God's Gold (29 page)

If you were one of the lucky members of the clergy, the barbarians simply stripped your clothes and exiled you from your church, naked, without a possession to your name. Other favorite bully-boy tactics of King Gaiseric included forcing open the mouths of bishops and priests with poles and stakes, and pouring dirt into their jaws to force confessions about the hiding places of ecclesiastical funds. Victor of Vita added that the Vandals “tortured others by twisting cords around their foreheads and shins until they snapped.”

A far more evil atrocity was the Vandal policy of burning bishops' bodies with “plates of glowing iron,” as befell Pampinianus and Mansuetus. By the time Gaiseric died in January AD 477, only 3 of the original 164 bishops preaching in Tunisia at the time of the barbarian invasion were still active.

The start of the reign of Huneric, the son of Gaiseric, enjoyed a return to religious tolerance. General assemblies of Catholics were once again permitted, Eugenius was ordained bishop of Carthage in AD 480–481, and almsgiving resumed. Vandals were even spotted frequenting Catholic churches. But this was a false dawn, a calm before an even more ferocious storm.

Huneric's mood swiftly darkened when the Arian bishop Cyrilla accused the king of unacceptable moderation and of disrespecting the mother religion. Victor of Vita writes that Huneric then “turned all the missiles of his rage toward a persecution of the Catholic church.” The first step was to stop Vandals entering Catholic churches. A very special torture was reserved for enemies of Arianism: “They were straightaway to thrust tooth-edged stakes at that person's head and gather all their hair in them. Pulling tightly, they took off all the skin from a person's head, as well as the hair. Some people, when this happened, immediately lost their eyes, while others died just from the pain” (
HVP
2.9).

The anti-Catholic holocaust swiftly intensified, with conversion to Arianism being forced on all palace officials and Romans in public employment. Those who refused had their tongues cut off. Catholics were now barred from even eating with Vandals. The heretic government also ended the hereditary ownership of church lands, seizing bishops'
possessions as their own by riding their horses into churches and forcing out the clergy. Churches were closed down throughout Africa and their rich estates gifted to Arian bishops. In total, Huneric exiled 4,966 bishops, priests, and other members of the Church to the desert. Papyrus prayer books were burned by the thousands.

Elsewhere, the Vandals had license to enjoy themselves in other terrible ways. Consecrated virgins were sexually violated and then tortured “by hanging them in a cruel way and tying heavy weights to their feet; they applied glowing plates of iron to their backs, bellies, breasts, and sides.”

Huneric's rule of religious bloodshed lasted for seven years and ten months. “His death,” spat Victor of Vita, “was in accordance with his merits, for as he rotted and the worms multiplied it seemed not so much a body as parts of his body which were buried” (
HVP
3.71). The king had proved a shameful assassin.

The Vandals' persecution of Catholic North Africa turned out to be their downfall. From his palatial perch overlooking the Bosphorus—Constantinople, the new capital of the Late Roman Empire—the Catholic emperor Justinian's outrage increased with every fresh report of the Arian atrocities. Yet his hands were technically tied by a peace treaty signed by his royal predecessors.

Moreover, Justinian's advisers were strongly opposed to war. The Vandals had settled on the other side of the world—a logistical nightmare. It would take 140 days for a Byzantine army to reach Carthage and launch a strike. More pressing was the perilous condition of the imperial coffers, running dry through a combination of Justinian's free and easy spending and prolonged skirmishes with the Persians hammering at the gates of the eastern borders. Gold was getting scarce. The imperial troops were exhausted.

In addition, the empire had already attempted in vain to invade Vandal Africa with disastrous consequences. Justinian, however, was not easily dissuaded. The hungry ambitions of the Vandal king Gelimer posed a clear threat to peace. Here was a volatile man who had usurped the kingship from Hilderic and imprisoned both the king and his sons, Euagees and Hoamer, whom he also blinded for good measure. How could you trade with a man who was willing to commit dynastic murder to gain the throne? In a final ultimatum, Justinian sent envoys to Gelimer, accusing him of acting in an unholy manner and demanding
the safe passage for Hilderic and his sons to Constantinople. Gelimer's reply bluntly told Justinian to mind his own business.

