Vandal Kingdom

A Germanic people who crossed a continent, took Rome's richest province, and gave a word for destruction to languages they never spoke. The Vandals crossed the Rhine around 406, moved through Gaul into Spain, and in 429 under Geiseric ferried some eighty thousand people across the strait into North Africa - the only barbarian group to take a Mediterranean fleet and use it. They captured Carthage in 439, seizing the grain supply on which Rome depended, and built a navy that raided Sicily, Italy and Greece. In 455 they sacked Rome over fourteen days; the sack was by most accounts less destructive than the Gothic one of 410, and the modern sense of vandalism comes from an eighteenth-century French bishop's coinage rather than from the event. The kingdom was Arian Christian and persecuted the Nicene African church, which is why the surviving sources, written by that church, are uniformly hostile. Belisarius destroyed the kingdom for Justinian in a single campaign in 533 and 534. The Vandals disappear from the record almost immediately afterwards. Their century in Africa left remarkably little trace. The kingdom ran from 435 to 534 and was centred on Carthage. Its territory covered modern Tunisia, eastern Algeria and the islands of the western Mediterranean. Vandal North Africa continued to export grain and olive oil. The name survives in Andalusia, though the derivation is disputed. Their language left no texts at all, and what is known of it comes from names recorded by others. Geiseric ruled for nearly fifty years.

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