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00:03Around 400 A.D., two barbarian babies were born.
00:07One was to enter history as the biggest, baddest barbarian of them all, Attila the Hun.
00:15The pagan who made the whole of Europe tremble, the scourge of God.
00:20The other would become king of the Vandals, leader of the worst wreckers in history, Geyserit.
00:27Between them, these barbarians would bring the Roman Empire to its knees.
00:32With Rome gone, Europe would enter a thousand years of ignorance and chaos, the Dark Ages.
00:41Well, at least that's what I was told.
00:59Huns and Vandals, the barbarians who brought death and destruction to Europe, and who wrecked the greatest civilisation the earth
01:07has ever known.
01:08Even their names are still remembered as insults.
01:11And yet, if I've learnt one thing making these programmes about barbarians, it's that nothing is ever quite as simple
01:18as it seems.
01:23The greatest achievement of Rome was not art or science or civilised values, it was propaganda.
01:32In fact, we've so completely bought into admiration of the Roman Empire and contempt for the barbarians,
01:38that 2,000 years after Rome's collapse, I was still being peddled their version of the past at school.
01:47The Celts, the Romans said, were primitive and unsophisticated.
01:51Yet I discovered a highly educated trading society, far more compassionate than Rome's.
01:59The Gothic tribes from Germany, they described as noble but murderous savages.
02:04Yet it was the Romans who gloried in brutality.
02:11The barbarians of the East were dismissed as wily and unmanly.
02:16But they were on the eve of an industrial revolution, and were ruled with a heck of a lot more
02:21humanity and sophistication than Rome.
02:26Somehow, from beyond the grave, Rome managed to pull off the most audacious country in history.
02:35How did they do it?
02:37Well, the answer's tied up in the sack of Rome, and the end of the Roman Empire in Europe.
02:49This is where the final chapter of the barbarian story began, in Central Europe.
02:57Here, on the fringes of the new Christian Empire, came a pagan avalanche, ferocious nomadic horsemen from Mongolia.
03:07It seems they'd decided to settle down in German territory.
03:13Hundreds of thousands of Germans fled in terror.
03:27I'm standing on the very edge of the Roman Empire, the world of civilisation and wine.
03:33In fact, the vines on the hills behind me were originally planted by the Romans.
03:38But over here, out there, is the great Hungarian plain.
03:44And sometime at the beginning of the 5th century, the place was overrun by the fiercest and most uncivilised of
03:51all the barbarians.
03:53The Huns.
03:55I'm looking at the kingdom of Attila the Hun.
04:06The Huns just didn't seem human. They didn't even look human, for starters. Their heads were a different shape.
04:13A Gothic writer vividly expressed the shock. Their mothers, he claimed, were sorceresses, and their fathers, demons of the wilderness.
04:22The Goths fled before the thunder of their hooves and the storm of their arrows, seeking the protection of the
04:30Roman Empire.
04:34The impact they made shook the Empire to its core and spread far beyond the lands they invaded.
04:49The baby Attila would grow up to lead these fierce warrior peoples to the height of their power.
04:58And Rome would tremble before Attila's vast army.
05:07The record of Attila and his Huns must be scorched into the land.
05:12And yet, I found evidence of the Huns surprisingly thin on the ground.
05:20I'm on the great Hungarian plain, Attila's homeland.
05:24Surely I'll find some evidence of him and his people here.
05:34I was let into the vault of the Segard Museum.
05:48Well, maybe this is it.
05:51I'm told this is all the right date.
05:54And maybe these are our first traces of the Huns themselves.
06:02Well, it wasn't much to go on.
06:04I was hoping Walter Pohl, a leading expert, would help me get closer to the disappearing Huns.
06:12I mean, amongst all these gold pieces here, what is typically Hunnic?
06:16Well, look at this. This is beautiful.
06:18These are pieces of a diadem, such as a Hunnic woman would wear around her hair.
06:25Oh, I see. Well, it's not like that or that way.
06:29And here we have pieces of harness.
06:32This is harness decoration.
06:35Horses were very important, so it's not only the people who wear all these wonderful golden ornaments.
06:40Also the horses that are decorated.
06:42Can you say there's a typically Hunnic in design?
06:45Well, you could say that, yes.
06:47If Walter sounds pretty tentative, maybe that's because after years of looking for the Hun nation, he's arrived at an
06:54astonishing conclusion.
06:57You couldn't speak of a Hunnic nation. You could become a Hun.
07:00You could actually convert to Huns.
07:04The Huns are warrior leaders who attract followers and their band grows and it's a mixed...
07:11Right. That is the dynamic of an empire like that of the Huns.
