Writing a few years after 485 ce, Victor of Vita described the Vandal conquest of North Africa in a manner that cast them forever as the ‘bad barbarians’ of late antiquity.Footnote 1 Indeed, Victor dwelt at length on the brutality of the military event, illustrated by the savagery of the Vandals and their particular singling out of clerics and members of the Nicene (for him, Catholic) Church.Footnote 2 Victor further described how the Vandals tortured priests and bishops so that they would reveal the location of their churches’ wealth.Footnote 3 Such depiction is what gave rise to the traditional understanding of the Vandal conquest as persecution, as an early example of what was to become the dominant characteristic of their rule in Africa.Footnote 4
Vandal Africa has garnered serious scholarly attention in recent years, leading to a thorough reappraisal of traditional interpretations of the Vandal period.Footnote 5 In the mid-twentieth century, in two seminal works on the topic, Christian Courtois had paved the way for such revision by presenting highly critical readings of contemporary historiography.Footnote 6 Perhaps the most important of Courtois's insights is his argument that the depiction of the Vandals by Nicene writers became increasingly hostile as time passed, and that later authors applied their contemporary hatred of the Vandals retroactively to the period of the conquest.Footnote 7 Courtois thus doubted the veracity of Victor's account, and particularly his thesis that the Vandals had systematically targeted the Nicene Church during the conquest. Instead, Courtois saw nothing out of the ordinary in Victor's description of Nicene sufferings; they were simply ‘the usual woes of war’.Footnote 8 Additionally, for Courtois, if the Vandals seemed to have targeted churches and clerics, as the Nicene sources claim, it was because the invaders were searching for wealth. If there were victims amongst clerics, and bishops especially, it was because they had assumed leading roles in resisting and in hiding church treasures, not because of their Christian confession.Footnote 9 Of course, as Courtois suggested, one explanation for this phenomenon could be that the contemporary religious climate at the time of writing influenced each writer's retroactive viewpoint on the conquest period. This interpretation has been favourably received in the last decade.Footnote 10 Recent studies have indeed argued that the religious policies of Geiseric (429–77 ce) and Huneric (477–84 ce) became progressively and increasingly fanatical in their attempts to impose a Vandal Church and increasingly coercive toward Nicene opponents of this policy.Footnote 11 This could well explain the growing hostility of the sources that Courtois observed.Footnote 12
Victor of Vita himself provides a piece of evidence in support of this interpretation. Following the conquest of Carthage and the proscriptions that accompanied it, the city's notables and especially the Nicene clerics went to petition King Geiseric in order to obtain residency in the Vandal kingdom.Footnote 13 Amidst his typical apologetic exaggerations, that a rabid (‘rabido’) Geiseric would have thrown them into the sea without the intervention of wiser counsels, Victor specifies that Nicene clerics withdrew, saddened, because the king had confiscated their churches.Footnote 14 As one of Victor's recent commentators understood well, however, such confiscations did not automatically entail a proscription of the Nicene cult.Footnote 15 This is a key difference: one that invalidates the notion that the Vandals systematically coerced Nicenes from their arrival in North Africa. Rather, confiscating religious buildings for use by the ruler's confession is in clear continuity with earlier Roman policies toward rival Christian factions.Footnote 16 This, in turn, supports the notion that Vandal religious policy evolved in stages, and that the more coercive of these stages followed their conquest of Carthage.Footnote 17
It is possible, however, to be more specific about the sources of this tradition, and to identify turning points in the fashioning of the Vandal historiographical persona as persecutor.Footnote 18 This article contributes to this discussion by showing that sources contemporary to the Vandal conquest (429–39) did not universally reflect the religious overtones of Victor of Vita's account, nor did they unanimously depict the Vandals as persecutors. What they did focus upon was material destruction and loss, as well as the horrors of war. One exception was Augustine, whose ep. ccxxviii constitutes a turning point as the first theological interpretation of the Vandals as a threat to the salvation of Nicene souls. Previous scholars who took the bishop of Hippo's description of the Vandals at face value, and a confirmation of Possidius and Victor's later accounts, missed an important point: Augustine's transformation of the potential violence and destruction evoked by an unnamed bishop (in a lost letter quoted by Augustine) into certainty. Augustine, looking back on his life's work against heretics and schismatics (‘Donatists’), considered the imminent Vandal conquest as the destruction of a century of efforts by the Nicene Church to triumph over its ecclesiastical foes in North Africa.Footnote 19 This is undoubtedly why he interpreted the arrival of the conquerors as spelling the eternal death of Nicene Christians, and cast the future actions of the Vandals as certainty, as a persecution in waiting.
It is intriguing that Possidius, who lived through the Vandal conquest, suffered exile at the hands of the Vandals and included Augustine's ep. ccxxviii in his Life of Augustine, did not explicitly label the event as a persecution.Footnote 20 It is actually another of Augustine's pupils, Prosper of Aquitaine, who resurrected his mentor's depiction of the Vandals as persecutors. With Quodvultdeus, the bishop of Carthage exiled to Campania by the Vandals in 439, another stage in the elaboration of the Vandal historiographical persona is reached. Indeed, witnessing the increasing success of the Vandal Church in attracting converts amongst Nicenes, Quodvultdeus diverged from Augustine's teachings and adopted an eschatological and milleniarist perspective in his depiction of the Vandals as precursors of the AntiChrist. All these viewpoints finally came together in the account of Victor of Vita, who in fact had probably been too young to witness the conquest himself.Footnote 21 This article thus argues that Augustine, in his reply to the anonymous bishops seeking advice in the face of the invasion, established the framework that became prevalent in Nicene sources’ depiction of the Vandals as persecutors, via later writers who shared the same confessional viewpoint such as Possidius, Prosper, Quodvultdeus and Victor of Vita.
