Following the surprising defeat of Castinus in 422, the Vandals found themselves in a strong position in southern Spain. Victory not only removed an immediate threat to the group, it also strengthened their forces and Castinus’ Roman and Gothic troops probably rallied to the Hasding standard, as the Alans and Silings had five years earlier. For the next half decade, the Vandals took advantage of this unexpected fortune and solidified their position within southern Spain. Prominent cities were besieged, presumably in an effort to suppress lingering resistance, and the Vandal kings increasingly looked beyond the fertile fields of Baetica to the rich pickings of the Balearic Islands and northern regions of Mauretania.
Hydatius’ Chronicle provides the only record of this consolidation of Vandal power. His account is impressionistic, and several separate stages of growth are lumped together into just two short entries:
425 The Vandals pillaged the Balearic Islands and when they had sacked Carthago Spartaria and Hispalis, and pillaged Spain, they invaded Mauretania.112
428 Gunderic, the king of the Vandals, captured Hispalis, but soon after, when with overwhelming impiety he tried to lay hands on the church of that very city, by the will of god he was seized by a demon and died.113
Late Roman Baetica was a rich province in its own right but was also closely bound by economic and social ties to the maritime regions of Mauretania and the Balearic Islands. During the classical and early medieval period, the fishing regions of the Mauretanian coasts and the grain fields of the Guadalquivir Valley were part of the same broader cultural and economic system.114 Texts and religious ideas happily spread from Spain to Africa and back again throughout Late Antiquity, and continued to do so for decades after the disappearance of the Vandal kingdom.115 Economically, Baetica and Tingitania had long been bound together by the shared exploitation of the Atlantic coast and the western Mediterranean, and display a strikingly consistent material culture. Even politically, the two regions had been linked in the provincial reorganization under Diocletian, a change that was perhaps motivated by a desire to keep the few frontier troops of the Atlas Mountains fed from the breadbasket of Baetica.116
Hydatius implies that the Vandals were the happy beneficiaries of this unity, and extended their authority into Hispalis (Seville) and the coastal regions beyond. The occupation of Carthago Spartaria and other ports on the south coast provided the Vandals with control over the shipping with which they could extend their authority into Mauretania and the Balearics. Hydatius’ language suggests that the Mediterranean islands were pillaged, while the north coast of Africa was settled more permanently, but whether we should read too much into the semantics of such a late source is not clear. What seems certain, however, is that by the middle or end of the 420s, the Vandals had established a relatively secure position in southern Spain and probably also along the coast of Mauretania Tingitania. The archaeology from southern Spain in this period can tell us little about the Vandals themselves - indeed one scholar has stated succinctly that the group left no ‘footprint’ within the rich soil of the Iberian Peninsula - but it does demonstrate the prosperity of the region in this period.117 Field surveys have revealed a thriving rural landscape, and archaeological excavation a strong continuity in urban occupation throughout the region.118
Modern scholars have almost universally presented the Vandal move to the sea as a moment of almost cataclysmic significance within the history of the later Roman empire. It is true of course that Geiseric was later to enjoy his greatest political and military influence as the master of both Carthage and her shipping, but it should not be assumed that either the Vandals or their contemporaries viewed the passage to Africa Proconsularis as an inevitable final stage to their movement southwards. Nor did the spread of Vandal influence into Mauretania Tingitania necessarily send ripples of panic through the Roman administration in Carthage.119 There is little to suggest that Vandal ambitions immediately turned to the rich lands of Africa Proconsularis and Sicily. The Vandals had recently proved themselves through the defeat of Castinus, but most observers of the time probably continued to see the group as lightweights on the world stage. In holding Baetica, the Vandals were already in possession of some of the richest cereal lands in the western empire, and the expeditions to the Balearics and Mauretania are best read as a consolidation of this southern Spanish kingdom rather than as a preparation for a still more ambitious campaign. To contemporaries - including perhaps the Vandals themselves - the movement into Africa was scarcely an obvious next step.
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