The Next Generation
In his fifties, Huneric became king of the Vandals and Alans in 477. His marriage to Eudocia had not lasted. Valentinian’s daughter left Huneric in 472 and moved to Jerusalem, officially because of her Catholic faith and possibly as a result of a deal with the Eastern Empire in order for them to accept Olybrius on the Western throne without any difficult family ties to the Vandals.
To paraphrase Procopius: Huneric persecuted the Catholics, had trouble with the Moors and died of disease after ruling for eight years. He was succeeded by Gunthamund, his nephew, who was the next oldest male of the royal family. He too persecuted the Catholics, had more trouble with the Moors and died of disease after ruling for twelve years. The next Vandal king was Thrasamund, who was Gunthamund’s brother, ‘A man well favoured in appearance and especially gifted with discretion and high mindedness.’ (Procopius)
Thrasamund took a different tack with his Catholic subjects, attempting conversion by persuasion rather than persecution. Despite ongoing difficulties with the Moors, when he ascended the throne in 496 the Vandals were still the most stable kingdom in the West and were incredibly wealthy. They occupied some of the most productive regions of the former West Roman Empire, their fleets controlled the Mediterranean and they had enriched themselves with the loot taken from Rome in 455. Elsewhere, Theodoric the Ostrogoth had moved into Italy, supplanted Odoacer and established a new kingdom. The Franks under Clovis had pushed the Visigoths out of Gaul and into Spain, while Anastasius was ruling the East Roman Empire.
Thrasamund sought an alliance with the Ostrogoths of Italy by marrying Amalafrida, Theodoric’s sister. Her dowry included 5,000 Ostrogoth warriors and Lilybaeum in western Sicily. As well as securing the friendship of the Ostrogoths in Italy, Thrasamund made efforts to improve relations with the East Roman Empire. According to Procopius, he became ‘a special friend’ of the Emperor Anastasius: ‘As a result of this Thrasamund was accounted the strongest and most powerful of all those who ruled over the Vandals.’
The Moors
In Geiseric’s time the native North African Moors either served the Vandals as auxiliaries or kept out of the great king’s way. ‘For through fear of Geiseric the Moors had remained quiet at that time, but as soon as he was out of the way they both did much harm to the Vandals and suffered the same themselves.’ (Procopius)
Like some of their Berber descendants today, the Moors lived on the periphery of the settled agricultural regions of North Africa, leading a nomadic lifestyle which endured while civilized empires rose and fell. They had fought for and against Hannibal, Scipio and Julius Caesar. Their light cavalry are depicted on Trajan’s Column in Rome fighting as auxiliaries, and the Notitia Dignitatum lists many units of Mauri serving in all parts of the Roman Empire. They were famous for their light cavalry – expert horsemen who would use agility and speed to shower the enemy with javelins while keeping out of harm’s way from more heavily-equipped troops such as the Vandals and Romans. They also employed large numbers of similarly lightly-equipped men on foot. They too would have been primarily javelin-armed skirmishers who could support the horsemen. Tough, nimble and fleet of foot, they could also move with ease over the rough mountain terrain that formed the southern borders of Vandal North Africa.
‘Horses and men were tiny and gaunt; the riders unequipped and unarmed, except that they carried javelins with them; the horses without bridles, their very motion being the ugly gait of animals running with stiff necks and outstretched heads.’ (Livy)
Although this passage was written many years previously the Moors do not appear to have changed much over the succeeding years. Procopius, writing eight centuries later, is at pains to show their hardiness, describing a way of eating grain that sounds not dissimilar to modern North African couscous:
‘The Moors live in stuffy huts both in winter and in summer…. And they sleep on the ground, the prosperous among them, if it should so happen, spreading a fleece under themselves…. And they have neither bread nor wine nor any other good thing, but they take grain, either wheat or barley and, without boiling it or grinding it to flour or barley-meal, they eat it in a manner not a whit different from that of the animals.’
As we have already seen, Vandal tactics, favouring hand-to-hand combat exclusively, were the complete opposite of the Moors. Knowledge of horse archery, that some of their Alan ancestors would have had in the fourth century, had long been forgotten. In the early-fifth century many or most Vandals would have fought on foot. As horses became more available, they increasingly took to mounted combat although, in their early years, they may still have dismounted when the circumstances suited it. After the establishment of their African kingdom, every Vandal warrior had the means to own and train good cavalry mounts and so took to fighting on horseback exclusively. The Vandals had no response to the fast hit-and-run attacks of the Moors, who would retreat to mountain strongholds when faced by a stronger enemy. As a result the Vandals often found themselves at a loss when trying to deal with the incursions, which happened with increasing frequency after Geiseric’s death.