Belisarius, general of the East, was immediately summoned and ordered to prepare for battle. The Byzantine invasion of Libya was packaged by the Byzantine Empire as a holy war. It is alleged that the turning point for Justinian came when God visited a bishop in a dream and rebuked Justinian for his caution: Christianity had to be protected from the Arian heretics of Libya. Forget what you may have been taught at school or read in later years about Richard the Lionheart and the eleventh-to twelfth-century Crusades. The invasion of AD 533 was, in fact, the first Crusade of history, the earliest holy war between Christianity and infidel. Once in Tunisia, Procopius tells us that on one occasion the tips of the Byzantine spears were said to have “lighted with a bright fire and the points of them seemed to be burning most vigorously,” a sure sign of divine blessing.

Fearful of the barbarians' reputation and access to untold North African riches and resources, Justinian almost certainly exaggerated the perceived Vandal military threat. In reality, the Vandal force of AD 533 lacked the primitive hunger of a hundred years earlier after growing fat off the splendors of the land. Luxury had made the barbarians soft, just as it made the Roman Empire susceptible to a fall in AD 455.

The Vandals' metamorphosis from barbarians to lovers of culture is clarified by Procopius:

This passage is key to getting inside the mind of the Vandals. A love of theater, hippodromes, banquets, and orgies made the “barbarians” as Roman as Rome. Despite the Vandals' appalling attitude toward Catholicism, fanatic hatred did not extend to Roman culture and forms of rule. The Vandals certainly demolished the churches of North Africa, but embraced the pagan Romans' way of life. If they kept the hippodrome and baths open, might they also have spared the Temple treasure of Jerusalem?

In Constantinople, Justinian assembled a mammoth military machine comprising 10,000 foot soldiers and 5,000 horsemen. Some 500 ships manned by 30,000 Egyptian and Ionian fighting sailors converged on the capital to man 92
dromones
—sleek and swift warships (“runners'). This battle of the sea was to witness a new and deadly weapon explode onto the Mediterranean: the
dromones
were equipped with flamethrowers that spat “Greek fire” from their bows.

Justinian granted the blessing of absolute imperial power to Belisarius, originally a native of Germania who was an all-action hero. His life reads like a modern soap opera. The general was equipped with a brilliant strategic mind, endless courage, and, as events would unfold, both good fortune in his military career and the devil of days in his personal life. As Procopius recorded, in North Africa Belisarius earned “such fame as no one of the men of his time ever won nor indeed any of the men of olden times.”

While taking on provisions in Sicily, Belisarius received an immediate stroke of great luck: the Vandal king Gelimer, he learned, was away from court, staying near Hermione in Byzacena, four days inland from Carthage. The coast was clear for a full-scale assault, aided by favorable winds that blew the fleet past Gozo and Malta far out to sea. Belisarius deliberately gave Carthage a wide berth to land at Caputvada, Shoal's Head, in Libya, five days east of the Tunisian capital. If
Carthage was ever attacked, the Vandals would be expecting to spy a fleet approaching from the west, not sneaking up unawares from the unprotected eastern flank.

General Belisarius was as much concerned with the battle for the hearts and minds of the local population as with military success. In Libya he was quick to let it be known that the stealing of farmers' produce would result in corporal punishment. The holy war had to be accompanied by just behavior:

Belisarius was proving to be a born leader of men. Later, after capturing the all-important public post used to ferry political dispatches by horse, rather than killing the chief courier, the general gave him a pledge of loyalty and a letter from Justinian reading: “Do you, therefore, join forces with us and help us in freeing yourselves from so wicked a tyranny, in order that you may be able to enjoy both peace and freedom.” The point was crystal clear: acquiesce, save your souls, enjoy prosperity. Only once did the general have to resort to a brute show of force when the local Romanized Libyans sold information about Byzantine strategy to the Vandals. Belisarius responded by impaling a Carthaginian called Laurus on a hill in front of Carthage on the charge of treason. An “irresistible fear” gripped the capital—problem solved.

Once the Byzantines had killed Gelimer's brother, any Vandal military master plan went out the window, and Belisarius was able to march on Carthage unhindered. In the Circular Harbor of Mandracium the Carthaginians lifted the iron chains guarding the harbor mouth from enemy ships and waved in the Byzantine fleet. The Vandals had proven to be parasitical leeches, sucking the life out of Tunisia. Marching up
toward Byrsa Hill, Belisarius must have been overcome by the sight of hundreds of locals cheering the arrival of Byzantium and a return to Roman values. As evening fell on Tunisia's Byzantine independence day, the general was amazed by the welcome: “For the Carthaginians opened the gates and burned lights everywhere and the city was brilliant with the illumination that whole night, and those of the Vandals who had been left behind were sitting as suppliants in the sanctuaries” (
Wars
3.20.1).

