Dwelling on the Sea-coast, and being a rapacious, cruel, violent and tyrannical People, void of all Industry or Application, neglecting all Culture and Improvement, it made them Thieves and Robbers, as naturally as Idleness makes Beggars: they disdain’d all Industry and Labour; but being bred up to Rapine and Spoil, when they were no longer able to ravage and plunder the fruitful plains of Valentia, Granada and Andalusia, they fell to roving upon the Sea; they built Ships, or rather took Ships from others, and ravag’d the Coasts, landing in the Night, surprising and carrying away the poor Country People out of their Beds into Slavery.
Daniel Defoe, A Flan of the English Commerce (1728)
Vandal ‘foreign policy’ seems like a macabre oxymoron. The countless raids and razzias which were sent out from Carthage throughout the fifth century did as much to secure the fearsome reputation of the Vandals as the persecutions within Africa itself. Chronicles and hagiographies testify to a fear of Vandal attack from Gallaecia to Alexandria, and their plundering expeditions were the subject of respectful poetry. In a period in which diplomacy increasingly overshadowed military action as the principal medium for Roman imperialism, the Vandals were the target of three major military expeditions to limit their authority in the Mediterranean and to reconquer North Africa. Their thalassocracy posed a genuine threat to the established powers in Ravenna and Constantinople.
Yet Vandal relations with the wider world were not simply confrontational. The sea-borne raids launched from Carthage (and there were a lot of them), did not take place in a simple political vacuum. Several recent historical studies have highlighted the complex diplomatic
The Vandals Andy Merrills and Richard Miles © 2010 Andy Merrills and Richard Miles. ISBN: 978-1-405-16068-1
Network which spanned the Mediterranean and its outlying territories.1 When viewed within the context of these ‘international relations’, Vandal actions, both military and otherwise, take on a different light. While Vandal attitudes to foreign relations were somewhat unusual, even by the standards of the fifth century, they were at least coherent, and they provide a vital clue to the understanding of the kingdom as a whole. Understanding what these policies were remains a challenge - none of our sources adopts even a remotely sympathetic position towards the Vandals, and the events of the fifth and sixth century have to be pieced together from the sherds and fragments of indifferent historical evidence and a lacunose archaeological record. But an assessment of what can be known allows some patterns in Vandal action to be detected.
Inevitably, Vandal policies changed over the lifetime of their kingdom. The world of 439 was very different from that of 533. The gradual eclipse and eventual disappearance of the western imperial court at Ravenna during the third quarter of the fifth century was counterbalanced by the emergence of Odoacer’s kingdom and later the Ostrogothic state of Theoderic within Italy. The struggles of the Sueves and Visigoths and - from the later fifth century - the Franks similarly altered the political ‘map’ of Gaul and Spain substantially, and forced the Vandals, the Ostrogoths and the eastern empire into new diplomatic contortions. The eastern Roman empire also changed within the same period, not least through the altered circumstances in its perpetual stand-off with the Persian empire to the east. The period saw the Balkan military elites supplant traditional ruling houses in court, the emergence of new bureaucracies and - arguably - the transformation of the later ‘Roman’ empire into something more recognizably ‘Byzantine’ during the reign of Justinian.
Inevitably, attempting to define a coherent ‘Vandal’ or even ‘Hasding’ foreign policy within this world is virtually impossible, but broadly three periods of distinct interaction with neighbouring Mediterranean polities might be identified. The first covers the sudden emergence of the Vandals on the world stage and their dealings with the Emperor Valentinian III from ad 439-455. After an initial phase of conflict, this was largely a period of peaceful entente, during which Geiseric established his own position within the high politics of the empire, helped in no small measure by the constant threat of further violence. With the sack of Rome in ad 455, the political stage changed again, and the two decades that followed witnessed a period of almost constant conflict between the Vandals and the two empires, until the signing of the ‘perpetual peace’ in 476. Thereafter, the role of the Vandals changed once more. The coincidence of the death of the last ‘official’ Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus in 476, and that of Geiseric in 477 simultaneously removed the greatest theatre for political intrigue within the western Mediterranean, and the Vandal king who most enjoyed acting upon its stage. Geiseric’s successors proved less adept than their progenitor at playing the great game of western politics, and largely concerned themselves with domestic tensions, or with the rising power of the Moorish kingdoms. Yet Geiseric had left them with a powerful Mediterranean empire. The last 50 years of the Vandal kingdom, then, from the death of Geiseric to the invasion of Belisarius, are best viewed through these ‘imperial’ possessions - Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica and the smaller islands - and the extent to which they shaped relations with the newly emergent powers of Italy, Gaul, Spain and Byzantium.
World History