This does not imply that the Vandal conquest was a peaceful event; quite the opposite.Footnote 22 Indeed, the Vandal military conquest of Africa was an event of unquestionable violence that led to the death and suffering of thousands.Footnote 23 On this point, this article follows Courtois's lead in understanding such violence as ‘les malheurs habituels de la guerre’. To label such violence as usual, or typical in such circumstances, is not to excuse it or to dismiss it as unimportant; it is simply that contemporary valuation should not be applied to interpretation of the past. The rape of nuns by Vandals, attested by Pope Leo's rescripts, constitutes a particularly relevant, if delicate, example.Footnote 24 Such behaviour was unfortunately, yet unquestionably, a regular occurrence in ancient warfare. Indeed, a recent study showed that the ‘terrible tetralogy’ of war – theft, rape, murder and arson – was not unique to the Vandals.Footnote 25 The crux of the debate is not whether the Vandals were cruel conquerors, which can be taken as a given, but whether they deliberately directed their violence at the Nicene Church.
The first part of the article examines Augustine's account of the Vandals from ep. ccxxviii, before contrasting it with accounts from contemporary observers of the conquest period (Capreolus of Carthage, Antonius Honoratus, Prosper of Aquitaine, Theodoret of Cyr and Possidius of Calama). A second section argues that a turning-point occurred with the Vandal conquest of Carthage, which led to the more hostile depictions of Quodvultdeus, who suffered exile at the hands of the Vandals. A third section compares these findings with the account of the fifth-century Spanish cleric Hydatius, which documents the Vandal passage through the Iberian Peninsula before they crossed into Africa. From a religious perspective, Hydatius’ account reveals that Priscillianists, not Vandals, were the main concern for Nicene clerics at this time.Footnote 26 More significantly, while disturbances typical of invasions are obviously an important part of Hydatius' description, the faith of the Vandals does not appear to be a major concern for him. This situation changes with Hydatius’ account of the Vandals' crossing into Africa; in this he followed African sources which transmitted the Augustinian interpretation of the Vandals as heretical persecutors.
The purpose of this article is to analyse the rhetoric of the sources, the literary construction of the Vandals as persecutors, and not to analyse the causes of the Vandal conquest or what it can reveal about the invaders’ religious policy.Footnote 27 The nature of, and whether the Vandal religious policy toward Nicene Christians was indeed a persecution is therefore beyond its scope. Rather, the article proceeds from the assumption that, among late antique Christian groups, because orthodoxy and heresy were a matter of contested definition, the concept of persecution became more subjective than earlier Roman persecutions of Christians had been. Instead, in the context of Christian claims to be persecuted despite living under Christian rulers, it came to identify a larger set of actions – that could often be attributed to normal law enforcement – perceived as unfavourable to the Christian faction of the observer, for whom coercive measures regarding the faith constituted persecution.
The Christian Roman state and its successor kingdoms attempted to impose the confessions that they considered orthodox through various degrees of coercion, based on claims to a monopoly of truth. The reaction to this was the counter-claim of being a victim of persecution. This constituted a discourse, a rhetorical tool of empowerment for dispossessed and disempowered Christian groups. From a historical perspective it seems that in the late antique period the allegation of persecution became a political claim used by dominated groups of Christians to attack the legitimacy of the dominant Christian faction. Such groups then used ‘corrosive discourses’, such as the rhetoric of persecution, as a means of resistance, as a political weapon against their ideological foes in order to oppose their subjective claims to truth.Footnote 28 This article analyses one such example of corrosive discourse, the construction of the Vandals as persecutors.
Augustine's Vandals
Following the Vandal crossing into Africa in 429 ce, Augustine's episcopal colleagues grew restless in the face of the imminent invasion.Footnote 29 A certain Quodvultdeus – not to be confused with the future bishop of Carthage – had written to Augustine to get his advice on the behaviour that bishops should adopt in the face of the Vandal advance.Footnote 30 Quodvultdeus was apparently seeking ecclesiastical support from Augustine for his desire to flee his city, perhaps citing Matthew x.23 (‘But when they persecute you in this city, flee to another’) since Augustine referred to this passage in his response.Footnote 31 Augustine replied with advice that Quodvultdeus undoubtedly did not want to hear: he should stay where he was as long as there were faithful to minister to. Following Psalm xxxi, ‘Be our protecting God and fortified place’, Augustine viewed the bishops as the fortress of their flock.Footnote 32 This was an important shift in tactics when facing what clerics considered persecution because it had long been a Christian tradition (illustrated by Cyprian and Lactantius) to obey the precept of Matt. x.23, which emphasised fleeing rather than facing persecution.Footnote 33 The magnitude of this change in Augustine's thinking is illustrated by the fact that the bishop of Hippo himself had earlier given the advice to flee persecution to his Donatist rivals.Footnote 34
Quodvultdeus apparently shared Augustine's reply (now lost) with his colleague, Honoratus of Thiaba, and the latter was so surprised to read that Augustine's advice went against the precept of Scripture that he too wrote to the bishop of Hippo (also lost).Footnote 35 Augustine responded by sending Honoratus a copy of the letter that he had originally sent to Quodvultdeus on this matter, a reply which failed to satisfy the bishop of Thiaba. He therefore challenged Augustine's understanding of Matthew, and supported Quodvultdeus’ traditional interpretation that justified flight. In his reply (ep. ccxxviii), the only letter to survive from this exchange, Augustine justified his alternative view on the way clerics ought to behave in the face of persecution.Footnote 36
The passages of Honoratus’ letter quoted by Augustine, as well as Augustine's reply, actually constitute the earliest descriptions of the Vandal conquest of Africa. A close reading of Augustine's letter, however, reveals that Honoratus’ description of the horrors of the conquest, upon which later accounts expanded, was entirely speculative and did not include religious motivation.Footnote 37 Similarly, a critical examination of Augustine's reply shows that it was the bishop of Hippo who blurred the distinction between potential and reality, added a theological interpretation of the conquest, and thereby provided a conceptual framework for understanding the Vandals as persecutors.
