History

A History of the Vandals — Torsten Cumberland Jacobsen

History
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A History of the Vandals
Torsten Cumberland Jacobsen
360 pages, including index
published in 2012

Of all the Germanic tribes invading the Roman Empire, the Vandals have the worst reputation for reasons that have little to do with what they actually did. Mostly this is of course due to the simple fact that they lent their name to vandalism, coined in the wake of the French Revolution to describe the destruction of religious artworks by revolutionairies by equating it to the infamous sack of Rome in 455 CE, which in itself had already been exagerrated by pro-Roman historians for various political reasons. The Vandals then have never had an even break, always been the bogeyman to an Europe much more inclined to identify itself with the grandeur of Rome than with the ‘barbarians’ that ended its reign.

This attitude perhaps explains why books about the Vandals are rare in English, with A History of the Vandals being the first general history of them in English. Then again it could also be because unlike the Franks or Lombards or Goths, the Vandals had their largest impact outside of Europe, in the empire they created in North Africa and hence can’t be used as semi-mythical ancestor tribe for a modern European nation. This, as well as the fact that for a century they were the most successfull of the ‘barbarian’ successor states to the Roman Empire could also explain why they and not those Goths or Huns were used and abused as the villains in the Fall of the Roman Empire.

My knowledge of the Vandals had been limited to what I’ve read about them in the context of more generalist works about Late Antiquity. I knew them as one of the Germanic tribes that managed to cross over into the Roman Empire in the wake of the Gothic invasions of the late fourth century CE, that like many other tribes pressure from more aggressive neighbours like the Hunas had forced them to move. From there, continueous pressure from neighbouring tribes and Romans alike kept them on the move until they settled in Spain, where they were threatened by Visigoth aggression and allied themselves with the Alans. In a brilliant move their great leader, Genseric, found the perfect solution to their problems: invade Roman North Africa and found an empire there. A desperate gamble, but it paid off.

A History of the Vandals doesn’t change this general outline but it does fill in the details of the Vandals’story. Jacobsen starts with the best guesses of where the Vandals actually came from and what they looked like before they invaded the Empire, which is of course the most speculative part of their story, as there are no written sources for it, theirs being a pre-literate society. Like the other Germanic tribes, their entry in written history starts when they first come into contact with the Romans and of course the sources we have from then on are mostly written from a Roman point of view. What we know of Vandal existence before that, has to come through archeaology and there the main difficulty is in matching the cultural remains found with what we know or think we know of the Vandals through later sources. It’s one of the reasons why many modern historians consider invading peoples like the Vandals to have only been created by their entry into the Roman Empire, rather than have existed as a coherent nation before. Certainly the idea of the invading Germanic peoples as readily distinct tribes has long been abandoned.

For the Vandals perhaps the moment they became a distinct nation could be said to be just before the leap to North Africa, when the Visigoths threatened to overrun them. Such an undertaking is difficult to imagine being done without having at least a coherent shared identity as well as a strong leader. Genseric was that leader ad he got the Vandals not only safe in North Africa, but established as the dominant power in the western Roman Empire by the time of his death. The Vandals not only took over the richest provinces in North Africa, provinces which until then had been spared most of the damage done by the ‘barbarian” invasions, but also Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica and the Balearics. His successors would have trouble holding onto the full extent of his conquest, but until the end the Vandal kingdom was considered the strongest post-Roman state in the western Meditterraean.

When the conquest of North Africa changed the Vandals from an insignificant also ran tribe into a major power, it also changed Vandal history. Under Genseric it transformed itself from a typical Germanic tribe where the king was just one of the nobles into a centrally led kingdom where the nobility no longer had the power to challenge the king. No longer would kings be elected, but rather the kingdom would be inherited by the oldest living male relative of the current king. That latest wrinkle would ensure that Genseric’s succesors would become king at a late age, as well as lead to frequent conflict as candidates fought out who would be king and reigning kings made sure their preferred heir would be the only living candidate…

Jacobsen describes how Vandal society in North Africa was reconstituted as that of a small elite atop a largely Roman population, with most functions of government still done by Romans, save for the army. The Vandals distinguished themselves mainly through their religion Arian Christianity as opposed to orthodox Catholicism and religious conflicts would be frequent to the very end of Vandal rule. North Africa has always been staunchly Catholic, with a great many theologians coming from its provinces. It’s no wonder therefore that the imposition of Arianism on it would lead to conflict and would be used as one of the justifications for the Byzantine reconquest of North Africa.