07:16These people would want to demonstrate who they were by wearing lots of gold and precious objects on them, their
07:23prestige, and go to war and have fun.
07:26So the Huns are kind of offering an alternative lifestyle?
07:33It's a different cultural model and that comes in from the steppes of Eurasia.
07:38It's very different from what a noble Roman would want to do in his life.
07:42For Germans who didn't want to buy into the new Christian Roman Empire, the Huns offered the tax-free pagan
07:49alternative.
07:50And as Walter says, being a Hun was more fun.
07:55It seems that the Huns weren't so much a nation, they were more of a new political grouping that a
08:02lot of people saw as a rival superpower to Rome.
08:05And far from fleeing from the Huns in fear and loathing, a lot of barbarians actually wanted to be Huns.
08:13And Germans, Goths, Iranians and even some disaffected Romans flocked to join this anti-Roman alliance.
08:25And although the physical traces of the Huns themselves may be hard to find, the spirit that so attracted their
08:32fellow barbarians still appeals today, as these modern aficionados of horse archery demonstrate.
08:42The Huns offered young warriors an alternative lifestyle that was tougher and boldier and anti-Roman.
08:49And they started recruiting into the Hun armies in their thousands.
08:54These armies were as yet no threat to Rome. In fact, the Hun leaders actually hired them out to the
08:59Romans.
08:59But the days of the wild horsemen would soon be over, thanks to Attila.
09:07This baby grew up into a barbarian to be reckoned with.
09:13He would stop supplying Rome with soldiers and turn his army into a powerful war machine.
09:20Attila was a man on a mission, a pagan mission.
09:24Attila had had a sign from the gods.
09:29When the Romans cut their ties with their pagan past, they burned the sacred books that interpreted the many signs
09:36that abounded in the pagan world.
09:38But the Huns remained pagan and to them signs were still important.
09:47Attila claimed to own the very sword of Mars.
09:50And under the personal protection of the god of war, he had risen to become the undisputed warlord of the
09:57Huns.
09:58It was his destiny, he claimed.
10:00He had been promised faithfully by a soothsayer that one day he would command not just the Hun Empire, but
10:07the whole world.
10:11Including the Roman Empire.
10:14His vast army was gathered and equipped to break down city walls.
10:22In 441, he set out to humble the Eastern Empire.
10:27He crossed the Danube and for the first time the Huns sacked a Roman city, Nassus.
10:36Then he returned to devastate the whole of the Balkan.
10:53Attila clearly had the Romans worried, worried enough to pay him off.
11:02By the end of the decade, the Roman Empire was paying him 150,000 of these solid gold coins each
11:11year.
11:14So one of those gold coins is like a fifth of a year's salary.
11:19What would you do with it?
11:20Well, you couldn't use it as coins in the Hunnic Empire.
11:25You would melt that down because what the Huns wanted were not the coins.
11:29There were these wonderful golden objects that they wore.
11:33I see, so you'd melt... I never thought of that before. You'd actually melt the coins down.
11:37It's like wearing a million pound note around your neck.
11:44How important was this gold to Attila?
11:48That is what kept his empire going.
11:51There was a strong competition among his retinue, among the powerful people at the Hunnic Court.
11:57Who could have more gold?
12:00And Attila was the one who distributed that.
12:02So he got more gold out of the Romans than any barbarian ruler before him.
12:06How had he done that?
12:08Attila had devised a system by which he could profit from both war and peace.
12:13War, he could go out and plunder and make his soldiers happy.
12:18Peace, he could extract yearly tributes from the Romans, distribute them among his warriors and make them happy again.
12:25Sort of like, you know, like, oh, you've got a very nice empire here.
12:27Wouldn't like anything to happen to it.
12:30It's sort of protection.
12:32Attila depended on that constant supply of gold from the Romans.
12:36Otherwise, his warriors would have deserted him very quickly.
12:43Roman gold was the secret of Attila's success.
12:48In fact, you could say, if the Romans hadn't had so much of the stuff, Attila the Hun would never
12:54have become, well, Attila the Hun.
12:59I feel I'm getting closer to the Huns, but I still can't quite picture how Attila and his men lived.
13:06Maybe that's because the Huns didn't leave any descriptions of themselves.
13:11In fact, only one person ever met at a lover Hun and left us with a record of what he
13:17saw.
13:22Inevitably, he was a Roman, a diplomat by the name of Priscus.
13:26Priscus had been sent on a diplomatic mission to Attila's court, and he went to the trouble of writing up
13:32his adventure in some detail.
13:34He tells us that he had almost as much trouble finding the Huns as I've had.