One of the original letters written to Augustine underlines the purely military nature of the Vandal advance. At ep. ccxxviii.4, Augustine quotes the words of ‘a certain bishop’ (‘episcopum quemdam’), Quodvultdeus or Honoratus, who wrote: ‘If the Lord commanded us to flee in those persecutions in which the fruit of martyrdom is found, how much more ought we to flee useless sufferings when there is a hostile invasion of the barbarians?’Footnote 38 Despite the possibility that the bishop was genuinely frightened and wrote to justify his desire to flee the invasion, it seems plain enough that for him the arrival of the Vandals in Africa was a ‘hostile invasion’ (‘hostilis incursus’), a war of conquest, without any specific religious motivation. These passages make a clear distinction between martyrdom/persecution and ‘useless sufferings’ (‘steriles passiones’)/‘hostile invasion of the barbarians’, the latter describing the current Vandal context. The mention of Spanish bishops who fled after their flock had themselves left shows the same basic point: the Vandals were causing devastation, but without religious motivation.Footnote 39
The original letter also included a brief description of what Catholics might expect from the Vandals. Augustine thus quotes the ‘episcopus quidam’ as writing: ‘If we must remain in the churches, I do not see what good we are going to do for ourselves or for the people other than seeing men being slain, women being raped, churches being burned, and ourselves not faltering under torture when they ask of us what we do not have.’Footnote 40 Strikingly, the unnamed bishop constructed his sentence with a future participle (‘profuturi’) and three subjunctive verbs (‘cadant’, ‘constuprentur’, ‘incendantur’) denoting potential outcomes. Augustine did not miss these verbal cues, and answered: ‘and yet on account of these events, which are uncertain, we ought not to commit the certain wrong of abandoning our duty, without which the destruction of the people is certain not in matters of this life but in those of the next life’.Footnote 41 Augustine thus correctly acknowledged that the Vandals had not yet committed any of these actions and that what the author feared were potential actions, a crucial detail missed by previous scholars. This fundamental point is especially important because this passage, with its traditional list of war atrocities, was to become the source of later depictions of the Vandal conquest (by Possidius and, through his narrative, Victor of Vita).
This neglect is perhaps to be explained by Augustine's blurring of the original distinction made between potential and tangible actions later in his response, a slippage that set up, through his addition of a religious motivation, a conceptual framework casting the invasion as a virtual persecution. Whereas the unnamed bishop's original question (‘If the Lord commanded us to flee in those persecutions in which the fruit of martyrdom is found, how much more ought we to flee useless sufferings when there is a hostile invasion of the barbarians?’) mentioned ‘persecution’ rhetorically, in order to support his argument that bishops should flee, Augustine ignored the description of the event to focus on the ‘persecution’ aspect. Indeed, in his response, Augustine provided guidelines for clerics’ behaviour during persecution, and thereby transformed the potential actions into future outcomes.
For example, Augustine wrote that ‘when he who can escape does not flee from the onslaught of the enemy and so does not abandon the ministry of Christ, without which men could neither live a Christian life nor become Christians, he finds a greater reward of love than he who flees, not for his brethren's sake but for his own, and when taken captive does not deny Christ but suffers martyrdom’.Footnote 42 This implies that the invasion will result in Vandal attempts to force captives to deny Christ and, in the event of a refusal, in putting the resistor to death (martyrdom). In other words, by adding this religious element (distorted, for Vandals were also Christian and did not, strictly speaking, ‘deny Christ’), Augustine's depiction of the conquest brought it into the realm of a holy war.Footnote 43 In addition, by insinuating that Vandals will create martyrs, Augustine implied that they were already persecutors. The original worries related to a war of conquest (‘men being slain, women being raped, churches being burned, and ourselves … faltering under torture’) from the unknown bishop did not contain such theological concerns.Footnote 44 In turning the ‘useless sufferings’ (‘steriles passiones’) of the unnamed bishop into martyrdom, moreover, Augustine accomplished what Elizabeth Castelli identified as the main function of the discourse of martyrdom: to give a significant meaning to meaningless suffering.Footnote 45 This was nothing new for Augustine, who had already argued that any average Christian could find an opportunity for martyrdom in daily activities, as when bed-ridden Christians resisted having recourse to amulets.Footnote 46
A key question is why Augustine insisted on this religious subtext, when he had excused essentially the same list of atrocities as ‘the woes of war’ for the Visigothic sack of Rome in the City of God.Footnote 47 The difference is the local, African, embittered ecclesiastical context in which Augustine had been a key player throughout his episcopal career. Augustine's concept of the two cities is at the centre of his thinking on the barbarian invasions.Footnote 48 In the words of Augustine's biographer, Possidius, ‘the man of God did not believe and think as other men did regarding the causes from which this most fierce assault and devastation of the foe had arisen and come to pass’.Footnote 49 Possidius is here undoubtedly referring to the more earthly worries that dominated Honoratus of Thiaba's account and his own, which might well have been the norm at the time. Again, ep. ccxxviii provides more details. In a series of antitheses, Augustine insists that Christians ought to fear spiritual rather than physical disasters.Footnote 50 In other words, for Augustine, spiritual death was far worse than the violence of invasion, which explains his argument that clerics ought to remain alongside their community no matter what.Footnote 51 This also explains Augustine's transformation of the invasion into a theological conflict, for the Vandals were Homoian Christians, as the bishop of Hippo was surely aware.
