius’ dynastic aspirations with suspicion. The Roman aristocrat Petronius Maximus and the court eunuch Heracleius organized the assassination of the patrician, and one tradition states that Valentinian himself struck the fatal blow.32 Other members of Aetius’ circle were murdered immediately afterwards, but the emperor did not long outlive his erstwhile lieutenant. Shortly afterwards Valentinian was killed on military exercises on the Campus Martius, presumably by federate troops who remained loyal to Aetius.33 Valentinian’s death created a power vacuum at the centre of the western empire that Petronius Maximus was only too happy to fill. He immediately sought to integrate himself with the populace through a programme of copious bribery, and with the ruling family through the by now familiar route of dynastic marriage. To this end, he married Eudoxia, the widow of Valentinian and also betrothed his son Palladius to her younger daughter, Placidia.34
The impact of these events was felt throughout the Mediterranean, but nowhere more acutely than in Carthage. As late as 454, the relations between the Vandals and the two imperial courts had been warm. Aetius’ military difficulties had weakened one of Geiseric’s major rivals for military authority within the western Mediterranean and, in a show of faith towards the Catholic emperors, the Vandal king had allowed the appointment of Deogratias as the Catholic bishop of Carthage, the first since the departure of Quodvultdeus in 439 or 440. Yet within little more than a year, the position changed irrevocably. The arranged union of Placidia and Gaudentius threatened to derail the careful dynastic plans which Geiseric had developed and Valentinian’s death removed a figurehead who may well have been increasingly sympathetic towards the Vandal cause. Most seriously, Petronius Maximus’ usurpation not only placed a hostile authority on the throne of Ravenna, his marriage to Eudoxia also trumped the yet unconsummated union of Huneric and Eudocia. With the emperor dead and his own dynastic pretensions suffocating, Geiseric’s position was critical. His reaction was dramatic. Faced with the danger of seeing his careful dynastic strategy come to nothing, the Vandal king abandoned his policy of talking softly and carrying a big stick. The threat of action had underscored Vandal foreign relations for much of the previous decade and a half. From 455, the threats were to be carried out.
In the years that followed the sack of Rome in 455, a persistent rumour circulated throughout the Mediterranean world that the Vandal attack had been instigated by Eudoxia, who had turned to Geiseric for help against her tyrannical husband Maximus. Like Honoria before her, the imperial widow was said to have turned to a fearsome barbarian in an effort to retain her own authority. The fact that several of the sources who recount this tradition are explicit in their own scepticism about it tells its own story.35 Eudoxia probably never called for help. But Geiseric came anyway.
World History