Already during Huneric’s reign, the Moors began to chip away at the peripheries of the Vandal Kingdom. One group of Moors occupied Mount Aurasium (Jebel Auress in the Aurès region of modern Algeria) and used it as a secure refuge from which to raid the fertile plains to the north east. The Vandals were unable to do anything about them, as by the time any Vandal troops arrived the Moors melted back into the mountains, where steep slopes and difficult access made pursuit impossible for the Vandal heavy cavalry. As a result the Aurès Mountains, only thirteen days’ travel west from Carthage, remained a Moorish stronghold well beyond the end of the Vandal Kingdom. Many centuries later, the Moors’ Berber descendants used this same area as a guerrilla base against the French during the Algerian War of Independence.
There were numerous small clans of Moors, all of whom operated independently under their own leaders. Spread out over thousands of kilometres of harsh mountain and desert terrain, they operated as small bands rather than uniting as a single nation. A Latin inscription dated to the early part of Huneric’s reign records the independence of the Moors of the Aurès Mountains and a lingering adherence to Roman rather than Vandal authority:
‘I Masties, Duke for sixty-seven years and Emperor for ten years, never perjured myself nor broke faith with either Romans or the Moors, and was prepared in both war and in peace, and my deeds were such that God supported me well.’
Further west, another Latin inscription from 508 commemorates the building of a fort by Masuna, King of the Moors and Romans. Again no mention is made of the Vandals.
During Thrasamund’s reign, the Moorish leader, Cabon, caused the Vandals trouble in Tripolitania (the western coastal region of modern Libya). Procopius gives a detailed description of a campaign which highlights some of the difficulties the Vandals had in dealing with the Moors. Cabon exploited the division between the Arian Vandal overlords and their Catholic Roman subjects. He treated Catholic churches with reverence, while the Vandals did the opposite. The highly mobile Moors kept the Vandal army under constant observation when they marched east from Carthage to oppose them.
‘The Vandals, upon making camp the first day, led their horses and their other animals into the temples of the [Catholic] Christians, and sparing no insult they acted with all the unrestrained lawlessness natural to them, beating as many priests as they caught and lashing them with many blows over the back and commanding them to render such service to the Vandals as they were accustomed to assign to the most dishonoured of their domestics. And as soon as they had departed from there, the spies of Cabon did as they had been directed to do; for straightaway they cleansed the sanctuaries and took away with great care the filth and whatever other unholy things lay in them… and after giving pieces of silver to the poor who sat about these sanctuaries, they then followed after the army of the Vandals.’ (Procopius)
This passage shows that the ancient Moors understood the importance of winning the ‘hearts and minds’ of the local populace in the same way as successful insurgent groups still do today. But Cabon did not only fight a guerrilla war against the Vandals. He also stood up to them in battle using some novel tactics, as Procopius recounts:
‘He [Cabon] marked off a circle in the plain where he was about to make a palisade, and placed his camels turned sideways in a circle as a protection for the camp, making his line fronting the enemy about twelve camels deep. Then he placed the women and children and all those who were unfit for fighting together with their possessions in the middle, while he commanded the host of fighting men to stand between the feet of those animals and cover themselves with their shields…. The Vandals were at a loss how to handle the situation; for they were neither good with the javelin nor with the bow, nor did they know how to go into battle on foot, but they were all horsemen, and used spears and swords for the most part, so that they were unable to do the enemy any harm at a distance; and their horses, annoyed at the sight of the camels, refused absolutely to be driven against the enemy. And since the Moors, by hurling javelins in great numbers among them from their safe position, kept killing both their horses and men without difficulty, because they were a vast throng. They [the Vandals] began to flee and when the Moors came up against them, the most of them were destroyed while some fell into the hands of the enemy and an exceedingly small number of the army returned home. Such was the fortune which Thrasamund suffered at the hands of the Moors.’
By the end of Thrasamund’s reign, most of the Mauretanias in the west, a large part of southern Numidia, as well as enclaves in Byzacena and Tripolitania were under Moorish rather than Vandal control. The latter increasingly concentrated close to Carthage, their numbers too small to control the thousands of kilometres of frontier bordering the less prosperous regions. As there was no single Moorish nation, not all bands were hostile. Many found it more profitable to trade with the Vandals and take service in their armies rather than raiding them. Right to the very end of the Vandal Kingdom there were Moors fighting in the Vandal army.