Indeed, in the second part of the letter, Augustine develops his initial, implicit, comment on the outcome of the Vandal conquest. He does so by prophesying what would happen if the shepherd abandoned his flock: ‘For the wolf will come, not a human being but the devil, who has often persuaded the faithful to become apostates if they lacked the daily ministry of the Lord's body. And the weak brother for whose sake Christ died will perish not in your knowledge [1 Corinthians viii.11] but in your ignorance.’Footnote 52 Augustine is here obviously connecting the Vandals with the devil, anticipating that they might incite Nicenes to convert to their faith, as Quodvultdeus will later attest. Incidentally, Augustine refers to Athanasius as a positive example of a bishop who fled in the right circumstances, because he was personally persecuted (he therefore did not have a flock to tend to).Footnote 53 It seems hardly coincidental that Athanasius was also ‘persecuted’ by a Homoian ruler (Constantius ii) and, in case anyone missed the allusion, Augustine specified that ‘the Catholic faith … was defended against the Arian heretics by his voice and zeal’.Footnote 54 Augustine's polarising interpretation, however, was unique among contemporaries of the Vandal conquest, for it is only later, through the accounts of Prosper of Aquitaine, Quodvultdeus and Victor of Vita that Augustine's version became the consecrated Nicene vision of events. By contrast, the contemporary accounts of Capreolus and Possidius focused on earthly concerns.
Capreolus, Liber genealogus, Possidius and Theodoret
In April 431 Capreolus, successor of Augustine's friend Aurelius to the episcopal see of Carthage, wrote to his fellow bishops assembled at Ephesus to explain why it would be impossible for African bishops to reach Asia Minor in time for the council. In a contemporary description of the Vandal conquest that contrasts with Augustine's account, Capreolus’ version surprises for its absence of religious motivation for Vandal depredations:
At this time, all means of access are cut off. Indeed, the mass of the enemy has poured out on us; everywhere the devastation of the provinces is enormous. Inhabitants have been either killed or driven to flee; the wretched sight of desolation offers itself to the eye in any direction one might turn, and therefore any possibility for those who were invited to attend is foreclosed.Footnote 55
It seems certain that Capreolus would have denounced the Vandals to his peers if he had considered their actions to be religiously motivated, especially since he took time to profess an Augustinian Trinitarian position in his letter to Ephesus.Footnote 56 Instead, he clearly describes the ‘usual woes of war’ without necessarily implying a religious dimension akin to persecution. In this context, the argumentum ex silentio is valid because it is inconceivable that Capreolus would have had a reason to ignore the posited persecution while writing to his fellow bishops. It is also important to note that Capreolus was able to send his deacon Bessula to Ephesus as a representative and, incidentally, to carry the letter that has survived down to us.Footnote 57 This often neglected detail should temper the darkest interpretations of the Vandal conquest based on Capreolus’ letter.Footnote 58
An African chronicle with Donatist entries, the Liber genealogus, provides a unique independent testimony. In 438 its Donatist editor depicted Geiseric as the AntiChrist, by claiming that the numerical value of his name equals 666.Footnote 59 Despite appearances, however, it would seem that this description of Geiseric does not have the same meaning as it would later have for Quodvultdeus, for the latter explicitly equates the AntiChrist with the Devil, while the ‘Donatist’ editor follows the original meaning of the Apocalypse more closely to mean ‘leading people astray’ (‘scilicet ut multas gentes seducat’).Footnote 60 This viewpoint might seem at first sight to align with Augustine's interpretation. However, that this text also identifies Anthemius as the AntiChrist raises a question. Why would this Eastern senator be placed alongside the Vandal ruler?Footnote 61 In the end, given that Donatists considered themselves as persecuted by any ruler who did not share their confession – almost continuously from Diocletian to Honorius – it was only natural for them to include Geiseric in this list since he followed his predecessors’ practice in favouring his own Christian faction.Footnote 62 The apparent agreement with Augustine is not conclusive in this case, because Donatists considered all secular authority (with the exception of Julian) as persecutory.
Possidius of Calama wrote his Life of Augustine before the fall of Carthage, in 439, in order to defend the bishop of Hippo and present him as a symbol of orthodoxy.Footnote 63 It is therefore to be expected that such a text, from a writer concerned with Augustine's reputation, not only ‘exaggerates the damage and disruption’, but also adopts his mentor's framing of the Vandals as dangerous heretics.Footnote 64 However, Possidius demonstrates a different understanding of the Vandal conquest from that of his mentor. Whereas Augustine assumed that the Vandals would cause the apostasy of Nicene Christians, Possidius’ Vandals were sent by God: here is the seed of an interpretation later popularised by Salvian, that the Vandals were God's punishment for the sins of Africa.Footnote 65 This is particularly significant, considering that Possidius reproduced a large section of Augustine's ep. ccxxviii within his Vita.Footnote 66 This is where Possidius’ comment that Augustine thought differently from other men on the cause of the Vandal conquest takes on its fullest meaning. Possidius’ purpose in including Augustine's letter was to disseminate the bishop of Hippo's advice in this troublesome period; differences of opinion on the Vandal conquest were secondary to him. Possidius, the most obvious source behind Victor's account of the invasion, repeats all the elements found in Honoratus’ original letter quoted by Augustine: ‘savage foes’, ‘raging with cruelty and barbarity’, devastation and pillage, murder and tortures, and other outrages.Footnote 67 Even if Possidius could have witnessed such events, it remains likely that his description is primarily literary, based on Augustine's ep. ccxxviii, rather than on his own experience.