13:40Attila insisted on a dead zone 100 miles wide, completely uninhabited, cutting the Hun kingdom off from the Roman Empire.
13:50It was like the Iron Curtain, and it was done for the same reasons, to control his people and to
13:56stop the Romans interfering.
13:59I guess Priscus and his companions must have been pretty spooked when they entered that no-man's land.
14:06Deep in the wilderness, without any noticeable landmarks, they got hopelessly lost.
14:14Priscus described the scene.
14:17We thought we were travelling due west, but when the day dawned, the sun rose in front,
14:22and some of us cried out that the sun was going the wrong way, portending unusual events.
14:34Priscus was even more out of his depth than he realised.
14:37What he didn't know was that his whole diplomatic mission was a front.
14:42One of his delegation was a hired assassin, who had been offered 50 pounds of gold to kill Attila.
14:49A real bargain.
14:55Even today, no-one knows exactly where in this area Attila's headquarters were located.
15:01But when Priscus eventually managed to find them, it wasn't just a clump of nomad tents.
15:07Attila's place was much grander than that.
15:11It was made of polished wood and surrounded with a wooden enclosure, designed not for protection but appearance.
15:17Not far from the enclosure was a large bathhouse.
15:21Well, Priscus and his boss would have had plenty of time for wash-and-brush-up,
15:25because Attila kept them waiting, and waiting, and waiting.
15:29Even senior Romans had to wait on the great barbarian's word.
15:36Eventually, however, they were shown into his presence, and thanks to Priscus, we get our one and only glimpse of
15:42the man.
15:47Priscus, of course, was a snooty, educated Roman.
15:51He was probably expecting to meet a gorilla dressed up as an emperor.
15:55What he actually encountered must have been a profound shock.
16:02A luxurious meal, served on silver plate, had been made ready for us, and the barbarian guests.
16:08But Attila ate nothing but meat on a wooden platter.
16:12In everything else, too, he showed himself temperate.
16:16His cup was of wood, while to the guests were given goblets of gold and silver.
16:22Of course, I think Attila was just showing off in his own way.
16:25You know, he was so rich and powerful he didn't need to prove anything.
16:31When they finally started negotiations, Attila suddenly dropped his bombshell.
16:36The pagan warlord produced the assassin's bag of gold and unmasked the murder plot in front of the Roman delegation.
16:44So, what did he do?
16:49Well, the obvious thing to do would have been to execute everyone involved.
16:53But Attila never did the obvious.
16:55Instead, he sent one of his own ambassadors to appear before the emperor with the bag that had contained the
17:02gold hanging round his neck, and to demand if anyone recognised it.
17:07Attila knew how to embarrass a Roman emperor when he had to.
17:11He was playing for the moral advantage.
17:15Well, what can you expect from a barbarian?
17:19I kind of get the feeling that the Iron Curtain's coming down, and I'm finally getting to know Attila.
17:25It wasn't just that he inspired fear, which he certainly did, as Walter Pohl explained.
17:31He also inspired people.
17:35Everyone loves a winner.
17:40Attila's personal prestige and charisma, he must have been a person who inspired people, who motivated people, who made them
17:48feel they were part of something extraordinary, who could bring them glory unparalleled in the history of mankind.
17:56But Attila didn't want to become part of the empire?
17:59No, no. Attila took great care to stay out, and to keep his people out, because he obviously judged that,
18:04settling in the Roman Empire, you would have to rely too much on the Romans to rule.
18:13It seems that Attila really did think he was destined to rule the world.
18:18Well, he certainly made everyone around him believe it.
18:21But he didn't want to rule the world the way the Romans did.
18:25You know, actually having to run things, making laws and organising administrations.
18:30I mean, that's a mugs game.
18:31Now, all he needed was one secretary and a big army to get everyone to bow down before him, humbly
18:38submit, and hand over the money.
18:40In the evenings, he'd come home to singing maidens, holding white cloths over his head, and watch everyone grovel.
18:46Now, that's ruling the world.
18:51Attila was an unparalleled success.
18:55The Huns had once been hirelings of the Eastern Empire, now they gave it orders.
19:00Where could he go from here?
19:06By the time he'd finished with the Eastern Roman Empire, Attila was bagging four times the protection money, sorry, tribute,
19:14that he'd been getting when he started.
19:16He must have felt he'd bled the East dry, and that now it was the turn of the West to
19:21get the Attila treatment.
19:25All he needed was a respectable excuse.
19:27He claimed he'd received a cry for help from the West, a plea for rescue from a damsel in distress.
19:35As absurd as this claim may sound, it was perfectly true.