Life in Vandal Africa
The Vandals who followed Godegisel and then Geiseric from the forests of central Europe through Gaul, Spain and North Africa, experienced a life of unimaginable hardship. Only the very toughest would have survived the more than two decades it took before they finally had a home they could call their own. Another two decades on and they were masters of the richest province of the West Roman Empire. They ruled the Mediterranean and decorated the villas they had appropriated from the African-Roman aristocrats with all the portable loot that Rome had amassed over the preceding millennium.
Like the modern baby-boomers enjoying the prosperity of the 1950s/60s after their parents’ sacrifices in the Depression and Second World War, the children and grandchildren of Geiseric’s generation took to the good life with a vengeance. Living on grand prosperous estates worked by armies of slaves and poorer subject Romans – and with the tedious bureaucracy of government being left to better-off Romans – a life of luxury would have been hard to resist, as Procopius describes:
‘For all the nations which we know, that of the Vandals is the most luxurious and that of the Moors the most hardy. For the Vandals, since the time when they gained possession of Libya, used to indulge in baths, all of them, every day, and enjoyed a table abounding in all things, the sweetest and best that earth and sea produce. And they wore gold very generally, and clothed themselves in the Medic garments which they now call silk, and passed their time, thus dressed, in hippodromes and in other pleasurable pursuits, and above all else in hunting. And they had dancers and mimes and all other things to hear and see which are of a musical nature or otherwise merit attention among men. And the most of them dwelt in parks, which were well supplied with water and trees; and they had great numbers of banquets, and all manner of sexual pleasures were in great vogue amongst them.’
The late-fifth century Roman rhetorician, Malchus, gives a similar verdict on the post-Geiseric generation:
‘After the death of Geiseric they had fallen completely into softness and had maintained neither the same strength for action nor had the same military establishment which he had kept ready for use, so that he [Geiseric] always moved more quickly than his opponents calculated.’
Always on the outlook to prove the perils of moral degeneracy, nineteenth century Europeans were quick to latch onto such passages to explain the relatively rapid collapse of the Vandal Kingdom in 533. Unsurprisingly, since the 1960s, modern historians have rejected this as too simplistic. However, it is not difficult to see why the succeeding generations of Vandals would have embraced the good life after so many years of hardship. Geiseric had to fight an offensive campaign against all comers in order to establish a homeland. His descendants had no desire to expand their kingdom, only to hold onto it and enjoy the ‘peace dividend’. This does not necessarily mean that the Vandal warriors of the sixth century were weaker or more degenerate than their forefathers, any more than modern British soldiers in Afghanistan are any less valiant that their ancestors on the Somme or at El Alamein. The experience of the Vandal army of the sixth century was in fighting Moorish insurgents and, unlike Geiseric’s men, they never had to face a well-organized, well-equipped and well-supplied conventional opponent.
With only a small number of Vandals controlling a vast area, with a much larger number of disaffected Roman subjects and hostile Moors picking away at the outlying regions, it is not surprising that the kingdom could not survive every concerted effort to destroy it. Each Vandal warrior killed in battle was hard to replace, while the Moors and the East Romans could afford casualties. The uncoordinated bands of Moors would never have the strength to take over the Vandal Kingdom, although they could whittle away at the periphery. Against the Romans, the Vandals had to win every single battle while the Romans could absorb a loss and come back another day when circumstances changed. Under Geiseric, the Vandals had survived many attempts to destroy them but it was probably only a matter of time before the inevitable happened. It will always be an uneven fight when you need to win every single battle while your opponent only needs to win one.
The King, The Queen, and The Usurper
Thrasamund died on 6 May 523. His successor was Hilderic, son of Huneric and Eudocia. As the oldest male of the royal line, Hilderic was the grandson of both Geiseric and Valentinian III. He was probably between 50 and 60 years of age at the time of his coronation and would have had a reasonable claim to the West Roman throne had the Empire survived. No doubt due to his mother’s influence, Hilderic adopted a pro-Roman and pro-Catholic policy. He allowed Catholic bishops to return to the Vandal Kingdom, reopened churches that had been closed by his predecessors and maintained friendly relations with the East Roman Empire.
Needless to say, this did not go down well with the fiercely Arian Vandal nobility, and many of them turned to Amalafrida, Thrasamund’s Ostrogothic widow, to be their champion. In 525, civil war broke out with the disaffected Vandal nobles allying with Amalafrida’s Ostrogoths and calling in some Moors to help them. A battle was fought at Caspa, 300 miles south of Carthage. We have no details of what occurred other than the fact that the Hilderic was victorious. He imprisoned Amalafrida at Carthage and executed the survivors of her Ostrogoth bodyguard. This led Theodoric, the Ostrogoth King, to contemplate an amphibious invasion of Vandal Africa. His death in 526 put an end to the plan. Hilderic kept Amalafrida alive while her brother was still living, but when Theodoric died he had her executed.