Although Possidius describes the way in which Vandals victimised members of the clergy and attacked church buildings, he adds an important detail which goes against the idea of a religiously motivated conquest: ‘Even the bishops of the churches and the clergy who, by the help of God, did not chance to meet the foe or, if they did meet them, escaped their hands, were despoiled and stripped of all their goods and begging in abject poverty.’Footnote 68 This indicates that the Vandals aimed primarily to seize the wealth of the clergy, not to inflict violence on them out of religious hatred or from a desire to extinguish Nicene Christianity within Africa.Footnote 69 This is why Possidius, unlike Prosper and Victor later, did not label these actions a holy war. In fact, Possidius did not use the word ‘persecution’ where it might have been expected: ‘I must by no means pass over in silence the fact that when the above-mentioned enemy was threatening us’ (not ‘persecuting’ us).Footnote 70 Although such restraint is surprising for a bishop who was himself exiled by the Vandal king, Prosper's words seem to indicate an expulsion from his see to deny him access to his basilica, by contrast with Quodvultdeus’ formal exile from Africa, undoubtedly a more traumatic experience which was to have an equally profound effect on his vision of the Vandals.Footnote 71
A series of contemporary letters from Theodoret of Cyrus similarly describes the circumstances of Carthaginians now in exile in the East without mentioning any strong religious reasons for their situation.Footnote 72 Instead, he laments the case of Celestiacus, a prominent man of Carthage now reduced to poverty, not by persecution but as a result of the ‘barbarian war’.Footnote 73 Even when recommending Bishop Cyprian to his colleague Ibas of Edessa, Theodoret echoes the views of Salvian and Quodvultdeus of the Vandals as divine punishment for the sins of African Christians, calling the invasion ‘an advantage for all’ because it shows the flimsy nature of earthly concerns.Footnote 74 In this context, Theodoret's harshest comment on the Vandals is that Cyprian is in exile ‘because of the ferocity of the barbarians’.Footnote 75 But this does not prove much, for he could have chosen to go into exile voluntarily, as Orosius had done in 414, fleeing into Africa from Spain to avoid the barbarians altogether.Footnote 76
Most likely, whereas Augustine's viewpoint was theologically driven, later writers such as Victor, who depicted the Vandals as persecutors, derived their hatred of the conquerors from personal observation of increasing coercive measures (mainly in Carthage) and retroactively applied these impressions to the conquest period. Possidius, by contrast, would probably not have exercised such hindsight, as it is not clear whether he lived long after the fall of Carthage.Footnote 77 Thus Victor amplified the original description found in the Life of Augustine by adding one key word: ‘it was particularly against churches and the saints’ basilicas … that [the Vandals] raged’.Footnote 78 Similarly, Quodvultdeus’ experiences definitely influenced his increasingly harsh accounts. Prosper represents an important intermediary stage in this development. As a disciple of Augustine, he could rely on a literary framework elaborated by his master, and disseminated by his disciple Possidius through his Life of Augustine, in which to cast his own account.Footnote 79
Quodvultdeus, Prosper and the fall of Carthage
Following Augustine's death in 430, Quodvultdeus, bishop of Carthage, carried forward his spiritual master's example to become the leader of the Catholic resistance to the Vandal invaders.Footnote 80 It is only natural, then, that Quodvultdeus followed Augustine in depicting the Vandals as persecutors.Footnote 81 The spoliations endured during the conquest of Carthage undoubtedly loom large in explaining another important turning point in the historiography of the Vandal conquest.Footnote 82 When he took control of the city Geiseric certainly exiled Nicene bishops who opposed him or perhaps refused to convert, but he also exiled rich landowners and senators of Carthage.Footnote 83 Moreover, despite Quodvultdeus’ adoption of the conceptual framework of persecution, his works contain numerous indications of African material preoccupations during these events, as well as evidence suggesting that the Vandals were quite successful at establishing a modus vivendi with their subjects, encouraging conversions by means of rewards.Footnote 84 As a result, Quodvultdeus progressively developed an apocalyptic interpretation of these events.Footnote 85
First, his works obviously attest to the violence associated with the war of conquest: women violated, nobles enslaved.Footnote 86 But, as Orosius had emphasised, such actions were customary during wars and nothing that the Romans themselves had not done before.Footnote 87 Like Victor of Vita, however, Quodvultdeus seems to have deployed rhetorical devices in order to exaggerate the violence of the Vandals. In the passage often quoted to describe the Vandal ‘atrocities’ committed during the sack of Carthage and later adapted by Victor, Quodvultdeus’ description of ‘pregnant women slain’, and ‘nursing mothers’, ‘with their little ones torn from their hands and thrown half-dead in the street’ alludes to the martyrological literature, specifically Perpetua and Felicity.Footnote 88 These martyrs were the subject of a previous sermon by the same author, referring to them being pregnant and nursing.Footnote 89 More than anything, this passage illustrates Quodvultdeus’ intertextual casting of the Vandal conquest as a persecution, i.e. paralleling the victims of the conquest with glorious African martyrs of the past. Following in the footsteps of Augustine, Quodvultdeus’ invocation of famous martyr narratives in the context of the violence accompanying the military capture of Carthage thus seems to be another attempt to transform meaningless suffering into a meaningful narrative of martyrdom for his community.