But did the light of the golden menorah from the Temple of Jerusalem also still sparkle on this occasion among the Vandal treasuries on Carthage hill?

Sitting cross-legged on the summit of Byrsa Hill, dominated by the ruins of a library dedicated by the emperor Augustus, I too watched the brilliant lights twinkle across Carthage—or rather across the Bay of Tunis. Only these were generated by electricity rather than olive oil and wick. The whole kaleidoscope of Tunis past and present played out in front of me in the few minutes it took for the orbiting sun to set. Imams in dire need of singing lessons hollered from minaret towers, completely ignored by children playing football next to the Roman amphitheater.

From the acropolis of Carthage the ancient port set within a fertile lagoon of calm water and palm trees faded into the shadows. Wherever you may be in the Mediterranean, there is something uniquely magical about watching a city unwind after a stressful day. Flickering lights sprinkle beauty across highways and suburbia as families come together to share stories of daily anguish and joy. Urban landscapes, ugly by day, assume a mantle of bewitched mystique by night.

This was both a highly peaceful and satisfying moment for me. I came to Tunisia in October 2005 with a few major expectations: to make sense of the Vandals' religious, political, and economic agendas; to understand how much of Carthage was “Vandalized” in this era. In truth, however, these were secondary interests. My main aim was to search for an ancient building excavated in 1933 that looked suspiciously regal to me.

After three days on Byrsa Hill I had exposed a startling piece of
evidence that left me jubilant. Now I knew where the Temple treasure of Jerusalem had been housed by the Vandals from AD 455 to 533. The enigma of the Temple treasure's fate was once again falling into place.

My reading of Procopius and other lesser sources made it clear that the Vandals' palace lay on Carthage's Byrsa Hill. As the capital of all North Africa, and hence the Vandal world, this would have been the showcase where King Gaiseric and his descendants would have stored their extraordinary treasures. After warning his army against looting and harming civilians, Procopius reported that in September 533 General Belisarius “went up to the palace and seated himself on Gelimer's throne.” At the same hour and on the same spot where I was watching Tunis unwind from Byrsa Hill, the Byzantine army had dined in the Vandal palace:

Other than on Byrsa Hill, the heart of the ancient city of Carthage elevated 184 feet above the plains of Tunis, there is nowhere within a six-mile radius of the port where it is geographically possible to “go up” to a palace. This expression restricts the location of the Vandal royal seat to Byrsa. Earlier in England I had spent weeks poring over all published accounts of excavations conducted across Carthage since the early twentieth century. I had very rapidly become fed up with the Phoenicians because almost all fieldwork predating the 1970s was besotted with the city's deepest foundations attributed to the legendary Queen Dido and her Punic descendants. Almost all early pioneering explorers were glorified trophy hunters in search of Phoenician tombs and rich grave goods. The Roman and later remains stratified closer to the modern ground level were largely ignored, and only uncovered because they
lay in the way of excavations cut beneath them down to the Phoenician “basement.”

To make matters worse, the Late Antique levels that intrigued me and dated from the mid-fourth to seventh centuries AD—spanning the Later Roman, Vandal, and Early Byzantine Empires—didn't seem to exist. While Rome has always been put under intense microscopic scrutiny as the root of classical and contemporary culture, Late Antiquity has traditionally been dubbed the Dark Ages. Only from the 1980s onward have scholars come to appreciate just how many forms of Roman institutions and administration from city councils to theaters still flourished across the Mediterranean as late as the seventh century AD. The Byzantine Empire that settled in Constantinople in the early fourth century was only called Byzantine after the name of its earliest colony, Byzantium. In reality, this was no less than New Rome, the Eternal City transposed to the Bosphorus.

