Vandals, Romans and Berbers

New Perspectives on Late Antique North Africa

Andrew Merrills

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351876100
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Altertum

The birth, growth and decline of the Vandal and Berber Kingdoms in North Africa have often been forgotten in studies of the late Roman and post-Roman West. Although recent archaeological activity has alleviated this situation, the vast and disparate body of written evidence from the region remains comparatively neglected. The present volume attempts to redress this imbalance through an examination of the changing cultural landscape of 5th- and 6th-century North Africa. Many questions that have been central within other areas of Late Antique studies are here asked of the North African evidence for the first time. Vandals, Romans and Berbers considers issues of ethnicity, identity and state formation within the Vandal kingdoms and the Berber polities, through new analysis of the textual, epigraphic and archaeological record. It reassesses the varied body of written material that has survived from Africa, and questions its authorship, audience and function, as well as its historical value to the modern scholar. The final section is concerned with the religious changes of the period, and challenges many of the comfortable certainties that have arisen in the consideration of North African Christianity, including the tensions between 'Donatist', Catholic and Arian, and the supposed disappearance of the faith after the Arab conquest. Throughout, attempts are made to assess the relation of Vandal and Berber states to the wider world and the importance of the African evidence to the broader understanding of the post-Roman world.

PART 1
AFRICAN IDENTITIES

Chapter 1

The Vandals: Fragments of a Narrative

Walter Pohl

The name of the Vandals is one among a number of ethnonyms (along with those of the Goths, Burgundians and Rugians) that appear in identical or similar form in eastern Germania in the first and second centuries AD, as post-Roman kingdoms in the fifth century, and as regional or tribal names in medieval Scandinavia (and/or as islands in the Baltic Sea).¹ In traditional scholarship, the interpretation was simple: these were peoples who had migrated from prehistoric Scandinavia across the Baltic Sea to the continent where they settled in the early imperial age, marching on into Roman provinces in the course of the Great Migration of the fourth to sixth centuries. Debate was limited to the chronology of migrations, and whether parts of a people had stayed behind in Scandinavia, or wandered back at a later date.²

Only from the 1960s did this linear migration narrative begin to fragment. Not only was there a complete lack of historical sources for a migration from Scandinavia (as might be expected), but the archaeological evidence also directly contradicted it, as there was no sign of mass movements from Scandinavia to eastern Germania around the turn of our era.³ R. Wenskus offered an alternative explanation: that only small groups, whom he called Traditionskerne (kernels of tradition), migrated, inspiring a new ethnogenesis under a familiar name that now came to indicate a group of quite different origin.⁴ Since then, scholarship has moved one step further. It has been suggested that ethnonyms may also have been taken from a limited stock of familiar and perhaps prestigious names, without necessarily indicating any direct relationship between different groups of the same (or similar) name. Obviously, individual cases differed greatly. In late Antiquity, sudden or long-term limited mass migrations, movements of small groups and individuals, or the spread of names and identities among previously unrelated groups all played a role. Gothic migrations and identity formations are a case in point, ranging from a gradual shift of settlement areas in the second and third centuries AD and mass movements of refugees from the Huns in the fourth century, to military expeditions and diffused claims of Gothic ‘status’ in the fifth.⁵ As early as the sixth century, retrospective narratives straightened out this variety into a linear ethnic history, developed further by modern historiography. Such narratives have now become much more patchy, although they have not simply dissolved: stories, however fragmentary, can still be told.

