Vandals Cross to Africa - Rome's Grain Supply Cut
Geiseric ferried the Vandals and Alans across the Strait of Gibraltar in May 429 — some 80,000 people, a migration rather than an army. They had crossed the Rhine in 406, spent two decades in Spain being harried by the Visigoths on Rome's behalf, and concluded that Africa was defensible and Spain was not. The invitation is part of the story and may not be true. Boniface, the Roman governor of Africa, was in dispute with the court at Ravenna, and later writers say he called them in and then changed his mind; contemporaries closer to the events do not. Africa was the western empire's richest region and its granary, and it had almost no garrison because nothing had threatened it for centuries. Augustine died in 430 during the siege of his own city of Hippo, with the Vandals outside the walls. A treaty in 435 recognised them as federates in Numidia and Mauretania. Geiseric ignored it and took Carthage on 19 October 439 while the city was at the races. What made the loss decisive was economic rather than territorial. Rome's grain supply and a large part of its tax base went at a stroke, and the western empire never afterwards had the revenue to field an army capable of recovering anything. Geiseric then built a fleet, took Sicily, Sardinia and the Balearics, and sacked Rome in 455. Two enormous expeditions to retake Africa were destroyed. Belisarius did it in one campaign in 533, a century later. The reconquest and the Berber wars that followed ruined the province, and it never fed anyone again.
- Year: 429 CE
- Category: Military