Second, the bishop of Carthage also reveals much more peaceful attempts made by the Vandals to proselytise and to convert Catholics to their Homoian faith. This is the most important religious element of Quodvultdeus’ texts, along with numerous mentions of rebaptism, the public ritual through which official conversion was sanctioned.Footnote 90 That North Africans, including Christians, were mainly worried about material losses and destruction is amply attested through his Sermons.Footnote 91 This is undoubtedly what spurred Quodvultdeus into believing, anticipating Salvian, that the Vandal invasion was a just punishment for the sins of the African province:
Where is Africa, that for the whole world was like a garden of pleasures? Where are her many districts? Where are her great, most splendid cities? Was she not chastised the more sharply, the more unwilling she was to take on discipline to remedy those evils, when other provinces had reformed themselves?’Footnote 92
More important, Quodvultdeus attests that the Vandals attracted numerous converts through peaceful means: ‘Beware, dearly beloved, the contagion of the Arians; don't let them separate you from Christ with a promise of earthly goods.’Footnote 93 And later, after having been exiled from Africa himself, the former bishop of Carthage writes of ‘Arians whom we now see seducing many either through their secular power, their evil industrious character, or assuredly their moderate abstinence or with the deception of all sorts of signs.’Footnote 94 These two passages indicate in the strongest way that, despite all the rhetorical attacks penned by Catholic clerics who depict them as cruel persecutors, the Vandals seem in this early period to have mainly attempted to attract converts to their confession in hopes of establishing it as the new African orthodoxy.Footnote 95 Nicene bishops naturally represented the strongest form of opposition to this endeavour, for theological reasons but perhaps also because they knew very well that this meant the end of their authority in these rich lands. But Quodvultdeus increased his literary assaults from his exile in Italy, now free to express his full hatred and spite for the new masters of Africa. Thus in his Book on the promises and predictions of God, written in exile around 450, he developed the same themes as in his earlier works; except that the Vandals are now the creatures of the Devil, precursors of the AntiChrist foretold by John, and announcing the end times, before which they shall be vanquished by the Lamb of the Apocalypse.Footnote 96
In a similar vein, three passages from the Chronicle of Prosper of Aquitaine, combined with a contemporary letter from Honoratus Antoninus, bishop of Constantina, depict Geiseric attacking Nicene Christians for their religious beliefs in 437 and 439 ce. Indeed, according to Prosper:
[1327] In Africa, G[e]iseric, king of the Vandals, wanted to use the Arian impiety to undo the Catholic faith within the regions where he resided. He persecuted some of our bishops, of whom the most famous were Pos[s]idius, Novatus, and Severianus, to the extent that he deprived them of their right to their churches and even drove them from their cities, for their steadfastness would not yield to the terrors of that most proud king.
[1329] In the same period, four Spaniards, Arcadius, Paschasius, Probus, and Eutychianus were formerly considered by G[e]iseric to be valued and distinguished by virtue of their wisdom and faithful service. To make them even more esteemed, he commanded them to convert to the Arian heresy. But as they most steadfastly rejected this wickedness, the barbarian was roused to a most furious anger. First their property was confiscated, next they were driven into exile, then tortured severely, and, finally, suffering death in various ways, they succumbed wonderfully to a most glorious martyrdom.Footnote 97
The first passage (1327) is noteworthy for containing an explicit mention of the Vandal persecution (‘eatenus persecutes est’), and thus can be seen as an application of Augustine's framework as expressed in ep. ccxxviii. A disciple of Augustine, Prosper applied his mentor's conception of the Vandals as persecutors of the bishops.Footnote 98 The chronological context of the episode is also important, for here is the first turning point in the historiographical tradition of the conquest: the beginning of a proselytising Vandal policy within the territories allotted to Geiseric following the foedus of Hippo (435 ce).Footnote 99 As a result, there followed an inevitable clash with the leading figures on the Nicene side. Geiseric decided to exile both bishops and aristocratic landowners, which the former perceived as a religious persecution. In doing so, the Hasding ruler was unmistakably already encroaching upon the terms of the treaty and assuming greater powers than a simple federate king.Footnote 100
While the first of Prosper's passages can be considered to be his own interpretation of events, the second one is not so easily dismissed. Here, rather, is positive evidence of coercion based on religious beliefs: a concrete example of Nicene advisers executed for their refusal to convert to the king's confession. It is true that Prosper edited his Chronicle numerous times, at least until 455, the year of his final entry, and thus it belongs to later sources that were probably influenced by contemporary developments of the Vandal religious policy. Honoratus Antoninus’ consolatory letter to Arcadius exhorting him to remain steadfast in the face of martyrdom and written while the latter was still alive, however, supports Prosper's story that there was an Arcadius with an opportunity for martyrdom.Footnote 101 This identification is nevertheless not quite secure, for it ultimately depends on Gennadius of Marseilles's entry on Honoratus in order to connect his missive with Arcadius.Footnote 102 Is this an odd exception, a religiously motivated act of cruelty by the Vandals during the conquest period?Footnote 103
This episode seems more to reflect Geiseric's concern with his own coalition, than traditional Vandal ‘persecution’.Footnote 104 The Vandal king seems, for the first time, concerned about the unity of his group. Understandably, as he risked it being overwhelmed among the greater numbers of Romans.Footnote 105 The context, of course, is equally important: two years after the foedus of Hippo and two years before the conquest of Carthage (439 ce), the Vandals were still only a group of federates in Roman territory without lands of their own. Nothing was certain about the fate of this expedition. The Vandals probably started to display their confession as one of many forms of identification that could distinguish them from their provincial hosts, and through which they could express their solidarity with each other when confronted with the extremely strong sense of confessional identity that they encountered in Africa, an area polarised by religious dissent since the end of the Great Persecution (312 ce).Footnote 106 In such a context, the high profile of four ‘Spanish’ (‘Hispani’) advisors of the Nicene confession represented a strong potential force of dissension at Geiseric's nascent court.Footnote 107 In the end, it therefore seems that the Nicene writers (Prosper and Honoratus) magnified the religious implications of what was mainly a ‘profane’ conflict, by turning a political purge into martyrdom, and thereby again giving meaning to ‘useless sufferings’. Even if this event is considered to have been religiously motivated, however, it does not follow from this case that the entire conquest period had religious goals.
