Vandal Kingdom Established in North Africa
Rome recognised a Vandal kingdom in North Africa by treaty in 435, four years before the Vandals took Carthage anyway. They had crossed the Rhine in 406, spent two decades in Spain, and crossed to Africa in 429 under Geiseric with something like 80,000 people — a migration rather than an army, ferried across the strait at Gibraltar. The invitation is part of the story. Boniface, the Roman governor of Africa, was in dispute with the court at Ravenna and is said by later writers to have called them in, then changed his mind and fought them. The treaty of 435 gave them Numidia and Mauretania as federates, in theory as Roman troops under Roman sovereignty. Geiseric took Carthage on 19 October 439 while the city was watching the races, and the fiction ended. What made it the most damaging of the barbarian settlements was economics rather than territory. Africa was the western empire's richest province and its granary, and Rome's bread supply and much of its tax base went with it. Geiseric then built a fleet — the only Germanic king who did — and took the Balearics, Sardinia, Corsica and Sicily, and controlled the western Mediterranean. He sacked Rome for a fortnight in 455, thoroughly and, by the sources, without the burning that gave the word vandalism its later sense. Two enormous expeditions to retake Africa, in 460 and 468, were destroyed. Belisarius reconquered the kingdom for Justinian in a single campaign in 533, a century after the treaty. The province was ruined by the reconquest and the Berber wars that followed, and never recovered its position as anyone's granary.
- Year: 435 CE
- Category: Political