According to Procopius, Hilderic was no warrior. He wanted nothing to do with the unpleasant business of fighting the Moors to defend the Vandal Kingdom, preferring to leave this to his young nephew, Hoamer. In the late 520s the Moorish chieftain Antalas started raiding into Byzacena. Hoamer pushed him back into the mountains but failed to dislodge him. The Moors then attacked the Vandals when they were resupplying and soundly defeated them.
A Germanic king was supposed to be his people’s pre-eminent war leader and Hilderic had abdicated this responsibility. Furthermore, having done so, his army had been defeated. Whatever simmering disquiet had been suppressed with Amalafrida’s defeat now again rose to the surface. Next in line to the Vandal throne, according to Geiseric’s law of succession, was Gelimer. He was Geiseric’s great-grandson, son of Geilaris – Thrasamund’s younger brother.
‘This man [Gelimer] was thought to be the best warrior of his time, but for the rest he was a cunning fellow and base of heart and well versed in undertaking revolutionary enterprises and laying his hands on the money of others…. He was no longer able to restrain his thoughts, but allying himself with all the noblest of the Vandals, he persuaded them to wrest the kingdom from Hilderic, as being an unwarlike king who had been defeated by the Moors…. Thus Gelimer seized the supreme power and imprisoned Hilderic, and also Hoamer and his brother Hoageis, after he [Hilderic] had ruled the Vandals for seven years.’ (Procopius)
Gelimer, therefore, became King of the Vandals and Alans on 15 June 530. He was supported by the vast majority of the Vandal nobles, who had become disenchanted by Hilderic’s unwarlike ways and pro-Roman tendencies. Hilderic had become very friendly with the new East Roman Emperor Justinian. No doubt the prospect of a more malleable Vandal regime and the possible restoration of the Catholic Church in North Africa had been welcomed by the Romans. Now, with Gelimer’s usurpation, such hopes were dashed.
Procopius tells us of furious diplomatic messages being sent back and forth between Constantinople and Carthage, with the Emperor Justinian telling Gelimer to wait for his turn at the kingship until Hilderic’s natural death and Gelimer replying that Hilderic was planning to change Geiseric’s succession law to give the kingship to his closest relatives rather than the oldest male of the line. Gelimer had Hoamer blinded, which ruled out him ever becoming king, and he refused repeated requests from Justinian to send Hilderic, Hoamer and Hoageis to Constantinople. Procopius reports Gelimer’s response to Justinian’s diplomatic notes as follows:
‘King Gelimer to the Emperor Justinian. Neither have I taken the office by violence nor has anything unholy been done by me to my kinsmen. For Hilderic, while planning a revolution against the house of Geiseric, was dethroned by the nation of the Vandals. I was called to my kingdom by my years, which gave me preference according to the law. Now it is well for one to administer the kingly office which belongs to him and not to make the concerns of others his own. Hence for you also, who have a kingdom, meddling in other’s affairs is not just; and if you break the treaty and come against us, we shall oppose you with all our power, calling to witness the oaths which were sworn by Zeno, from whom you have received the kingdom which you hold.’
If Justinian had already been angry with Gelimer, the Vandal king’s effrontery in presenting himself as an equal to the East Roman Emperor added insult to injury. Gelimer’s timing was bad. Justinian had only ascended to the throne in 527. He was young, energetic and had just concluded a reasonably successful war against the Persians. By 533, the East Roman Empire’s frontiers were secure, riots in Constantinople had been suppressed and the Roman Army was led by the rising star Belisarius, who had won victory against the Persians and put down the riots with a brutal efficiency. Greek was replacing Latin as the principal language of the Eastern Empire, but Justinian was a native Latin speaker who looked to the West and dreamed of re-establishing Rome’s ancient glories.
Thus the stage was set for the confrontation to come.
Europe and North Africa AD 533. This map shows the political boundaries of the various barbarian kingdoms at the time of the Roman reconquest of Vandal Africa. While the Western Empire disappeared in 476, the Eastern Empire continued with its capital at Constantinople. Belisarius’ invasion force sailed from Constantinople to Sicily and, after replenishing, landed at Caput Vada. They made their way overland towards Carthage in order to avoid a naval engagement with the Vandals.