19:40And the damsel in question was none other than the sister of an emperor, a lady by the name of
19:46Honoria.
19:48Now, Honoria, I have to tell you, was a bit of a handful.
19:51She'd had an affair with her chamberlain, got pregnant, and been hurriedly smuggled off to some dull place of confinement
19:59to live in chastity.
20:00Not her idea of a good time.
20:03So she'd smuggled her ring out to Attila the Hun and begged him to come to her rescue.
20:11Attila promptly took her up on the offer and applied to the Western Emperor for his blessing and her half
20:17of Europe.
20:18Unsurprisingly, Honoria's brother said no.
20:23So, in 451, Attila and his Hun army suddenly appeared in Belgium.
20:30The battle to drive them back killed more people than any previous battle in history.
20:39Attila regrouped, and the next year brought his happy Huns to the sunshine of Italy.
20:45One Christian city after another fell to the pagan.
20:49It was now being called the Scourge of God.
20:54Achillea, Padua, Mantua, Vicenza, Verona, Brescia, Bergamo and Milan.
21:01Where was the wonderful, professional Roman army?
21:11Well, there wasn't one.
21:13The empire was broken.
21:15It depended on gods who saw no reason to fight.
21:19But they'd all gone home.
21:24Rome was on its own, undefended.
21:27Obviously, it was Attila's for the taking.
21:33This is where we come to the most extraordinary of all the stories surrounding Attila.
21:41Attila.
21:54Somewhere on a riverbank near the town of Mantua, Attila and his horde came up against something that stopped them
22:02dead in their tracks.
22:04And made them all turn around and go right home again.
22:08What on earth could it have been?
22:10The Roman army?
22:11No, not this time.
22:13An earthquake?
22:15No.
22:16A miracle, perhaps?
22:18Well, possibly.
22:20It was the Pope.
22:24The Pope?
22:26The Pope?
22:27Why wasn't it the Emperor?
22:28What had happened to him?
22:32Had he fallen on his spear?
22:34No.
22:35The truth is there were now two political power bases within the Roman world.
22:40The Catholic Church, which was flourishing and expanding, supported by tax breaks for the clergy.
22:47And then there was the Emperor.
22:50But his power base was no longer what it had been.
22:55Since the time of Constantine, emperors had relied on the Christian church for support.
23:01And claimed that they were put there by the Christian God.
23:07The Roman state makes the claim that it dominates the Mediterranean world because it is God's creation for bringing civilization
23:14and Christianity to the entire world.
23:22Peter Heather knows more than any other living person what went on in the late Roman Empire.
23:28Here you're looking at the Imperial court lined up.
23:32So you have the Emperor himself in the middle in solid purple.
23:36On his right you've got the Imperial bureaucrats.
23:39They get a bit of purple.
23:40And the soldiers on the outside.
23:43On the other side here we have Maximianus, who's the Archbishop of Ravenna.
23:48And then his clergy on the right hand side.
23:50But it shows the total harmony of church and state.
23:55The two are melded together.
23:57Looks to me like the most important people.
23:59They're all clergymen, by the way.
24:00You're quite right.
24:03Christianity and the clergy are major elements of this ideological structure that is the Empire.
24:11How did the Pope, the man of God, repel Attila, the rapacious man of blood?
24:17Well, here's the official Catholic version.
24:22And lo, suddenly there were seen the Apostles Peter and Paul, clad like bishops, standing by Leo.
24:29The one on the right hand, the other on the left.
24:32They held swords stretched out over his head.
24:36At this appalling spectacle, according to the Catholic Roman chronicler,
24:40the most vicious pagan in history turned into a pussycat.
24:44Attila withdrew.
24:50Personally, I'm a little bit dubious about St Peter and St Paul fluttering in the air above everybody's heads.
24:56Erm, I think Leo and his delegation must have done some sort of deal with Attila that gave Attila enough
25:04of what he wanted to allow him to go home.
25:07All the Roman sources say he went empty-handed.
25:12But then they would, wouldn't they?
25:14A Gothic source tells a different story.
25:17It states that Attila was promised everything he'd asked for.
25:20The emperor's sister and a fortune in gold.
25:25Pope Leo turned his encounter with Attila into a personal triumph.
25:30In a way, you could say the creation of the Pope was Attila's only lasting legacy to the world.
25:37For he'd never returned.
25:41Back home, he seems to have got impatient waiting for his Roman bride,
25:45and he married another one to be going on with, a barbarian one.
25:50She would be Attila's last conquest, and a short-lived one too.
25:58Attila had too good a time on his wedding night and burst a blood vessel.
26:06The greatest barbarian threat to world peace was discovered in the morning, dead beside her.
