The Vandal Renaissance

The first of several blows to Roman North Africa came at the hands of Genseric, king of the Alans and Vandals, in 428. The Vandal Kingdom lasted barely a century, before its conquest at the hands of Justinian's famous general Belisarius.

The Vandals have the unique distinction of combining savagery - their sack of Rome in 455 gave us the common meaning of 'vandal' - and delicacy. So the historian Procopius (de bello Vandalico 2.14):

"Indeed from the time when they captured Africa, all of them made use of the baths everyday, and they enjoyed a table abounding in all things, the sweetest and best that earth and sea provide. And they wore gold as much as possible, and wrapped in Persian clothes, which they now call silk, they spend their time in theatres and in hippodromes and in the enjoyment of other good things, and most of all in hunting. And they had dancers and actors and many things to hear and watch which happen to be musical and especially worth seeing among people. And most of them lived in gardens, which abounded in water and trees; and they held as many drinking parties as possible and all kinds of sexual activities were widely practised by them." (1)

Even their kingdom, however, was not entirely bereft of letters - a small number of gifted Latin writers and orthodox Christians flourished in North Africa in the period from 450-530. Their efforts - small and inconsequential as they may seem today - are the last flowering Christian culture in North Africa west of Egypt, and their movement has been termed by historians the 'Vandal Renaissance.'

The Vandal Renaissance meant nothing in the historical sense - its works were soon forgotten, its legacy swept away in the storm that would gather over the remnants of the Mediterranean empire of Rome and Constantinople. Their works - highly mannered, difficult even for the most accomplished readers - have never found wide acclaim, and can scarcely be called permanent constituents of the Classical Tradition.

And yet there remains something inspirational about a doomed Renaissance in a Vandal Age. In another Carthage, whose fleshpots still hiss and boil, there still might be a place for what is old and good, for antiquity and Christian revelation.

(1. Quotation from Conant, Staying Roman [Cambridge 2012], 56-7).