Finally, in his description of the conquest of Carthage in the Chronicle, Prosper exaggerates the victimisation of Nicene clerics already found in Honoratus of Thiaba and Possidius, and thereby provides the intermediary stage that will lead to Victor's exaggerated account:
On 19 October, [Geiseric] took advantage of the peace and seized Carthage. He put its citizens to various kinds of tortures and took all of their wealth as his own. Nor did he refrain from despoiling the churches. Emptying them of their sacred vessels, and depriving them of the attention of their priests, he ordered that they no longer be places of worship but quarters for his people. He was harsh towards the entire captive population but particularly hostile to the nobility and clergy so that no one could tell whether he was waging war more against man or God.Footnote 108
In a significant contrast, however, the Vandals’ passage through Spain did not leave traces of religious antagonism. Spanish sources do report Vandal persecution, but only for events subsequent to their crossing into Africa, which seems to betray the influence of African sources. Of course, Vandals were not the primary subject of Spanish writers of the time. But if they had been the hateful persecutors that Augustine believed them to be, it would seem that Spanish Nicene writers would have taken notice. Instead, this disparity shows that the historiographical traditions on the Vandals were vastly different in Spain and Africa. It would seem that the historiographical persona of the Vandals as persecutors took root in the polarised context of late Roman Africa, following the model first elaborated by Augustine of Hippo.
Hydatius’ Vandals
The Vandals, together with the Sueves and the Alans, crossed the Pyrenees into Spain in the autumn of 409.Footnote 109 The main source for their presence in Spain is Hydatius, bishop of Aquae Flaviae (Chaves, Portugal), who wrote his Chronicle from 457/8 to 468/9 at the earliest.Footnote 110 Hydatius’ text reveals a strong preoccupation with heretical activity, to the extent that, as one scholar commented, heresies were more worrisome for Hydatius than were the barbarians.Footnote 111 In his preface, for example, Hydatius wrote that ‘the state of ecclesiastical succession [is] perverted by indiscriminate appointments, the demise of honourable freedom, and the downfall of virtually all religion based on divine instruction, all as a result of the domination of heretics confounded with the disruption of hostile <barbarian> tribes’.Footnote 112 Yet, along with some of Augustine's writings from the 420s, Hydatius attests that despite the presence of Vandals and Goths, Priscillianism constituted the main preoccupation for Spanish Catholic clerics during the same period.Footnote 113 Indeed, after narrating Priscillian's downfall (Chronicle, 16), Hydatius writes of one bishop ‘Ortygius, who had been … living in exile because, on account of his orthodox faith, he had been driven out at the instigation of Priscillianist factions.’Footnote 114 This passage makes it clear that Hydatius was concerned with certain ‘agentibus Priscillianistis’ when he accused ‘heretics’ of being the cause of religious troubles in his preface.
While Hydatius only connects barbarians with economic disaster resulting from the looting and pillaging of the migration, the Chronicle’s preface puts heresy on a par with invasion as an explanation for the troubles that had befallen Iberia. Overall, however, Hydatius seems to explain economic disasters as a result of heresy. Hydatius writes that ‘the barbarians who had entered Spain [Alans, Vandals and Suevi] pillaged it with a vicious slaughter’.Footnote 115 He equates this plundering with the exactions of the Roman tax-collectors and soldiers, which are all explained as a ‘deadly pestilence’ divinely sent as punishment for the heresy that had taken control of the country.Footnote 116 Hydatius buttressed the apocalyptic vision with a description of a second plague, a famine, which he described by using the well-worn topos of cannibalism among the population.Footnote 117 Strikingly, however, Hydatius’ vision of doom associated with the conquest ceases when he depicts barbarians as divine agents of God instituting peace throughout the region: ‘When the provinces of Spain had been laid waste by the destructive progress of the disasters just described, the Lord in his compassion turned the barbarians to the establishment of peace. They then apportioned to themselves by lot areas of the provinces for settlement.’Footnote 118
This depiction is very similar to the earlier one of another Spanish cleric, Orosius, who wrote Seven books of history against the pagans probably in 417 in Carthage.Footnote 119 Orosius confirms that after the pillaging of numerous areas, the barbarians divided the land by lot.Footnote 120 There can be no question that Iberia suffered from the migration, and many Spaniards suffered from the violence that accompanied it. Surprisingly, however, Orosius writes that whatever suffering Spain incurred from the two years of barbarian migrations was as nothing compared to the two hundred years of suffering that they had endured under Roman authority.Footnote 121 Like Hydatius, Orosius records that after pillaging the land for about two years, the barbarians turned to peace and settlement:
damning their sword, they converted to the plough and they now treat the rest of the Romans very well, as allies and friends, so that there are now among them Romans who prefer to support freedom in poverty among barbarians rather than the worry of tribute among Romans.Footnote 122
Despite the obvious rhetoric with which Orosius and Hydatius constructed these passages, both show an initial period of brutal conquest mainly characterised by pillage and looting.Footnote 123 In both cases, their silence concerning religious actions is remarkable given the highly inflammatory historiographical treatment that the Vandals are subject to in later sources. Hydatius’ silence is particularly significant, moreover, considering his depiction of the Vandals as persecutors later in his own text.
