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Vandals

Jealous of the Roman General AEtius, Boniface, Governor of Carthage called to his assistance Genseric, king of the Vandals in Spain, who landed in Africa A.d. 429, and was speedily joined by troops of native Moors and the wild hands of the Donatists. With these formidable allies he marched through the country, devastating it on every side; and, in spite of the late repentance of Boniface, he seized the six Roman provinces one after another. In 439, Carthage fell into his hands, and was once more destroyed; and thus for a time "the granary of the Roman Empire" was lost.

Genseric left only outposts in Mauritania and Numidia, where the country was wasted, and many of the cities depopulated by the pestilence arising from the heaps of dead which marked the course of the Vandals. He settled near Carthage, and proceeded to consolidate his power by uniting the rival sects in the tenets of Arianism. He allowed the laws and customs to remain as they were; and gave by his maritime expeditions, a new turn to the wild spirit of his people, who were the earliest predecessors of those pirates and corsairs that were the scourge of the Mediterranean before the French conquest. It is related of Genseric that his orders to his steersmen were, "Turn your sail to the wind, and it will lead us against those with whom God is angry." He ravaged the coasts of Sicily and Italy, and in 455, enjoyed a fourteen days' sack of Rome, bringing back immense treasures and 60,000 prisoners.

In 476, after a vain attempt to re-conquer the African provinces, the Eastern Empire was obliged also to humble itself before the Vandals, by securing to tbem in a treaty, Sardinia, Corsica, the Balearic Islands, and Sicily. Genseric died A.d. 477, and under his successors, the rough northmen fell into the luxurious habits of the Romans they had conquered.

The Byzantine empire took advantage of the first pretext for a fresh invasion. This was offered in the reign of Justinian, when Gelimer, having deposed his relative Hilderik, was defeated by a large fleet and army under the command of Belisarius, and carried a prisoner to Europe, AD 534. The power of the Vandals was extinguished throughout the provinces, but the empire of the Greeks was never firmly established in that part of the country we know as Algeria. The Europeans, it is true, held the towns on the coast, but the fertile plains were in the hands of the Berbers and Moors, and in many places became desert in consequence of the tremendous decrease in the population caused by successive wars.