God's Gold (28 page)

Theophanes was convinced about the fate of the Temple treasure. After accepting Eudoxia's cry for help, Gaiseric,

Compelling, unequivocal evidence thus places the menorah, silver trumpets, and Table of the Divine Presence on a slow boat to Carthage in AD 455. But what was their fate at the hands of the Vandal nouveau riche?

The transfer of Jerusalem's Temple treasure to Carthage in AD 455 completed the tribal Vandals' dream of seizing the Roman high life, lock, stock, and barrel. Roman loot would drive hunger and poverty from their door. Nevertheless, how did the relocation of the treasure fit the sociological and psychological profile of the Vandals? Was the treasure simply a money chest or were the Vandals perhaps aware of its religious and symbolic power? The barbarians had to confront the same dilemma as Vespasian had almost four centuries earlier: to melt down the symbols of Jewish faith or show them off as signs of their new superiority.

Vandal Carthage is the ugly stepsister of ancient history. The period is completely misunderstood for one very good reason: no one is interested in suspending for one moment the popular preconception that these barbarians were anything other than the most evil assassins of culture. That the Vandals perpetrated uniquely heinous forms of torture on the Catholics of North Africa and had no regard for Roman property is clearly chronicled. Yet this is only one side of a very complex argument stacked heavily in favor of the Romans. For it was both a Byzantine court historian, Procopius of Caesarea, employed by the emperor Justinian, and a Romanized Catholic native to Libya, Victor of Vita, who recorded the Vandals' sins.

Other than a few Vandal poets, no record explains events from the barbarian perspective. So how can we be certain of the truth? Should
we condemn the Vandals outright as enemies of culture? Would they have callously melted down God's gold with little thought about its meaning and legacy?

If you accept the written word to be the gospel truth, then the Vandals should be immediately condemned. Typical is the bleak judgment of Victor of Vita writing in his
History of the Vandal Persecution
:

These lines echoed in my ears as I drove to my hotel in the Gammarth district of northeast Tunis in October 2005. Today the country is well disposed to outsiders, and the colossal sculpture of an outstretched open hand at the center of a fountain in front of my hotel seemed a perfect reflection of Tunisia's singular welcome amid countries renowned for Islamic fundamentalism. Despite the allure of a pool flanked by palm trees, the sky looked ominous and I was keen for the quest to resume. If the true character of the Vandals and their psychological attitude toward the Temple treasure could be gauged anywhere, then the ancient port was that place. Did they basely crush Carthage and live their own barbarian lifestyle or did they wholeheartedly adopt Roman forms of administration and culture?

After being conned by a taxi driver for the second time within an hour in Tunisia, I set off by foot from the edge of Carthage's Byrsa Hill, the heart of the ancient metropolis. The scale of modern development engulfing the site surprised me; no wonder UNESCO felt compelled to call in crack international teams of archaeologists in the 1970s to try to resuscitate stories from these endangered grounds.

The Byrsa district of Carthage is a million miles from Tunis's drab suburbia some six miles away. Dark red and purple bougainvillea drooped from trees and crept around palm trees. White villas adorned with blue doors and railings roll down the hill toward the Antonine Baths—among the largest public washing facilities of the ancient world—and the sea. Freshly polished Mercedes-Benz cars are parked outside pristine villas, the updated counterparts of Roman Carthage, where the houses of the rich and famous, replete with landscaped gardens and elaborate mosaics, were blessed by the same sea breeze.

Even the street names recall past splendors. I passed down Rue Hannon, named in honor of the pioneering Phoenician sailor who was the first man to circumnavigate Africa, and turned onto Rue Baal Hammon, a reminder of the chief male god of the Phoenicians. Large drops of rain started to splatter the seaside and I quickened my walk in search of the ancient port. How much of this prosperous district survived the arrival of the Vandals, I wondered, as the rain turned into a storm. Roman writers condemned the Germanic barbarians for flattening the Odeon (theater) and the Via Caelestis, a two-mile-long swanky avenue—Carthage's very own Rodeo Drive—adorned with mosaics, columns, and pagan temples flowing down to the Mediterranean. Did this destruction typify Carthage's mind-set as a whole and hint at the sad fate of God's gold? I wondered.

With 200,000 citizens, Carthage was the second-largest city of classical antiquity after Rome. On previous trips to Tunisia I had walked in amazement across the enormous La Malga Roman water cisterns, fifteen colossal semicircular installations at the foot of Carthage's Byrsa Hill. The cisterns are still intact today, so the Vandal administration clearly maintained parts of the key urban infrastructure, an approach that was potentially good news for the Temple treasure.

One of the main reasons why Vandal Carthage has earned its reputation as the ugly stepsister of classical antiquity is because of the absence of archaeological remains attributable using coins or inscriptions to the period of Vandal occupation. It is said that archaeology never lies, like the camera. But how you read excavation results can be twisted.
Even if the Vandals did build major new villas and public monuments, they could be invisible.

Unlike the Romans, the barbarian masters weren't interested in blowing their own trumpets and slapping each other's backs by plastering imperial marble inscriptions into walls unashamedly advertising how much money they had invested in public monuments. And then there's the problem of the coins—or, rather, the lack thereof. For the first forty years of their rule, the Vandals didn't mint any coins and so failed to leave us any calling cards about where they lived, played, and died. For instance, only eight graves across the whole of North Africa have been identified as unequivocally Germanic, which is ridiculous given that the 80,000 migrants who crossed into Morocco in AD 429 must have swollen to over 100,000 by AD 500.