26:14Well, that's the story anyway.
26:17The scourge sent by God, the beast was gone.
26:25But what was even more astonishing was that within just a few years, the whole Hunnic Empire had vanished too.
26:32So much so that, as we saw in Hungary, it's hard to find traces of Attila's Huns at all.
26:41Attila dies, and then what happens to his empire?
26:45His empire lasts for about five minutes.
26:47He dies in 453.
26:49By 469, 16 years later, the whole thing has just disappeared in the blink of an eye.
26:54Why does it collapse so completely?
26:57Because it's full of tensions between dominant Huns and subject Germanic tribesmen that Attila is forced to work for him.
27:09But then the subject peoples quickly see that this is a huge opportunity for them to break away from Hunnic
27:14domination.
27:15Without the charismatic figurehead of Attila to extract protection money, the Hun Empire fell apart.
27:21It was inevitable.
27:23It had no income except for the war, and once the warlord was dead, there was nothing for the warriors
27:29to hang around for.
27:30Its great army dispersed.
27:35Rome didn't fall to the barbarian, it fell to the church.
27:41Attila's only real achievement was inadvertently to establish the Pope of Rome as the unquestioned leader of the Roman Catholic
27:48Church.
27:49Its legacy was not the founding of a magnificent barbarian kingdom, but a Catholic one.
28:00Rome wasn't finished yet.
28:02That would be the job of the barbarians whose name has gone down in history as a byword for wanton
28:08destruction.
28:11The Vandals.
28:16But Vandal didn't always have this connotation.
28:21Vandal, or Wandali, originally meant wanderers.
28:24It was fear of the Huns that had launched their great migration in midwinter 406.
28:31Tens of thousands of them crossed the frozen Rhine into Gaul.
28:35They were not a warlike people, and once they were over the river, a third of them would be slaughtered
28:40by the local inhabitants.
28:42Their king was killed.
28:46But his baby son survived.
28:49Gaiseric would spend his childhood as a refugee in this wandering band of desperate people.
28:58As tens of thousands of them moved through Gaul, looking for somewhere to settle, the sheer numbers provoked violence.
29:06So much violence that it's said the whole of Gaul became a funeral pyre.
29:12They were attacked by Romans, then Visigoths, then Romans and Visigoths together.
29:22Eventually, the Vandals ended up in southern Spain, in Andalusia, which is possibly named after them, Vandal Luthia.
29:30By 428, Gaiseric was the undisputed leader.
29:36He seems to have been a formidable man.
29:39For example, when a certain princess committed adultery, he had her ears and nose cut off.
29:45I don't think I'd have liked him particularly.
29:48And I don't think the Romans did, either.
29:52The reason was nothing to do with his alleged savagery, but his religion.
29:58You see, Gaiseric was a Christian.
30:00But wait a minute. We said the Romans were Christians, and that's true.
30:05But Gaiseric's problem was that he was the wrong sort of Christian.
30:11In fact, his sort of Christianity was considered worse than paganism by Rome.
30:17It was so evil that the Empire had expressly outlawed it as a criminal heresy.
30:23The version of Christianity adopted by Gaiseric and his people was not Catholicism.
30:28It was Arianism.
30:31Now, the Arians believed that since Jesus is the Son of God,
30:36he must therefore be in some way subordinate to God the Father,
30:40whereas the Catholics said they were both equal in status.
30:43Now, this may seem like a fairly minor point of divergence,
30:48but it became a bitter conflict.
30:52Catholicism said that Jesus was identical with God,
30:55and that rubbed off on the Emperor.
30:59Jesus, Emperor, Emperor, Jesus, just like that.
31:04Both represented God on earth.
31:10Gaiseric certainly didn't want to be subordinate to imperial power.
31:14After a lifetime of being harried and persecuted, he hated Rome.
31:18And since Catholicism was now identified with the Empire, he hated that too.
31:23Even here in Spain, the Empire would not let him settle.
31:28Spain didn't suit Gaiseric one bit.
31:31For starters, people were constantly being attacked,
31:34and secondly, he wasn't recognised by Rome.
31:37He must have looked longingly across the straits to northern Africa.
31:43Perhaps beyond the sea, he and his people could find a part of the Roman Empire where they could settle.
31:49Rome thought of the Mediterranean as its own property.
31:52They called it Our Sea, and it was illegal even to teach a barbarian how to sail.
31:59But Gaiseric had a vision of himself as the new Moses, leading his people away from the Pharaoh in Rome.
32:06He couldn't part the sea, but he embarked on a huge project, building hundreds of boats to transport an entire
32:14nation.