Said reconquest happened a lot quicker than anybody expected; several earlier attempts had been soundly defeated and the Vandal kingdom was supposed to be the dominant power in the west. However, its strength had been undermined through internal conflicts as well as border skirmishes with the Moors, who had taken over parts of the kingdom. Combined with a much less aggressive foreign policy after the death of Genseric, this meant the Vandal army was much less strong than assumed. Furthermore, the relatively small size of the Vandal elite meant that any serious defeat would probably mean the collapse of Vandal rule. As it turned out, the failure of the Vandal fleet to prevent the landing of the Byzantines meant the Vandals had to come into pitched battle and to their credit, they did. Jacobsen shows that their strategy was right and their fighting spirit was always high, but in the end the Byzantine armies were too strong.

As with a lot of histories of ‘barbarian’ tribes, A History of the Vandals is coloured by its reliance on Roman sources; histories written from a Vandal point of view are, almost non-existent. This means that by definition this isn’t the definitive history of the Vandals, as reflected in the title. Nevertheless, this is a good introduction and overview of their history, readable for anybody interested in Late Antiquity, highlighting one of the era’s lesser known but important powers.

The Normans — Marjorie Chibnall

History
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The Normans
Marjorie Chibnall
191 pages including index
published in 2000

So the Normans eh? Bunch of Vikings who plundered the English and French coasts for a while, before the king of France made an offer they couldn’t refuse and they settled in what became Normandy, named after them, to defend France against, well, other Vikings. Traditionally this is supposed to have happened in 911 CE. unlike other Scandinavian invaders attempting to set up stock in the countries they raided, these Vikings not only survived but thrived, creating essential a new people, the Normans and a new country, Normandy, in the process. Not only did Normandy become a powerful duchy, more or less indepdent from the kingdom of France, from there on William the Conqueror went on to take over England and Wales and invade Ireland, while other Normans went on to the Mediterranean and found kingdoms in Sicily and Antioch.

What the Normans managed to do looks a whole lot like what earlier “barbarian” invaders like the Goths did to the Roman empire, grabbing a piece of it and settle there in return for protection against other “barbarians”. But, as Marjorie Chibnall explains in her book, the Normans were “a product, not of blood, but of history”, not so much a people on the move as in the “classic” — and quite likely never to have happened in that form — people movements of Late Antiquity. Instead, it was a tightly knit group of warriors loyal to a specific ruler which took over and created Normandy, mixing with and ruling over the original populations. It was similar ties between ruler and noblemen that would later enable William the Conqueror to win the English kingdom.

A slight digression. I’ve been attempting to play a computer game called Crusader Kings II, which starts at roughly the conquest of England. At first glance this looks a standard grand strategy game, where you take control of a medieval country or duchy and attempt to conquer Europe from it, but which instead turns out all to be about building up your family and feudal ties and making your family the most prominent and powerful in Europe. It was hard to get into the mindset, but The Normans helped me a lot with this.

Because as said, if you trace the history of the Norman conquests after they’d been established in Normandy, it’s not a people or even a country going out to conquest, but instead smaller and larger groups of noblemen and knights, often younger sons left out of an inheritance, looking for adventure and spoils outside Normandy. The invasion of England was a highly organised state run enterprise; the establishments of Norman kingdoms in southern Italy/Sicily and Antioch were almost accidents, opportunities grabbed by clever, strong leaders.

Especially in their later conquests the Norman rulers were never more than a tiny minority, ruling over often already fairly mixed populations. For the most part they turned out to be tolerant of their subjects and their faiths, though not hesitant to sponsor and promote their own brand of Catholicism, including providing new monastries for their favourite orders.But because the Normans were always a minority at best, always intermixing with the populations of the countries they conquered, it’s hard to point to specifics about Norman culture and the chapters dealing with this are the weakest.

Overall though The Normans is a good, concise overview of Norman history, a good foundation to explore the Norman world from.