For the Vandals, that means that we cannot take their ‘Vandal’ identity for granted over time nor fill in chronological gaps and draw equations over large distances. Vandal identity was anything but clear-cut in the beginning. A review of the sources for the first centuries of our era shows that there is a considerable amount of ambiguity and misunderstanding connected with the Vandals in particular. Authors writing at the time of the early Roman Empire mention the Vandilii (or similar) in eastern Germania. The name Vandilii later changed to Vandali (as in the case of Gutones/Gothi, and unlike that of the Burgundiones and the Rugii). What that means for ethnic continuity remains obscure. The ethnic landscape in the regions around the Oder and Vistula rivers is further complicated by the use of some ethnonyms as umbrella terms for larger agglomerations comprising several other names. Pliny, for example, counts among the Vandili the most important peoples of eastern Germania – the Burgundiones, Varines, Charines and Gutones.⁶ Conversely, in Tacitus, ‘the genuine and ancient name’ of the Vandilii, referred to in the second chapter of the Germania, does not appear in his list of peoples at all. Instead he names the Lugi as the main ethnic group, with the Harii and the Naharnavali belonging to them; he classes the Gutones as an independent group, along with Rugi and Lemovii, while the Burgundians are missing. In the second-century work of Ptolemy, completely different names for the peoples of the Lugi are to be found, perhaps due to discrepancies in the transmission of the text.⁷ Ptolemy does not name the Vandals at all, but includes the Burgundiones. He also knows of the Silingi, who are still referred to in the migration period as a sub-group of the Vandals. Since the majority of these groups were to be found in the southerly and westerly regions of modern-day Poland, it was often assumed that the name of Lugi (which disappeared in the third century) might be a pre-Germanic foreign term used for those peoples who named themselves Vandilii. Ptolemy, however, does not count the Silingi amongst the Lugi at all. Thus, instead of the fixed classifications proposed in the older literature, we are obliged to take into account a considerable elasticity when dealing with descriptions of larger agglomerations. This flexibility is also demonstrated in the case of the Suebi, a term whose extension changes drastically in the period between Caesar and Tacitus.⁸

The Vandilii (but not only this group) lived at the time of the early Roman Empire in a cultural area defined by archaeologists as the Przeworsk culture, which was formed in the second century BC and stretched from Silesia to both banks of the Middle and Upper Vistula.⁹ In the second century AD, this culture spread across the Carpathian Mountains to the upper Tisza River. This archaeological evidence should not be used for ethnic identifications without considerable care, but together with the expansion of the Wielbark culture – roughly coextensive with the area of the Gutones – it corresponds with the historical sources which affirm that during the period of the Marcomannic wars, peoples living north of the Carpathians started pressing southward. Warrior groups of the Vandilii began to launch advances upon the imperial territory and upon other peoples. Excerpts from the chronicle of Cassius Dio, produced in the fifth century, tell of how at the time of Marcus Aurelius ‘the Astingi, whose leaders were Raus and Raptus, came to settle in Dacia, in the hope of being accepted as allies and thereby receiving money and land’. ¹⁰ The Emperor Aurelian is reported to have defeated Vandals in the third century,¹¹ and the group also fought against the Marcomanni.¹² In the fourth century, as Jordanes reports, the Goths attacked the Vandals, who, under the leadership of Visimar, Asdingorum stirpe (‘of Hasding lineage’), were living along the banks of the Tisza.¹³ Both the Gothic origin legend, transmitted in Jordanes’ Getica,¹⁴ and also that of the Lombards, places a battle against Vandals at the beginning of the migration narrative. In the Origo gentis Langobardum, written down in the seventh century, the battle against the Vandals is crucial to establishing Lombard identity.¹⁵

Reports since the fifth century attest the name Hasdingi as that of Geiseric’s dynasty, and Jordanes understood the same from his source, Dexippos. Did the name denote a Vandal sub-group before the migration? Or do the two passages in the excerpts from Cassius Dio and Jordanes simply reflect ‘knowledge and contemporary bias of Cassiodorus’ time’?¹⁶ Still, the assumption of the existence of a Hasding group among the Vandals during the third to fourth centuries remains entirely plausible. At any rate, it should not be overlooked that the pre-supposed Silingi–Hasdingi dualism to be found in modern reconstructions does not appear in the sources. The Silingi are only mentioned in passing before the crossing to Africa, for the last time in Hydatius.¹⁷ The Hasdingi are thereafter principally referred to as a royal lineage. The origin of the Vandals from the regions to the north of the Carpathian Mountains was no longer known to later authors. Procopius believed them to have come from the Maiotis – the Sea of Asov – and counted them amongst the Gothic peoples to whom, in his opinio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART 1 African Identities
• PART 2 Written Culture
• PART 3 The African Church in Context
• Select Bibliography
• Index