The real history of this time, however, is the story of Aetius. His talent, energy, and ability to seize the moment defined Roman success and opportunities in the Latin west from the 430s to the 450s. He was indispensable—always a bad thing in a general, for generals die, and the most important thing they can give their employers is reasonable confidence in a viable succession. Aetius managed everything but that.
Aetius was a typical Roman general of his time; that is to say, his ancestry was mixed. He was born far to the east of Rome, in Moesia, in a place called Durostorum (modern Silistra, in Bulgaria), the last important crossing of the Danube, just where it turns north from the Bulgarian border to divide into a long stretch of delta that eventually opens into the Black Sea. His mother was Roman and his father barbarian. In his youth, he spent some time among Alaric’s people, and more time living outside the Roman borders in the camps of Rugila, king of the Huns. It would be hard not to call him a barbarian, pure and simple.
Aetius made his important military debut as the leader of an army said to consist of 60,000 Huns who entered Italy to support Johannes’s claim to the imperial throne. Arriving in Ravenna a few days late and finding Galla Placidia, Valentinian, and their forces in control, he turned coat in a twinkling, declaring his allegiance to the new regime, and he was rewarded with an appointment as master of the horse for the provinces of Gaul. He flourished in Roman high politics by remaining constantly and astutely aware of the possibilities and threats of the Huns he had known so well when young. And so the worst of the barbarians became the real power base for one of the best Roman generals.20
In a sequence of campaigns, usually with Hunnish mercenaries at his disposal—that is to say, Huns learning to be Romans in the way new arrivals traditionally learned to be Roman—Aetius introduced order and regularity to various frontiers that had been challenged in recent years. He made good judgments, and also questionable ones.
Africa he had written off to the Vandals, who were left in command at Boniface’s departure. Whether Rome could have more firmly defended Africa against the Vandals is an open question. The closer the African provinces were to Carthage, the more thickly populated and defended they were, and Rome had organized the main defensive force in the provinces to manage southern frontiers while controlling relations with backcountry Berbers and Saharan nomads. Farther west, toward and somewhat west of modern Algiers, the Roman presence thinned out and kept its defense focused on protecting the southern border. No one ever thought that a significant threat could come from the west, crossing the Strait of Gibraltar. Then the Vandals appeared.
Limited Roman garrisons
Once established in Africa, once able to draw on local restlessness while very likely enlisting some rootless border rats along the way, the Vandals could outwait and on occasion outfight the limited Roman garrisons. When the emperors proved reluctant to send reinforcements and when some of the local forces left Africa to go with Boniface, there was not much to do except wait for the inevitable. Even so, the inevitable can take a while. The Vandals crossed to Africa in 429, they besieged Hippo in 430, and they had the upper hand in the whole series of provinces west of Carthage by 435. They did not actually take Carthage itself until 439, but then their regime remained in control for almost a prosperous century balkan tours 2023. Constantinople at first resisted the new regime and opposed it, but by the 470s made peace. What followed over the next half century was a sharp upturn in commerce between Constantinople and Carthage. Some people say wars are good for business, but apparently, in this case, so was peace.
Vandals and Visigoths were faithful to the borderland Arian Christianity that had crossed the frontier with them. They followed their fathers’ tradition, which they could truthfully say descended directly from the apostles: a very old and deeply Roman religion. The Vandals, under the extraordinary Gaiseric, who ruled them from 428 to 477 (and thus can scarcely have remembered any life outside Rome’s borders), exercised iron- fisted church management in favor of the orthodoxy the Vandals brought with them, to the disadvantage of the Christian factions they found already there. Many African Christians were still resentful of the forced unification of churches in 411, when the Caecilianist faction won the support of the emperor against the majority Donatist faction.21 With Augustine and a few of his longtime collaborators gone from the scene at the end of the 420s, the imperfectly unified African church was without strong leaders. Some natives welcomed the Vandals and attended their churches, while others resisted fiercely. The Vandals’ suppression of dissent was effective but not total, and the imperial church survived to reappear when the Vandals were ejected. In all this, the Vandals appear to have been the most intolerant, that is to say the most modern, of the Arians who took power in western provinces in the fifth and sixth centuries. All the others—Franks, Burgundians, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Lombards—were more inclined to make peace with the other versions Christianity they encountered.
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