32:20In the summer of 429, they crossed the Straits of Gibraltar to North Africa.
32:2780,000 people packed on a flotilla of small boats.
32:34Their crossing was so unexpected that it was virtually unopposed.
32:44Which is odd, because North Africa was the last place Rome wanted to be overrun by barbarians.
32:51Why?
32:52Because North Africa was fertile, and it was very rich.
32:58The most Romanised province in the west outside Italy.
33:03Rome had been unopposed in this part of the world for more than 500 years.
33:08This is just one of the many magnificent cities that flourished here in Rome and North Africa.
33:15Then it was called Tuga. Now it's Duga.
33:18It's terrible how things changed down the years.
33:22But in Gaiseric's time, this was all very des res.
33:25These grand buildings were put up by Roman aristocrats.
33:30Rich ancient families that could trace their line back 600 years.
33:35But now their cities and estates fell, one by one, to Gaiseric the Vandal.
33:41Who would have thought it?
33:47As the Aryan Vandals made their way across Catholic North Africa, the Roman Catholic Church went into a frenzy.
33:55One bishop said they were worse than Jews and pagans, inspired by the devil.
34:01But for many North Africans, it was the Catholic Church that was inspired by the devil.
34:06They condemned it as corrupt and vicious, and they set up a rival church.
34:13The Roman Catholics had been persecuting anyone who disagreed with them for some years.
34:18But Gaiseric didn't go in for that sort of thing.
34:20So his arrival in Northern Africa was greeted with some relief by most of his non-Catholic fellow Christians there.
34:27He didn't even seem to persecute the Catholics that much, apart from exiling some of the most cantankerous and die
34:33-hard bishops.
34:35But otherwise, the Vandals seemed to have gone out of their way to try and reach the accommodation with the
34:40Catholics.
34:41As for destruction, they only destroyed buildings that were falling down anyway, so they could rebuild.
34:47It was only vandalism in the sense that any urban renewal is vandalism.
34:51And the worst example of Gaiseric's cruelty that the Catholics could find was that he banned their hymns.
35:02One by one, the towns of North Africa fell into Gaiseric's hands.
35:07Gaiseric wasn't going to stop until he got the full set.
35:10He'd set his sights on the mayfair of the North African Monopoly board.
35:16Carthage.
35:20The last time Carthage had been captured by an invader, more than half a million people had been slaughtered in
35:26a six-day orgy of killing.
35:28And the entire city had been razed to the ground.
35:31But then, that had been the Romans.
35:40They had eventually rebuilt it, and it had developed over the centuries into a jewel in the imperial crown.
35:48Over the last 30 years, a vast program of excavations has made it clear just how important a metropolis Carthage
35:56had become.
35:57Henry Hurst is an archaeologist who spent much of his career unearthing the Carthage the Vandals invaded.
36:04There was a huge city hall, the biggest one outside Rome, a very grand temple, a library, and a whole
36:14set of civic buildings.
36:16And this was built by the Romans to express their power over Africa.
36:22So this wasn't just a sort of like a provincial, minor provincial town. This is a really key place kind
36:28of thing.
36:28Yes. Roman Carthage in the early fifth century was at its most beautiful. It was famous for its beauty.
36:35It was the cultural centre where, you know, you came for religion, for entertainment in the circus, in the theatre.
36:42It was, of course, the centre of power in Africa. It's where the governor of Africa was based and all
36:48the top officials of the city.
36:50And it was where some of the richest guys in the Roman world lived.
36:54A lot of the writers of the time said this was an African Rome.
36:59Getting hold of a wealthy city like Carthage would be a triumph anyway.
37:04But the Carthage excavations have revealed exactly why the city was so important to the Roman Emperor.
37:13The port had become the lifeline of Rome itself.
37:20It was a very particular type of trade.
37:24This was, if you like, the command economy.
37:27This was the emperor getting the food supply back to Rome, which meant principally grain, wheat.
37:33And wheat was grown in the fertile lands near here.
37:36And brought here, probably in carts over land, in small ships along the coast.
37:43And then there was a big operation here of checking it all out and getting it into the big ships,
37:48which went across the sea to Rome.
37:51The archaeologists found the port accounts, 1600 years old.
37:57Fortunately, the Romans didn't use spreadsheets.
37:59They kept their records on pieces of pottery.
38:03In fact, the pottery is just like this.
38:06This is from an amphora, an oil jar.
38:09And you see, it's about that thick.
38:11And it's got this nice light wash on the outside.
38:15And you can write on that in black ink.
38:17This is a real old piece of pottery.
38:19That's a real genuine piece of pottery, yeah.