The first appearance of a religious subtext in Hydatius’ account of the Vandals occurs after a description of more pillaging: ‘Gunderic, the king of the Vandals, captured Hispalis [Seville], but soon after, when with overweening impiety he tried to lay hands [‘manus extendisset’] on the church of that very city, by the will of God he was seized by a demon and died.’Footnote 124 There is some ambiguity here. For example, what was the exact nature of Gunderic's actions against the Church? It is possible that the Vandal king tried to confiscate a church building for the use of his Homoian followers, as Courtois has suggested.Footnote 125 Whatever the motivation for this action, Hydatius presented it as an impious act, an isolated occurrence, and not as part of systematic attacks against Nicenes. Hydatius did not consider this event as part of a persecution. Rather, the Vandal king's death is a punishment from God for the performance of a specific impious deed. By contrast, the religious elements in Hydatius’ narrative make it clear that it was Priscillianists, and not Vandals, with whom the Spanish cleric was concerned.Footnote 126 Of course, Hydatius must have had his own agenda in focusing on the Priscillianists rather than the Vandals. Significantly, however, the Vandals did not represent for him the theological threat that they posed to Augustine in Africa.
Hydatius’ description of the events surrounding the Vandal crossing into Africa and the period of African conquest, however, adopts a much clearer religious overtone.Footnote 127 The difference between Hydatius’ narrative of the Vandals in Spain and his description of the African Vandal period – the Vandals start attacking Catholic clerics once they have crossed into Africa – illustrates vastly different religious milieux. In the first case, while preparing to cross the straits of Gibraltar, Geiseric is cast, without any consideration for his heterodoxy, as the instrument of divine vengeance against the impious Suevi: ‘Not far from Emerita, which [the king of the Suevi] Heremigarius had scorned, thereby causing an affront to the holy martyr Eulalia, G[e]iseric slaughtered the accursed soldiers who were with the Sueve.’Footnote 128 As Hydatius’ account shows, even at this late stage, Geiseric and his men could still be depicted as working alongside God to chastise impious barbarians.
It is revealing of Hydatius’ perception of the Vandal presence in Spain that for him Homoian Christianity became a problem there only after 455, in connection with the Visigothic king Theoderic's attacks, and long after the Vandals had left. Hydatius describes how Theoderic sacked numerous churches, breaking altars, abducting virgins, using church buildings as stables and kidnapping bishops who opposed him.Footnote 129 Nevertheless, the first explicit mention of Homoians in an unambiguously negative context does not occur until the entry for the year 465: ‘Ajax, a Greek apostate and leading Arian, arose amongst the Sueves, with the help of their king, as an enemy of the orthodox faith and the divine Trinity. This noxious venom emanating from this hateful man was conveyed from the Gallic home of the Goths.’Footnote 130 These passages contrast sharply with Hydatius’ narrative about the Vandal sojourn in Spain, which records no aggressive proselytising of Homoian Christianity as it later did in Africa, as well as with Hydatius’ own narrative of the Vandal conquest.Footnote 131
Indeed, after describing the capture of Carthage in rather neutral terms, an important transition occurs in Hydatius’ description of the Vandals.Footnote 132 Similarly, Hydatius describes the Vandal pillage of Sicily, in the year 440, with an important subtext of persecution:
In the course of pillaging Sicily G[e]iseric undertook a lengthy siege of Panormus and at the instigation of Maximinus, a leader of the Arians in Sicily who had been condemned by the orthodox bishops, he initiated a persecution of the orthodox in order to force them into the Arian impiety by any means whatsoever. Some succumbed, but a considerable number persevered in the orthodox faith and achieved martyrdom.Footnote 133
The change of tone about the Vandal conquest is unmistakable, as Hydatius’ account now follows the consensus found in African sources on this topic. While we are relatively well informed on Hydatius’ sources for Spain – up to 427, after which Hydatius apparently wrote from his own knowledge of events – scholarship has paid little attention to the sources that he used for his narration of African events.Footnote 134 The influence of the Augustinian tradition and the African framing of the Vandals seem obviously at play in this radical shift in Hydatius’ narrative.Footnote 135 Other evidence of Hydatius’ knowledge of Augustine and of the ecclesiastical contacts between Spain and Africa makes this seem very likely.Footnote 136
This overview of the sources contemporary to the period of the Vandal conquest has made two main points. First, sources writing independently of the Augustinian tradition do not present the Vandals as cruel persecutors. Of course, this does not imply that the Vandal period in Spain and the conquest of Africa were peaceful times, in fact it was quite the opposite. But in contrast with later sources like Victor of Vita, which depict the Vandals as targeting and abusing Nicene clerics specifically because of their religious beliefs, earlier sources attest mainly to the pillaging and general violence associated with a war of conquest.Footnote 137
Second, this analysis has shown that an important transition occurred after the Vandals crossed into Africa, when Augustine's depiction of the invaders as persecutors created a theological framework of interpretation in which Nicene clerics were able to cast them as the enemies of God. This rhetoric of martyrdom and persecution was not immediately and universally adopted by Nicene clerics, as the example of Possidius illustrates, but most later authors who followed the Augustinian tradition adopted it: Quodvultdeus, Prosper of Aquitaine and, later, Victor of Vita. As they witnessed coercive measures, experienced exile and saw their faction losing ground, these writers developed an increasingly polarised interpretation of the Vandal conquest that lost touch with the ‘reality’ of what had happened. Victor of Vita, who likely had access to all of these texts, seems to have conflated all their perspectives to write what became the classic depiction of the Vandals and thereby to define their historiographical persona for centuries to come.
