Staying Roman: Conquest and Identity in Africa and the Mediterranean, 439–700 by Jonathan Conant (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Staying Roman: Conquest and Identity in Africa and the Mediterranean, 439–700 by Jonathan Conant Chris Doyle Staying Roman: Conquest and Identity in Africa and the Mediterranean, 439–700. Jonathan Conant Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, Pp. 442. ISBN 9780521196970. Jonathan Conant’s exploration of the varying fortunes of North Africa and its peoples after the region fell out of Roman control during the 420s and 430s is a welcome and absorbing study. The time frame extends over two and a half centuries, from the fifth- century Vandal invasion and seizure of North Africa to the Byzantine “liberation” of the region from the Vandals, before concluding with a brief treatment of the effects upon Roman and Christian civilization of the Muslim conquest, which began in the seventh century. Conant states that his study is focused “heavily on the interconnectedness” of post-Roman Africa with the greater Mediterranean world, and he argues that Romano-Africans endeavoured to hold onto their Roman identity through “political, personal, religious, intellectual, and economic ties” to that world (3). Conant’s methodology includes the compilation of a prosopography of almost two thousand persons who were involved in North African life during the period 439–700. He acknowledges that this database necessarily deals mainly with various elites, and, as a consequence, tells us little of the average North African’s experience under Vandal, Byzantine, or Muslim rule. As regards our historical sources, for instance Victor of Vita’s vitriolic account of Vandal mistreatment of Nicene clergy, and the exodus of many from this group, as well as North African secular elites, to safer climes (68–75), Conant urges caution against accepting their biases. Instead, he keeps as “open a mind as possible” in his analysis of his sources (14). After all, the Vandal overlords did reach an accommodation with those Romano-African elites who remained, though this was not always maintained. Again, the historical narrative presents us with opposing views on Vandal-Roman relations, especially from African writers. Victor [End Page 185] of Vita’s barbarian nightmare contrasts starkly with the poet Luxorius’world of a reconciled civilization in which classical education flourished (134–36). The Vandal monarchs legitimized their authority in North Africa through both violent and non-violent means. Elsewhere, they made efforts to draw connections to Constantinople and to the western imperial court and, when the latter ceased to exist, to various barbarian successor states, especially to Visigothic Spain and Ostrogothic Italy. Legitimation occurred in other ways, for example, through the emulation of imperial ideology evident in Vandal coinage. The Vandal kings reestablished the Carthage mint, which had not operated since 311, and they used and adapted Roman numismatic conventions such as the legend dominus noster and representations of the goddess Victory. Equally, the Vandal regnal dating system counted from the date of Carthage’s capture, thus evoking the Roman convention of dating from the foundation of the city (ab urbe condita). That is, the Vandals, like their barbarian contemporaries, sought as much as possible to continue a Roman way of life in the imperial territories where they settled. Chapter four describes the reestablishment of Roman rule through the emperor Justinian’s reconquest. Politically, the Byzantine campaign was presented as the liberation of Roman people from their barbarian oppressors. Conant makes much of the fact that the military and civilian administrators of Byzantine North Africa were men who came from all over the eastern empire rather than from Romano-African circles, a situation that led to what what he calls the “Byzantinizing of African society” (211). As in the case of the full extent of refugees and production exports from the Vandal kingdom, the ethnic makeup of the minor military and civilian officials remains unclear since the evidence for Byzantine rule in North Africa is “primarily epi-graphic” and applies to a higher social order (247). Nevertheless, as Conant speculates, Constantinople must have used local people in its North African territory as there is “little evidence for the large scale arrival of fresh troops from the east” (250–51). Chapter five discusses the Moorish kingdoms that emerged in the fifth-century Maghrib interior. At different times, the Moors were both...