Vandal Sack of Rome (455): Gaiseric Plunders the City

The Vandal sack of Rome took place in June AD 455, when King Gaiseric’s fleet sailed from Carthage, entered the undefended city on 2 June and plundered it for about two weeks. Coming only 45 years after Alaric’s sack, it stripped Rome of much of its remaining public wealth and carried thousands of captives to Africa, including the widow and daughters of the emperor Valentinian III. The episode gave the Vandals a lasting reputation, and their name to the word “vandalism”.

Background: the Vandal kingdom in Africa

The Vandals, a Germanic people, crossed the Rhine into Gaul with the Alans and Suebi at the end of 406 and spent two decades in Spain. In 429 their king Gaiseric led them across the Strait of Gibraltar into North Africa, Rome’s richest grain-producing region. The bishop Victor of Vita later put their number at 80,000, a figure that probably included women and children.

They took Hippo Regius, where Augustine died during the siege in 430, and on 19 October 439 captured Carthage, the great city of Roman Africa (see Vandal conquest of North Africa). A treaty in 442 recognised their kingdom.

The loss of Africa was a disaster for the Western Empire. It deprived Rome of grain and of a large part of its tax revenue. Gaiseric built a fleet and raided Sicily and the Mediterranean coasts, becoming the leading naval power of the western Mediterranean.

Murder at the imperial court

To secure peace, the emperor Valentinian III agreed that his elder daughter Eudocia would marry Gaiseric’s son Huneric. The marriage linked the Vandal dynasty to the Theodosian imperial house.

This arrangement collapsed in a series of killings. On 21 or 22 September 454 Valentinian personally murdered his leading general Aetius, the victor of the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains. On 16 March 455 two of Aetius’s former guardsmen, Optila and Thraustila, killed Valentinian in Rome.

The wealthy senator Petronius Maximus seized the throne the next day. He forced Valentinian’s widow, Licinia Eudoxia, to marry him and married Eudocia to his own son Palladius, cancelling her betrothal to Huneric. Some later sources claim that Eudoxia invited Gaiseric to avenge her, but this story is doubtful. Gaiseric did not need an invitation: the treaty with the dead emperor’s house had lapsed, and Rome was weak.

The Vandals reach Rome

In late May 455 news came that the Vandal fleet had landed at the mouth of the Tiber. Panic spread. Petronius Maximus tried to flee and was killed by a mob, or by his own servants, on 31 May 455 after a reign of about 75 days.

Three days later, on 2 June, the Vandals entered Rome unopposed. Pope Leo I went out to meet Gaiseric. According to the chronicler Prosper of Aquitaine, a contemporary, Leo persuaded him to spare the inhabitants from burning, torture and slaughter in return for the city’s surrender without resistance.

Fourteen days of plunder

For about two weeks the Vandals systematically emptied the city. They took gold, silver and furnishings from the imperial palace on the Palatine and from the houses of the rich. Procopius reports that they removed half of the gilded bronze roof tiles of the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus.

Among the loot, Procopius says, were the treasures of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, including objects that the emperor Titus had brought to Rome in AD 70 and that appear on the Arch of Titus. They were shipped to Carthage. One ship carrying statues reportedly sank on the voyage.

The Vandals also took thousands of captives. The most important were the empress Licinia Eudoxia and her daughters Eudocia and Placidia. Eudocia was married to Huneric, as originally planned. In Carthage, Bishop Deogratias sold church silver to ransom captives and turned two churches into shelters for them.

How the sack compared with 410

The two sacks of Rome are often confused, but they differed in important ways. Alaric’s Goths in 410 were a land army that had besieged the city three times and stayed only three days. Gaiseric’s forces in 455 came by sea, met no resistance and had two full weeks to search the city methodically.

The targets also differed. The Goths mostly seized portable wealth from private houses, while the Vandals took large quantities of public and imperial property, from palace furnishings to metal stripped from temples. Ships allowed them to carry heavy loot, including statues, that an army on the march could not.

Both events were symbolic blows rather than military turning points. Yet the second sack confirmed that the Western Empire could not even protect its most famous city against a former province turned enemy kingdom, a humiliation that contemporaries such as the Gallic poet Sidonius Apollinaris lamented.

Consequences

The sack accelerated the collapse of Western imperial authority. The Gallic aristocrat Avitus was proclaimed emperor with Visigothic support in July 455 but was deposed in 456. Real power passed to the general Ricimer, who made and unmade emperors until his death in 472.

Gaiseric continued to raid Italy and the Mediterranean islands. A huge joint expedition sent by the Eastern and Western empires against Carthage in 468 was destroyed by Vandal fireships off Cape Bon, ending the last serious hope of recovering Africa. Eudoxia and Placidia were released to Constantinople in the early 460s.

The Vandal kingdom survived until 533–534, when the Eastern general Belisarius conquered it in a swift campaign (see Vandalic War). Procopius says the Temple treasures were then paraded in Constantinople.

Myths and facts

Myth: the Vandals mindlessly destroyed Rome. Ancient accounts describe a thorough but largely orderly looting, with little deliberate destruction of buildings. Their aim was wealth and captives.

Fact: “vandalism” is a modern word. It was coined in 1794 by Henri Grégoire, the constitutional bishop of Blois, to condemn the destruction of artworks during the French Revolution. Historians now consider it unfair to the Vandals, who were no more destructive than other armies of their time.

Myth: the sack of 455 ended the Western Empire. Emperors continued to rule in Italy for another 21 years, although with shrinking authority.

Key people

• Gaiseric (c. 389–477): king of the Vandals and Alans from 428, founder of their African kingdom.
• Valentinian III (419–455): Western emperor murdered in March 455.
• Petronius Maximus: senator and emperor for about 75 days in 455.
• Leo I: bishop of Rome from 440 to 461, who negotiated with Gaiseric.
• Licinia Eudoxia (born 422): Valentinian’s widow, taken captive to Carthage.

Timeline

• 429: The Vandals cross from Spain into North Africa.
• 439, 19 October: Gaiseric captures Carthage.
• 454, September: Valentinian III kills Aetius.
• 455, 16 March: Valentinian III is murdered in Rome.
• 455, 17 March: Petronius Maximus becomes emperor.
• 455, 31 May: Petronius Maximus is killed while fleeing.
• 455, 2 June: The Vandals enter Rome after Pope Leo meets Gaiseric.
• 455, mid-June: The Vandals leave with booty and captives.
• 468: The Roman expedition against Carthage is defeated.
• 534: Belisarius ends the Vandal kingdom.

Why it matters

The Vandal sack showed that the Western Empire could no longer defend even Rome against a neighbouring kingdom. It drained the city’s wealth, deepened the chaos at the Western court and, through the later word “vandalism”, left one of the most familiar, if unfair, legacies of the barbarian migrations.