Norman London — William Fitz Stephen

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Norman London
William Fitz Stephen
109 pages including index
published in 1990

Now here’s an interesting little booklet. The meat of it consists on a treatise on Norman London, originally written by one William Fitz Stephen for his Life of Thomas Beckett, sometime before 1183. It’s therefore as close an eyewitness account of Norman London as we could ever get. Though interesting, this in itself is not enough to make a book of course. It is therefore partnered by another, more modern essay on the city, written in 1934 by Frank M. Stenton, a renowned historian of Anglo-Saxon England. These two pieces combined from the basis for what’s perhaps the most useful feature of the book, the maps of Norman London at the back of it.

There’s not really much more to say about Norman London. It’s an informative little booklet, but nothing more than that. What’s more, as the Stenton essay is more than seventy years old, it can’t help but be outdated, as new insights, more archaeological research and new theories will have altered our views of the period. I don’t think this would give a good picture of what we thought the Norman city looked like anymore. But this doesn’t make it worthless, if only because it still includes that eyewitness account of London, one of the few if not the only one we have of London at that particular point in time. The Stenton essay on the other hand is more of interest now for its own inherent historical value than for its accuracy.

Fitz Stephen’s depiction of London is that of the civic booster, the Londoner proud of his city, painting a rosy picture of the daily life of its inhabitants. It’s written with a naive enthusiasm, which is tempered by Stenton’s much more business-like summing up of what the city of London was like around 1100. His picture is based on not just Fitz Stephen’s account of course, but other sources as well, combined with archaeological research. So yeah, I bought this for a couple of euro on a book fair and read it in about an hour. An interesting curiosity, great to get a quick picture of Norman London, if not perhaps the most up to date picture.

The Empress Theodora — James Allan Evans

History
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The Empress Theodora
James Allan Evans
146 pages including index
published in 2002

Ken MacLeod once said that “history is the trade secret of science fiction”, but sometimes it’s abused and nowhere more so than in the cribbing from early Byzantine history that has been ongoing ever since Isaac Asimov first put in thinly disguised expys of emperor Justinian and general Belisarius in his Foundationtrilogy. Largely overlooked in these sort of appropriations is the empress Theodora, who as James Allan Evans shows in The Empress Theodora – Partner of Justinian was just as important as her husband in determining the course of the Byzantine empire.

There were quite a few strong woman emperors in Byzantine history, but most of them either ruled through their weak husbands, or as regents ruling in place of their still minor children. Theodora on the other hand ruled together with Justinian, a strong emperor himself. Their rule was a true partnership and it’s this relationship and Theodora’s role in it that Evans wants to examine here. At the same time The Empress Theodora is also a concise biography/history accessible to lay people like me.

The main problem with writing a biography of somebody who died in 548 CE is of course finding reliable sources. Archaeology won’t really help you much in pinning down the details of any given individual ruler’s life, though it can help with establishing the broad outlines of their reigns (e.g. through coins minted during their rule, or statues dedicated to their thriumps). Therefore the biographer needs to depend on the fortitious survival of primary sources dealing with their chosen subject. For Theodora luckily there are several such sources; contemporary histories, religious treatments and so on, but there’s one source that throws its shadow over the rest: the Secret History of Procopius.

Procopius was an official on the general staff (so to speak) of Belisarius and a gifted writer and historian. As such he wrote a history of Justinian’s wars, The History of the Wars in which he of course biggened up both the emperor and Belisarius, which is the most important reason why the latter is still so well known. As what you might call a court historian he was of course full of praise for the emperor and Theodora both, but in private his opinions were much less flattering. The Secret History is where all this saved up bile spewed out and Theodora does not come out looking well.

According to Procopius Theodora was born and raised in the theatre, a whore who used her sexual favours to become empress and kept using it to keep Justinian in her thrall and through him ruin the empire. Nonsense obviously, the rantings of a jealous man with the usual accusations against any woman who gains any sort of power in a patriarchal society like the Byzantine Empire, but not without a grain of truth, as Evans argues. That Theodora was of a humble background, even a theatrical background has been claimed in other sources as well, sources not as obviously hostile to her. Procopius therefore is likely to have been largely right about her background, just very slanted in how he presented it and biased in his interpretations, which has coloured later views of her.

