The Byzantines defeat the Vandals at Tricamarum, 533 (MED0105)

Belisarius defeats the Vandals at Tricamarum, 533

Within a few months of 533 a Byzantine army of some fifteen thousand men erased a kingdom that had stood for a century. Belisarius landed in Africa in September, won at Ad Decimum outside Carthage, and in December at Tricamarum destroyed the last Vandal forces under Gelimer. This was the opening of Justinian’s reconquest programme, and its swiftest success.

Why the Vandals fell so fast

The Vandal kingdom of Africa was not militarily weak: its cavalry was feared, and a century earlier it had sacked Rome. But it was an Arian Germanic elite laid over a Roman and Catholic population with no reason to defend it, and it found itself fighting on two fronts — against the Byzantines and against the Moorish tribes of the interior. At Tricamarum the Vandal cavalry charged without waiting for its infantry and was beaten before the bulk of the army engaged.

The commander

Belisarius is the best-documented general of late antiquity, because his secretary Procopius of Caesarea wrote the history of his campaigns — and then, privately, a savage Secret History attacking Justinian and the court. The two works by the same author have to be read together: they are our principal source and they are openly partisan in opposite directions.

Equipment

Giuseppe Rava shows the Byzantine soldier of the sixth century: the boukellarios, an armoured horseman carrying both bow and lance, able to fight at a distance and in the charge. It was an unusual combination, and Procopius describes it with pride as the decisive advantage over opponents skilled in only one of the two roles.

What the reconquest cost

Africa returned to the empire, but the Italian war against the Ostrogoths that followed lasted twenty years and devastated the peninsula far more than Gothic rule had done. Justinian’s reconquest succeeded militarily and failed as a project: most of the recovered territory was lost again within a generation.