Reviewing posthumously published books is a challenging task. M. was one of the modern giants of late-antique North African history. His revisionist history of the Moors, Les Maures et l'Afrique romaine (2004) was a significant achievement that challenged C. Courtois's assertion in Les Vandales et l'Afrique (1955) that the Moors were responsible for the end of Roman Africa. Around the millennium, he began to turn his attention to another – at that time – neglected group: the Vandals, who seized parts of Tunisia, Algeria and Libya from the Roman empire and created a kingdom that endured for nearly a century (a.d. 435–533/4). A number of masterful articles on topics such as the territorial extent of the Vandal kingdom to the fall of Carthage gave a preview of the insights from this new focus of M.’s scholarship, one that was cut off by his premature death in 2010.

This book – playing on the title of Courtois's book – appears to have an even bolder aim than M.’s book on the Moors: to contextualise the Vandals within the Roman empire rather than late-antique Africa alone. Edited only sparingly by M.-Y. Perrin, the book reproduces M.’s manuscript in the state it was in 2010. It is divided into three parts: the origins of the Vandals and their advances through Gaul and Spain (Chapters 1–3); the conquest of Africa and the establishment of the Vandal kingdom (Chapters 4–6); and Vandal rule in Africa (Chapter 7). A further five chapters examining the organisation of the Vandal state, urbanism and culture, Arianism and Christianity, the relationship with the Moors, and the collapse of the Vandal authority as well as an epilogue were planned, but unwritten, at the time of M.’s death. The book's coverage therefore is restricted to the history of the Vandals in Europe, and the foundation of the Vandal kingdom in North Africa until the 470s.

In the first part, M. describes the supposed origins of the Vandals in Eastern Germania and traces their progression through Gaul and Spain. Chapter 1 recounts the history of the Vandals in the early Roman period through a close reading of classical and late-antique authors (especially Tacitus, Pliny and Jordanes) and material culture of the so-called Prezworsk and Wielbark cultures. For M., the Vandals were of Celto-Germanic origin rather than Scandinavian, politically fragmented, had good relations with Rome but were only of minor importance before a.d. 400. Chapter 2 analyses the processes which led the Vandals to cross the Rhine into the Empire. M. takes the traditional view that the movement of the Vandals and other Germanic groups into Roman territory was a consequence of Hun activity. In contrast to recent arguments that these episodes should be viewed as an invasion by small military groups, he depicts the Vandals as a migrationary people accompanied by women and children. Chapter 3 turns to the Vandal presence in Gaul and Spain, and convincingly shows that it is with their incursion into Gaul (406–9) that the Vandals begin to gain their reputation as destructive. In an important excursus on this trope, M. demonstrates that later medieval authors attribute unknown destructions and martyrdoms to the Vandals from the seventh century onwards. Once in Spain, M. convincingly argues that the different groups of Alans, Silings, Suevi and Vandals were settled on the land by an imperial settlement in 411; he follows W. Goffart in arguing that the Alans were the most powerful and received half the territory. Over the next decade, however, wars against the Goths devastated the Alans, Silings and Suevi, who were absorbed by the Vandals. For M., this created the need for a new form of group identity based around Arianism and warfare against shared enemies in Spain and the western Mediterranean.

The second part of the book adds important clarifications to M.’s published views on the Vandal conquest of Africa. Chapter 4 describes the Vandals’ progress across North Africa between 429–439. M. sees Vandal success as a consequence of Heraclian's attempt to usurp imperial control in 413, which spread the military resources of Africa too thinly. M. makes a forceful argument for a violent capture of Carthage in 439 as a corrective to a recent tendency to see the capture of the city as a peaceful process. His argument is based primarily on textual evidence and would have benefited from a more detailed discussion of the latest archaeological research on late Roman and Vandal Carthage. Chapter 5 turns to the question of the territorial limits of the Vandal kingdom and its relation with the Roman empire. M. argues that the 442 treaty is best seen as a diplomatic fiction that allowed the Romans to claim that the Vandal king was a client of the Roman empire, but also enabled the Vandals to depict themselves as the heirs of Rome. Over the course of the fifth century, the Vandals increasingly used this claim to demonstrate their independence and authority in North Africa. Based on his study of toponyms and the Notitia provinciarum et ciuitatum (an African episcopal list of 484), M. lays out a compelling argument for Vandal control of all the African provinces apart from Mauretania Tingitana by the 480s, before being gradually diminished by the emergence of Moorish polities in the west (this latter development was to be discussed in the unwritten Chapter 11). Finally, Chapter 6 turns to the contentious scholarly debate on the fiscal nature of barbarian settlement and whether Germanic groups appropriated land or tax revenues. He argues – correctly, in my view – that Vandal occupation entailed the expulsion of certain landowners and the confiscation of their land, which was given over to the soldiers, and that subsequently further land was expropriated from ecclesiastical and lay owners in the province. This mass seizure of property, however, was restricted to Africa Proconsularis, where Vandal persecution of the Nicene Church was also largely confined.

The final (incomplete) chapter reconsiders the strategic significance of Vandal ‘piracy’ in the Western Mediterranean in relation to Roman naval activity and diplomacy in the fifth century. It is within this context of continued Roman maritime victories that M. compellingly argues in a short appendix that the so-called ‘Vandal rostra’ in the Roman forum should be redated to the reign of Anathemius (467–72).

It would be unfair to ask more of an incomplete book manuscript published posthumously, but it is clear that M.’s major new insights into the debates on the Vandals in North Africa, currently driven by German and Anglo-Saxon scholars, would have come in the unwritten chapters of the second half of the book. Here, his unparalleled knowledge of the late-antique and medieval sources would certainly have transformed our understanding of key debates on the royal court, urban life, economy, religion and relationships between the Vandals, their Romano-African subjects and the Moors. The rich illustrations of objects (unfortunately never referred to in the text and poorly captioned) give the reader a tantalising clue of M.’s intentions to integrate the most recent archaeological evidence into his narrative, much of which has emerged in the last 20 years. In the end, this book is an extremely valuable French contribution to the growing number of works on the Vandals published in recent years in English and German, but it leaves the reader regretting the loss of M. for North African scholarship all the more.