To cloud the picture even more, the archaeological remains of Late Roman Carthage are a mess. Rather than dealing with regular decay, we have to contend with the ruins of ruins. Not only is the superstructure of most buildings long gone, but even the veneers of foundations have been rudely stripped bare for recyling, a reality confirmed in 1899 by Ernest von Hesse-Wartegg's
Tunis: The Land and the People,
in which he described the modern city:

For these reasons it's extremely tricky to work out what the Vandals did and didn't do to Roman buildings and thus to understand the mentality toward great art. One of my reasons for visiting the ancient port was to give the Vandals a fair press and to assess whether their at
titude toward the Temple treasure of Jerusalem would have been based on pure greed or respect. In other words, did ignorant barbarians melt down the treasure or did they preserve these centuries-old symbols of divinity?

As a marine archaeologist I had read about the greatest port of antiquity for over a decade and had even lectured about it at an international conference in Oxford. Yet physically visiting the site was an altogether different experience, which I had been eagerly anticipating for months. Soaked to the skin by an early autumnal downpour, I was nevertheless tense with excitement as I rounded a corner to the sea and walked down rue de l'Amirauté. And there she was: the Circular Harbor, first built by the most famous merchants the world has ever known, the Phoenicians, and then developed by Rome.

The island's soils were thick with pottery, commercial waste abandoned by the ton in antiquity. Enough rims of African Red Slip semi-luxury bowls were scattered at my feet to make it absolutely certain that the port continued to be exploited by the Vandals. The harbors were also still standing in AD 533, when Belisarius, general of an invading Byzantine force dispatched from Constantinople, entered a sheltered basin called Mandracium. So our modern stereotype of Vandal culture seemed to be entirely unfounded. Commerce continued to flow and the barbarians looked forward, not backward, to the Danube. But before I could use this psychological pattern to feel confident that they would have followed Roman customs to preserve God's gold, I had to explore one very real problem: the Vandals hated all religion other than their own. What on earth would they have made of Jewish spoils from the Holy Land?

 

I
f the Vandals were selective about the property they chose to demolish in Carthage, depending on what message they wished to hammer home, their attitude toward the early Christian church was systematic and cold-blooded. As I headed up to Byrsa Hill to work out where the barbarians stored the Temple treasure of Jerusalem from AD 455 to 533, I mulled over their cold-blooded hatred of the local Christians
and whether this mentality extended to a loathing of Jewish symbols of faith.

I ducked past the Antonine Baths and headed west up the avenue 7 Novembre. A quick detour into the deserted grounds of the Roman theater confirmed written testimony that the Vandals did indeed smash this structure to smithereens. Now reconstructed for Tunisian music extravaganzas, only three minor sections retain the original Roman stonework.

With their religious intolerance and penchant for pandemonium, the Vandals set the scene for the emergence of Islam and its rigid doctrines in seventh-century North Africa. At the end of the nineteenth century, Ernest Hesse-Wartegg, visiting Tunis, wrote:

How times change. As a French colony up to 1956, fanaticism was flushed away and Tunisia was exposed to Western customs. Today the country is a constitutional republic and a bulwark of democracy between the chaos and instability of Algeria and the dictatorship of Gaddafi's Libya. Islam, of course, is alive and well but avoids the frenzy found in other eastern countries. The Tunisians are of proud, traditional, God-fearing stock, but not extremist: they resist throwing their beliefs down your throat. It feels safe to walk the streets late at night.

I emerged into rue Tanit, the street dedicated to the goddess of child sacrifice. Crossing the street, I mulled over the character of Victor of Vita, author of the
History of the Vandal Persecution.
This is a no-holds-barred tale of blood and thunder, a record of fact that makes Quentin Tarantino's fictional
From Dusk Till Dawn
seem like child's play. But did
this holocaust against the early Christian church ever really happen?

The degree of the Vandals' religious observance is a matter of great uncertainty. Their mother religion, Arianism, may simply have been a convenient weapon with which to beat up the local Catholics. In the end, however, it would induce the collapse of the Vandal occupation of North Africa.

By the time the Temple treasures of Jerusalem were on a ship bound for Carthage in AD 455, the Church had already been fighting Arianism for two hundred years. Arius was a deacon of Libyan descent who lived between AD 250 and 336, and was a source of great controversy about the fundamental truth of the nature of Christ—a row that persists today. In 321, Arius, and his views based on earlier Gnostic philosophy, were condemned at Alexandria by a synod of a hundred Egyptian and Libyan bishops. Excommunicated, he fled to Palestine. Although his books would later be burned, his approach would divide the Church forever.

In the simplest terms of a very complicated debate, Catholics worshipped Christ as the true Son, a God in his own right, inseparable from the Father. However, Arianism questioned this relationship because the technical terms of the doctrine were never fully defined: Greek words like essence (
ousia
), substance (
hypostasis
), and nature (
physis
) bore a variety of meanings. Hence, the opportunity for misinterpretation. Arians could not accept that God could have spawned a physical Son and, thus, denied any notion of the Son as of equivalent essence, nature, or substance as God. Christ was not consubstantial with the Father or equal in dignity, or co-eternal, or existing within the real sphere of Deity.

Victor was a priest who lived through the Arian atrocities perpetrated by the Vandals before becoming bishop of Vita in Byzacena. As a man of the cloth who witnessed his fellow clergy submitted to such harrowing torture, he deplored the Vandals. He opens his history with a simple overview: “In particular, they gave vent to their wicked ferocity with great strength against the churches and basilicas of the saints, cemeteries, and monasteries, so that they burned houses of prayer with fires greater than those they used against the cities and all the towns” (
HVP
1.4).