HISTORY 15 B VANDALS

The Vandals were a “barbarian” Germanic people who sacked Rome, battled the Huns and the Goths, and founded a kingdom in North Africa that flourished for about a century until it succumbed to an invasion force from the Byzantine Empire in A.D. 534. 

History has not been kind to the Vandals. The name “Vandal” eventually became a synonym for destruction, in part because the texts about them were written mainly by Romans and other non-Vandals. 

While the Vandals did sack Rome in A.D. 455, they spared most of the city’s inhabitants and did not 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,” writes Torsten Cumberland Jacobsen, a former curator of the Royal Danish Arsenal Museum, in his book “A History of the Vandals” (Westholme Publishing, 2012). 

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