Vandals

The Vandals' traditional reputation: a coloured steel engraving of the
Sack of Rome (455) by Heinrich Leutemann (1824–1904), c 1860–80

The Vandals were an East Germanic tribe that entered the late Roman Empire during the 5th century, perhaps best known for their sack of Rome in 455. Although they were not notably more destructive than other invaders of ancient times, Renaissance and Early Modern writers who idealized Rome tended to blame the Vandals for its destruction. This led to the coinage of "vandalism", meaning senseless destruction, particularly the defacing of artworks that were completed with great effort.

The Goth leader Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths and regent of the Visigoths, was allied by marriage with the Vandals as well as with the Burgundians and the Franks under Clovis I. Like the Goths, the Vandals, whose influence can best be judged in their longest-lasting kingdom in North Africa, were continuators rather than violaters of Roman culture in Late Antiquity.

Origins and early history

The Germanic tribes of Northern Europe in the mid-1st century AD.
The Vandals/Lugii are depicted in green, in the area of modern Poland.

Some archaeologists and historians identify the Vandals with the Przeworsk culture, and controversy surrounds potential connections between the Vandals and another, possibly a mixture of Slavic and Germanic tribes, the Lugii (Lygier, Lugier or Lygians), which is referred to as inhabiting the area by Roman writers. Some academics believe that either Lugii was an earlier name of the Vandals, or the Vandals were part of the Lugian federation, which was composed of Germanic and Slavic tribes. Jordanes refers to Vandals as Gothic (East Germanic) speakers, and name etymologies support the notion of Vandalic being near related to Gothic.

The bearers of the Przeworsk culture (possibly the Lugii) had the custom of cremation. Cremation is characteristic to Baltic Prussian tribes. In Prussia both cremation and inhumation burials were found, which Germanic tribes practised. The remains of the Przeworsk culture is mainly traced in the areas which were marshes, when Romans mentioned the Lugii tribe.

Similarities of names have led to appointing homelands for the Vandals in Norway (Hallingdal), Sweden (Vendel), or Denmark (Vendsyssel). The Vandals are assumed to have crossed the Baltic into what is today Poland somewhere in the 2nd century BC, and to have settled in Silesia from around 120 BC. This tradition supports the identification of the Vandals with the Przeworsk culture, since the Gothic Wielbark culture seems to have replaced a branch of that culture.

Some Medieval authors applied the ethnonym "Vandals" to Slavic peoples: Wends, Lusatians or Poles.