And what do they call people who commit acts of vandalism?
AFAIK the word vandalism (which occurs in several European languages in one form or another) has come to us from some invaders a long time ago who were called Vandals. So I suddenly wondered if there are any left and what they call it.
They were a Germanic tribe who worked their way westwards across Europe into (what is now) Spain . They were displaced from Spain (by the Romans, allied with some local tribes) and moved south into North Africa and then eastwards into a region somewhat larger than modern Tunisia. They conquered that region (St. Augustine of Hippo died during the Vandal seige of Hippo) and established Vandal kingdom, which in time expanded to include Sicily, Sardinia, the Balearic Islands. By the mid-fifth century they were powerful enough (and the divided Empire was weak enough) that they could sack the city of Rome itself.
In the long run this turned out to be a bad idea, since it alarmed the Romans enough that the Eastern and Western empires made common cause against the Vandals. The Vandal Kingdom wa also weakened internally by religious divisions (the Vandal rulers were Arians, but most of their subjects were Catholics). The Kingdom contracted and, in 534, was completely defeated and extirpated.
The Vandals scattered. Some went to what is now Algeria, where they integrated into the Berber community. Others entered service as warriors or administrators in the Ostrogothic Kingdom (North Italy/the Adriatic) or the Visigothic Kingdom (Spain). Still others formed a couple of Vandal regiments in the service of the Byzantine Emperor; they were sent to guard the Persian frontier. As a distinct ethnic group, they disappeared within a generation or two.
Do they have descendants? Presumably, but their descendants are not a distinct or identifiable group. Practically nothing is known of the language they spoke; they never sought to impose it on any of the populations that they conquered. It was presumably an East Germanic language.
More than a thousand years passed before their name was appropriated (around 1800) to describe the destruction or despoiling of art or beauty.
There are those who say that the region of Spain known as Andalucía, formally al-Ándalus, derives from those folks.
I don’t have time to really research this question because I’m going back to vandalize Rome again. I’m not really sure why I do that anyway, it just seems my family has always been in to that.
Sometimes you get lucky and there’s a royal connection between a former group and European royalty of later times. Which then leads to likely descendents among current royalty as well as just about all common folk of European descent.
Unfortunately, the North African Vandal Kingdom died out just at the end of late antiquity. And no reliable descent from antiquity is known in the region. The next-to-last King, Hilderic, btw was himself descended from a late Western Roman Emperor. So if he had known descendants a couple hundred years later there’d be a lot of excitement about that.
And even less chance of finding a royal lineage surviving among Visigoths or some such in Spain after the main group left for Africa.
Note that Northern Spain in antiquity had a remnant population of Celtic people, so even hoping to ascribe blue eyes and blond hair in that area to Vandals is pointless.
Catholics from the Tunisia area (most likely to have emigrated by now) could have a bit more Vandal blood than others, but more likely descend mostly from the pre-existing Christians before the Vandals showed up. The ratio of local Christians to new Vandals moving in was really high. One estimate was that 80,000 Vandals moved to Africa, several cities in the region had higher populations at the time.
One does get the feeling and is left with the impression that they were kind of a destructive group… to have been commemorated with their own verb…
Well, the verb didn’t arise until more than a thousand years after the Vandals themselves had disappeared, so it has more to do with the press they got in the intervening millenium than it does with the Vandals themselves. And that press coverage is in turn a reflection of what the Romans said about the Vandals, since nothing the Vandals said about themselves (or about anything else, for that matter) has survived. And Roman comments about the Vandals might not have been entirely free of bias.
The Vandals were probably not very different from the Normans who arrived in England about seven hundred years later. If anything, the Vandals were probably a gentler lot, since they may no attempt to impose their culture on conquered nations, did not engage in ethnic cleansing, etc. But we don’t have a verb, to normanize, do we? The failing of the Vandals which gave rise to their modern reputation was not the conquests they made, but their eventual defeat and extirpation at the hand of Rome.
See, OP, even the descendants of the Vandals use the term.
Interestingly enough, there seems to be an argument that the term “Vandal” might have originally meant “Wanderer”, in the sense of a nomadic people. The Vandals, of course, spoke a Germanic language and it is likely that “Vandal” is simply their form of the Germanic term that became “wanderer” in English and related to the English and German verb “wend”.
Also, see the warning signs that your child may be a Goth.
Obviously I was joking up there, but one wonders if they thought of themselves as particularly violent or whether they just thought of themselves as another nation.
The pump don’t work because someone apparently stole the handle.
I’m not naming any names but… you know them people have a well earned reputation. I’m just sayin’…
The Vandals were displaced in the 1980’s by a Celtic tribe called the Graffitti
My compliments to UDS for the most interesting information.
Certainly they have descendants. In fact if you’re a European or an American with European roots the chances are good that you have Vandalic blood yourself. I recently found just how wide one’s ancestry is when I had mine traced. I’m English and I found that I was descended from King Edward II, Fulk, King of Jerusalem, Charlemagne, Frankish kings, 6th century Roman senators, etc.
I was astonished but the genealogist told me I was nothing special, 90% of Europeans and Americans of European descent would share the same ancestors. That’s how genealogy works, exponential increase of ancestors the further one goes back. So there is certain to be some Vandal blood in the modern gene pool too.
Other sources of light eyes are Vikings and inmigrants from Northern Europe (defined as “pretty much the whole rest of the continent”, since we’re at the bottom). The road to Santiago in the Middle Ages and the industrial development of the 19th century saw a surprising amount of inmigrants, and that’s just two “peaks” I happen to know of.