Full episode on Spotify/iTunes
#earth #art #culture
In
the late 400s, the mighty Roman Empire's capital fell under the rule of
two powerful tribes from the empire's Germanic outskirts: the Visigoths
and the Ostrogoths. Their leader, Flavius Theodoricus Rex, ruled the
Roman heartlands as King of Italy, King of the Visigoths, and King of
the Ostrogoths. Theodoric's rule was made possible by his predecessor
Odoacer, one-time soldier in the Roman imperial army. In 476, Odoacer
rebelled against the empire and expelled child emperor Romulus and
declared himself King of Italy. For the eastern half of the Roman Empire
based in Constantinople, the conquest was a shock and would precipitate
a series of campaigns to bring the western territories under
Constantinople's control. The most famous leader of these campaigns was
Emperor Justinian, a Latin speaker who ruled as Roman emperor in
Constantinople in the 500s and whose most famous legacy was the
construction of the Hagia Sophia. It would be another century before
Emperor Heraclius changed the language of administration in
Constantinople from Latin to Greek and turned its attention to the
rising Islamic empires emerging along the trade routes from Petra and
Palmyra to Arabia.
 |
D[ominus] N[ostris] Hildrix Rex / Kart[a]g[ine] Felix
|
But
the fall of Rome to Germanic conquerors wasn't entirely unexpected in
the 470s. A few decades earlier, another group had preceded the
Visigoths and Ostrogoths in capturing the heartlands of the Roman
Empire: the Vandals. In 429, the Vandals crossed the Mediterranean from Roman Spain to Morocco and eventually captured the city of Roman Carthage in what is now Tunisia. It was there where they established their own
kingdom stretching from coastal Tunisia and Algeria to Sicily across the Sicilian Strait and the island of Corsica off the western coast of Italy. In other words, the Vandals had the Roman capital surrounded, but they never captured Rome. That feat was accomplished by Odoacer and his successors among the Visigoths and Ostrogoths. But the conquest was undoubtedly made easier by the Vandals' capture of Carthage and Sicily.
 |
| Vandal Kingdom in the 470s (credit: Karnoefel) |
The Vandals ruled from their new capital in Carthage from 439 to 534---almost one hundred years. What made them so memorable in the eyes of the Romans was their attempt to take Rome in 455. Just two decades before the city fell under the rule of the Visigoths and Ostrogoths, the Vandals sacked Rome. One of the only reports of the time comes from a writer named Prosper from the city of Aquitaine in southwestern France. Proper was a student of Augustine. Augustine was the famous early Christian writer from present-day Algeria, specifically from the city of Hippo on the outskirts of what is now Annaba. Both Prosper and his teacher Augustine spent part of their lives in Rome and wrote works in Latin, and Prosper actually witnessed the Vandals' Sack of Rome. In his chronicles, known as the Epitoma Chronicon, Prosper tells us that on the second day of June 455, the Bishop of Rome Pope Leo the I officially received Vandal king Gaeseric, King of the Vandals and Alans, and beseeched him not to destroy the city and to instead be satisfied with whatever spoils of plunder he and his army had taken and to go back to Carthage in peace. The Vandals left with large amounts of treasure, but they did destroy Roman monuments like the Temple of Jupiter. It was this destruction that earned them the reputation for the destruction of cultural significant sites centuries later. During the Renaissance, writers coined the term vandalism to describe situations in history when anyone or any group damaged culturally significant art and architecture. In other words, for these writer, people who deface public or private property and especially artistic monuments are in a sense, vandals like the Vandals who damaged the Temple of Jupiter during the Sack of Rome in 455.
But there was another term in history that draws on the memory of the Vandals. Andalus, the Arabic word for the Iberian peninsula that still survives today in the word Andalucía. Long after the Vandals surrendered to the eastern Romans in the 500s, when the Visigoths controlled Iberia close to Morocco, Arabic-speaking adventurers throughout the eastern Roman empire's frontiers continued to remember the Vandals.