Key Facts
- Duration
- 435–534 AD (99 years)
- Founding crossing
- ~80,000 Vandals crossed from Hispania to Africa, 429 AD
- Capital captured
- Carthage taken 439 AD
- Sack of Rome
- 455 AD
- End
- Conquered by Belisarius in the Vandalic War, 534 AD
Imperial Zenith Metrics
Historical Trajectory
Phase I: Rise
Under the warlord Gaiseric, an estimated 80,000 Vandals and Alans crossed from Hispania into North Africa in 429 AD, advancing eastward along the coast. Unable to expel them militarily, the Western Roman Empire formally permitted Vandal settlement in Numidia and Mauretania in 435 AD. Four years later the Vandals broke the agreement, seizing Carthage and establishing a robust independent kingdom controlling North Africa's wealthiest provinces.
Phase II: Zenith
At its height the kingdom encompassed the coastal regions of modern Tunisia and Algeria, along with the strategically vital Mediterranean islands of Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and Mallorca. The sack of Rome in 455 AD demonstrated Vandal naval power. Despite their Arian religious policies, the kingdom sustained Latin intellectual culture, with North Africa remaining home to leading writers and natural scientists of the late Western Roman world.
Phase III: Decline
Two Roman naval expeditions in the 460s AD failed to dislodge the Vandals, but internal dynastic weakness eventually undermined the kingdom. In 533–534 AD the Eastern Roman general Belisarius launched the Vandalic War, rapidly defeating Vandal forces and incorporating the territory into the Byzantine Empire. The surviving Vandal population either assimilated into the indigenous North African population or was dispersed across Byzantine territories, ending the kingdom entirely.
Notable Imperial Reigns
Selected rulers mapping the empire’s trajectory