38:20It's just lying around on the floor.
38:22Oh, there's tons of it, yes.
38:24The records show that the people of Rome were taking vast quantities of grain and oil out of North Africa.
38:30And it all came through Carthage.
38:37It's quite plainly a pretty huge operation.
38:39We know that the emperor, from very early on, time of Augustus onwards, gave free food, free grain, to the
38:47entire male population of Rome.
38:49And it's been calculated that he was distributing about 120,000 tonnes of this stuff.
38:54Was this out of the goodness of his heart, was this?
38:57No, no, no. It was to keep him emperor.
38:59They'd riot if he didn't do this.
39:01And there was a very, very volatile, very concentrated population, which could unmake the emperor and break the system.
39:07So, Geiseric, by taking hold of Carthage, was actually making a political move against Rome.
39:13He had an absolute ace in his hand, politically.
39:18And so it was that in 439, Geiseric and his Vandal refugees, driven from their homelands by the Hun invasion,
39:27harried and beaten across Europe, found themselves in a land of milk and honey, with their hands around Rome's throat.
39:39The barbarians had waited a long time for this, but not being Romans, they didn't intend to kill anyone at
39:47all.
39:48There was plenty of blood and guts, for sure, but it wasn't spilt by the Vandals.
39:53You see, Geiseric chose to enter the city during the Roman games.
39:59Animals and humans were being slaughtered for entertainment as the Vandals walked into the city unopposed.
40:07It was a stunning moment.
40:10The Romans hadn't just lost a great city.
40:13During one afternoon's sports day, the Romans suddenly found they'd lost the Mediterranean.
40:21Rome could not survive without control of Carthage.
40:26You'd think they'd do anything to get it back.
40:29And they did.
40:30Over there, about 100 miles away in Sicily, they assembled a vast army and fleet to try and knock Geiseric
40:37off its perch.
40:38But it never sailed.
40:41And here's the real irony.
40:42The Vandal hold on Carthage was preserved by the very people who had driven them out of Germany 40 years
40:50before.
40:52Attila the Hun had started on his bloody career.
40:55And the Romans were more terrified of Attila than they were concerned about winning back North Africa.
41:02Lucky old Geiseric.
41:06Geiseric had fulfilled his destiny.
41:10He watched the Romans dismantle the invasion fleet and pull the troops back to defend Constantinople from the Huns.
41:19And he knew what that meant.
41:20Rome was at his mercy.
41:25He had achieved what other barbarians could only dream of.
41:29He'd taken the wealthiest Roman province and made it into an independent Vandal kingdom.
41:35Now he could dictate his own terms to Rome.
41:41But he promised to continue supplying the grain that was its lifeline.
41:46In return, his son, Huneric, was engaged to the daughter of the Western Empress, Eudoxia.
41:55Huneric went to live in the imperial court.
41:59And the Romans recognised Geiseric as the ruler of much of North Africa.
42:05There's no doubt Geiseric was right up there at the top table of world diplomacy.
42:11Geiseric was, as Procopius said, the cleverest of all men.
42:18But the story that began with the two babies born at the same time has not yet run its course.
42:24The destinies of Geiseric and Attila the Hun are still inextricably intertwined.
42:31For there is one last twist to the tale.
42:36Just as Attila's first attack had unwittingly helped Geiseric retain North Africa,
42:41now he blows apart Geiseric's careful diplomacy with Rome.
42:47By dying.
42:52Attila's death removed the Hun threat from the Roman Empire.
42:57Big relief.
42:58The only snag was, this allowed all the seething political tensions within the imperial court to explode.
43:06The regime that Geiseric had done his deal with was overthrown and the empress was forcibly married to the usurper.
43:15For the second time, a lady of the imperial household appealed to a barbarian to be her knight in shining
43:23armour and come to her rescue.
43:26What can a poor chap do?
43:29Well, Geiseric did the right thing.
43:32He set out from his North African kingdom with enough ships and men to rescue his son's betrothed and her
43:38mother.
43:39And, by the by, to commit the act that will blacken the name of his people forever.
43:43He will sack Rome.
43:48Less than three years after his meeting with Attila, Pope Leo was forced to act again.
44:01Pope Leo decided to try his barbarian-defying feat again and he rode out to confront the Vandal invaders.
44:09But this time it didn't work out quite so gloriously.
44:12Unlike Attila, Geiseric refused to go home, although he did promise there would be no killing and no torturing.
44:20But he didn't say anything about robbing.
44:23And for the next three weeks, Geiseric plundered Rome to his heart's content.
44:32With a surprisingly tiny amount of bloodshed, Geiseric collected a huge amount of booty.