James Allan Evans tries to look past the bias of Procopius and other sources to the real Theodora and the pictures he sketches of her is appealing. He argues that she was a true partner to Justinian as empress, also functioning as a sort of “loyal opposition” to him, the one person who could stand against him when necessary without fear of her life. This was especially important in the religious conflicts that dominated Justinian’s reign.

It’s hard to judge the importance of Christian dogma in the politics and daily life of the Byzantine Empire, but it’s fair to say these were more than academic debates. Once the Roman Empire had become an explicitely Christian one it was always going to become monoreligous, with only one kind of Christianity allowed. Which kind was decided by the ruling emperor and Justinian followed his immediate predecessor by supporting the Chalcedonian doctrine, against the Monophysites, who were now heretic. Theodora on the other hand was herself inclined towards Monophysitism and supported and protected them, to the point where she was later made a saint. Evans argues that she also functioned as a lightening rod, drawing dissenters towards her, with the end result being that Monophysite dissent could largely be channeled, rather than run wild. Theodora played the same roles in more down to earth political matters as well, as Evans e.g. shows how she influenced Justinian into putting more effort in his Italian campaigns to retake the old Western Empire.

At just under 120 pages, The Empress Theodora is more of a sketch than a full biography of course, but it’s a great way to start. Evans is a clear and careful writer, taking care to note the limits of his sources. Glad I took this out of the library.

Charlemagne — Rosamond McKitterick

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Charlemagne: the Formation of a European Identity
Rosamond McKitterick
460 pages including index
published in 2008

I knew Rosamond McKitterick from the volume in the Short Oxford History of Europe series she edited, which is why I picked up Charlemagne: the Formation of a European Identity from the library. Charlemagne himself has only relatively recently picked my interest, mostly through having read Emperor of the West a few years back. Interest in Charlemagne in general has rather picked up in the past decade, as the search for a common pan-European identity has taken on obvious political significance, what with the EU and all.

Which is where this comes in, as Rosamond McKitterick attempts to get back to contemporary sources to re-evaluate Charlemagne and his reign, without the interpretations later historians have given them. Her goal is to in this way provide a new critical understanding of what these sources tell us about the development of the Carolingian empire, its political identity and how these changed during Charlemagne’s reign. It makes Charlemagne a heavily text orientated history, as McKitterick examines the narrative representations of Charlemagne produced during his lifetime and shortly after. To be honest, at times this made it heavy going, especially when I read most of it during the morning and afternoon commute.

Charlemagne is divided into five chapters. In the first McKitterick tackles the problem of how Charlemagne has been represented in late eight century and early ninth century sources, like the Annales regni francorum produced during his lifetime and revised shortly after, as well as purely posthumous sources like the Vita Karoli. The largest problem with these sources is of course the dating of them, which is far from easy; obviously it makes a difference if a source is truly contemporary or written several decades after his reign, with memories having become unreliable in the meantime and political useful interpretations of it having been developed…

The second chapter: Poppinids, Arnulfings and Agilolfings: the creation of a dynasty, is the closest this book comes to a narrative history as McKitterick gives a short overview of the rise of the Carolingian dynasty and Charlemagne’s own rise to the throne, first as ruler together with his brother Carloman, then on his own. The assumption underlying much of Carolingian history is that Charlemagne had fallen out with his brother at some point, but as McKitterick shows, this is actually not easy to prove using contemporary sources. From there on, she moves on to Charlemagne’s own succession as well as the growth of the empire during his lifetime.

The third chapter introduces another important aspect of Carolingian history where the orthodox interpretation might not quite be in synch with what can actually be deducted from the historical documents available: the royal court. She first looks at the representations of the court in various types of texts, then at what we might be able to conclude from these, in the context of whether the image of Charlemagne’s court as an itinerant one, travelling with the king between palaces, is actually correct. She also looks at Charlemagne’s own travels, the political and diplomatic space in which he operated and on a more meta level, at the survival and redaction of royal charters and what information these can give us.

The fourth chapter builds on this, examing the king’s own communications both within and outside the empire and what they reveal about the Carolingan political identity and programme, if there was such a thing. This and chapter five, looking at the religious aspects and ideology of Charlemagne, were the hardest chapters to finish, as McKitterick’s analys of the primary documents on these subjects is somewhat less than gripping, to be honest.

On the whole Charlemagne wasn’t quite the history book I was looking for, but it is obviously a valuable contribution to Carolingan studies.