The installation of the Vandals in Roman Africa
“La fin d’un empire”, Claire Sotinel, Belin, 2019
With Gaiseric, their king since 428, the Vandals, the last hostile barbarian group, entered Africa in order to find a rich territory, sufficiently away from the imperial armies to be able to live there in complete independence: in May 429 their army of several thousand men, accompanied by their families, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar. They progressed towards the east over 2000 km, sweeping away the Roman troops and leaving the memory of a particularly murderous expedition. For Rome, losing Africa means losing the richest province in the West and the City’s source of supply. But the counter-offensives did not make it possible to defeat the Vandals even if the siege of Hippo between June 430 and August 431, during which its bishop Saint Augustine died, ended in a failure for the barbarians.
Faced with millions of African Romans, the Vandals were few in number (less than 100,000) but they were invaders who had little interest in signing a fetus with Rome. Finally, the latter was still signed on February 11, 435; the Vandals received land around Hippo while the Romans kept the largest part of Africa, the most urbanized and the richest. But
Gaiseric, converted to Arianism, went beyond his status as federated king by adopting an anti-Catholic and anti-Roman aristocratic policy: in addition to the destruction of churches, expulsions and executions of clerics, was added the confiscation of ecclesiastical or senatorial lands for transform the Proconsular into an area of Vandal settlement and Arian religion.
On October 19, 439,
Gaiseric
took Carthage by surprise and then occupied Byzacene and Tripolitania. Rome negotiated in 442: the Vandals occupied proconsular Africa, Byzacene and the eastern part of Numidia while the king agreed to deliver grain to supply Rome. He respected this treaty for 20 years but the loss of Africa was no less a disaster for Rome.