44:39Much of it, treasures the Romans themselves had looted down the centuries, including the fabled treasures from the temple in
44:48Jerusalem.
44:52Geiseric rescues his son and his future daughter-in-law, along with her mother, Eudoxia.
44:58And then, according to the historian Procopius, placing an exceedingly great amount of gold and other imperial treasure in his
45:05ships,
45:06he sailed to Carthage, having spared neither bronze nor anything whatsoever in the palace.
45:13He even took a shipload of statues with him, but that sank.
45:17So it is true he did mick an awful lot of stuff, but he didn't wreck things.
45:23In fact, apart from the temple roof, he doesn't appear to have destroyed anything.
45:27So much for the sack of Rome.
45:31Geiseric returned to Carthage, where he created a kingdom famous for its fine buildings, sophistication, even poetry.
45:39Come again? Vandal poetry?
45:41Poetry is not something that one, you know, that I normally associate with vandals.
45:47Not quite, no.
45:48Judith George is an expert on the world Geiseric created in North Africa.
45:55I mean, they went in for pantomime and the theatre, and they had these lovely villas, they enjoyed hunting.
46:02They're all the mosaics that show them doing these things.
46:06And Judith told me that it's from their poets that we know about their achievements.
46:12Luxorius is one of the main writers, and he lived towards the end of the Vandal period.
46:17He compliments the king on building this new marvellous building or a palace that's been built in the wild.
46:26And they very cunningly used the local hot springs to produce running hot water for the palace.
46:31So there's a little poem celebrating this.
46:34And this chap, Salvian, says, actually, the vandals were a very good thing because they're straightforward, they're moral and upright
46:43characters.
46:44They're not like all these other Christians who are very corrupt and loose living.
46:48And living in this absolutely fantastic spot here.
46:52Yeah.
46:53Living it up with a very sophisticated court life, I guess.
46:56Yes. Because, as the archaeologists say, I mean, there's no record of great destruction until 100 years after the vandals
47:03go.
47:03No.
47:05Geysric outlived the Western Empire.
47:07He ruled in Africa for 50 years.
47:09When he died, about 80 years old, the Roman Empire had vanished from Europe.
47:14The fatal blow wasn't Geysric's sack of Rome, although he was undeniably responsible.
47:20You see, Geysric controlled North Africa, and without the taxes that Rome had relied on for so long, the Empire
47:27crumbled away.
47:28All the old barbarian lands became new barbarian kingdoms, and the last Western Emperor was quietly deposed.
47:36Imperial robes were sent to Constantinople with a note saying they weren't needed anymore.
47:45Geysric's kingdom would last for over 100 years, and yet it's not the vandals' version of history that I was
47:52taught, but Rome's.
47:54The vandals were still destructive.
47:56Attila was still the scourge of God.
47:59Vandals, the people who wrecked Rome and plunged civilisation into the Dark Ages.
48:06How come?
48:18Well, the truth is that Rome only partially disappeared.
48:23One institution survived.
48:26Indeed, it thrived.
48:34Pope Benedict XVI is the direct successor to Attila's Pope Leo.
48:39But he's also the successor to the emperors of ancient Rome, and he's inherited a lot from them.
48:51Like the emperors, he's called Pontifex Maximus.
48:57But like them, he claims his authority derives from divine providence.
49:06And Latin, their language, is still used in the mass, and it's also the official language of the Vatican.
49:16Indeed, Latin became the means by which history was passed down to us.
49:21The documents that preserved the ancient world were copied by generations of Catholic scribes.
49:29So it's hardly surprising that Roman, papal, Catholic points of view have deeply affected how history has been spun.
49:42For the Vandals, that meant that all their sophistication and style was forgotten.
49:48They were heretics, so they went down as wreckers.
49:52And the Huns were pagans.
49:55So, of course, they were viciously foul and justly outwitted by Pope Leo and the hand of God.
50:02I've discovered how the Romans reviled all the other barbarians we've met.
50:07The primitive Celts.
50:09The savage Goths.
50:13The effete and decadent Parthians.
50:16And the Romans were able to do so because they were the winners.
50:36The Romans had already falsified the picture of the world they lived in,
50:41and now the Catholic Church controlled our understanding of the past
50:46by the preservation of some documents, the destruction of others,
50:50and even the invention of a few new ones.
50:53So the Vandals became destroyers and Attila was designated the Scourge of God.
50:59That was the final stage in the story of how we lost our history
51:06and how Europe's ancestors were transformed into monsters fit for children's stories.
51:13That was how barbarians were made.
51:18So the sacrifice at the beginning of the world,
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