Who were the Vandals, the 'barbarians' who sacked Rome?

[Judi Lynn]

By Owen Jarus published about 13 hours ago

The Vandals sacked Rome and carved out a kingdom in North Africa.

The Vandals were a Germanic people who sacked Rome and founded a kingdom in North Africa that flourished for about a century, until it was conquered by the Byzantine Empire in A.D. 534.

History has not been kind to the Vandals. The word "vandal" has become synonymous with destruction, in part because the texts about them were written mainly by Romans and other non-Vandals.

Despite this modern name association, the Vandals were likely no more violent or destructive than their contemporaries. While the Vandals did sack Rome in A.D. 455, they spared most of the city's inhabitants and didn't burn down its buildings. "Despite the negative connotation their name now carries, the Vandals conducted themselves much better during the sack of Rome than did many other invading barbarians," Torsten Cumberland Jacobsen, a former curator of the Royal Danish Arsenal Museum, wrote in his book "A History of the Vandals(opens in new tab)" (Westholme Publishing, 2012).

It wasn't until after the French Revolution, in the late 18th century, that the name "Vandals" became widely associated with destruction, Stephen Kershaw, who holds a doctorate in classics, wrote in his book "The Enemies of Rome: The Barbarian Rebellion Against the Roman Empire(opens in new tab)" (Pegasus Books, 2020).

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A map of the Vandals' and other Barbarian's routes into the Roman Empire. (Image credit: North Wind Picture Archives via Alamy Stock Photo)

More:
https://www.livescience.com/who-were-the-vandals

[cbabe]

1. Terry Jones' Barbarians

Rome, 23rd of August in the year 410 A.D... Tomorrow Alaric the Goth will sack Rome. It will be one of the most traumatic moments in history. The whole of the western world will be shaken to its core. Blood and violence! Rape and slaughter! Death and destruction! The cradle of civilization burned to the ground and left in ruins!
Well, not really. It was all much more extraordinary than that.

-Terry Jones' Barbarians

So what do you do after you've been part of the most famous comedy troupe ever? Well, pretty much anything you like. The members of Monty Python have gone on to become critically acclaimed directors, actors in films, and the host of a series of travel shows. Terry Jones (among other things) has turned his interest in the past into a series of TV documentaries on medieval history. Starting out in 1995 with The Crusades, Jones has written and hosted several such series, the latest being 2006's Barbarians, now available on DVD. An engrossing and interesting documentary, it challenges much of what we've been taught about the Roman Empire in a very convincing way.

The series is broken down into four episodes, each of which looks at a different barbarian race. The first thing that Jones makes clear is that according to the Romans, a barbarian is simply anyone who isn't Roman. The xenophobia that the Romans felt is clearly visible in their writings about other races, all of which are described as inferior and uncivilized. But was that really the case? Probably not.

As the old saying goes, history is written by the winners, and that is doubly true when the losers have not form of written language. Most of what we know of the Goths, Vandals, and Celts comes from Roman texts, a decidedly one-sided look at things.

https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/31978/terry-jones-barbarians/

(Who is a barbarian and who is civilized?)