Immersed one evening in Oxford University's Sackler Library in a sea of plans of Punic tombs, I stumbled across a “treasure map”—or more precisely a plan of Punic tombs excavated by Father Lapeyre in 1933. The drawing looked quite abstract since above the Phoenician levels the explorer really didn't know what he was dealing with. Thankfully, Lapeyre didn't destroy the ruins he uncovered as he shifted tons of soil to descend thirty-three feet below the modern ground level to his beloved eighth-to-third-century BC tombs. This was due more to luck than cultural enlightenment: the two “Roman” structures he uncovered were so monumental that it would have been far too much bother to get rid of them. And Lapeyre, like most of his contemporaries, was interested in swift results.

What caught my eye and got my heart pounding was a massive rectangular slab of architecture running perpendicular to Lapeyre's tombs. Although his plan didn't make complete architectural sense, its overall form reminded me of a palace recently excavated at Butrint in Albania by a colleague, Professor Richard Hodges of the Institute of World Archaeology at the University of East Anglia. The mystery structure in Carthage terminated to the north with a separate wing
characterized by a tripartite room. Toward the late third century AD, the Roman dining experience in elite villas and palaces was revolutionized. Villa owners turned to the
stibadium
, a semicircular dining couch set around a semicircular marble table. The rigid Roman rectangular dining experience was replaced by a new style offering a more relaxed, egalitarian atmosphere. The cozy alcove with its smoothed curves was far less formal than the Roman form, which was designed for spectacle alone. Sitting on a curving couch, neither host nor guest was head of the table.

Initially, the
stibadium
was built at the end of the dining room, farthest from the entrance door. At some point in the fourth century AD, however, the scheme experienced a logical development: the creation of a three-winged triconchal room, whose curved inside walls snugly accommodated the semicircular dining tables where one sat cross-legged and low down, rather like enjoying traditional Chinese cuisine. The plan of the “Roman” structure exposed by Lapeyre looked like a template for this elite form of Late Antique dining experience. Could it be the Vandal palace? Stylistically, I was very optimistic, but a spanner in the works was a coin of the emperor Constans I that had been found in the building's foundations, the only solid piece of dating in existence. Constans ruled from AD 337 to 350, so this coin was far too early for a Vandal presence between AD 439 and 533.

I had turned up at Carthage a little green behind the ears, equipped with only Lapeyre's plan and a photocopy of a 1930s photograph showing the general area of his excavation. I figured that if I could track down the two distant buildings in the photo I might be able to at least find the spot where the “palace” was excavated, and soak up the atmosphere where the Temple treasure of Jerusalem once resided during its remarkable history. No modern maps or travel books even mention this building. Was this because modern archaeologists have failed to fathom its function or was it because the structure had been bulldozed? I simply had no idea and was taking a risk by visiting Carthage with fool's optimism. Other than in the early 1930s literature, no other photograph of the building existed in later publications. Lapeyre's find was an enigma
and John Ormsby's
Autumn Rambles in North Africa
(1864) left me with little optimism of finding it intact:

The heart of ancient Carthage, Byrsa Hill, is something of a time warp, not because of the ruins themselves, familiar friends to me, but because the site museum and description plaques are retro 1970s. As a living museum Carthage is a little jaded and frayed around the edges. To the nonspecialist the mass of ancient walls can be utterly confusing.

Two maps carved onto stone display plinths on Byrsa Hill are all you get to help you navigate the ruins, and I was immediately dispirited to see that neither labeled any palace. Nevertheless, I started to roam around the ruined esplanade—three times the size of Augustus's Forum in Rome and twelve times larger than any other public space in Roman North Africa—from the outside inward in ever decreasing circles. My neck soon ached from continuously staring between the skyline and my “treasure map” and photo. After scrambling around the northern perimeter of the hill with no luck for half an hour, I made my way south. Standing amid piles of Roman pottery and apsidal walls, I finally found my prey. In a typically academic manner I had got lost amid the details rather than appreciating the big picture. The top left corner of my photo showed a semicircular tower annexed to a monumental building. From the south it immediately became obvious that this was the huge Cathedral of Saint Louis, which has dominated the hill since 1890. This feature allowed me to cross-reference a small one-story building with a crenellated roof, and from these bearings I soon had Lapeyre in my sights.

To my delight I suddenly realized I was standing on top of the “pal
ace,” which had survived the decades after its excavation intact. I quietly thanked the Tunisians for this fortune, even though no one really knew the nature of the beast straddling the southeastern hillside. I had not anticipated the sheer scale of the building, whose massive foundations plummeted some twenty-six feet down.

I spent three long days under the relentless rays of the sun studying this monument, scrutinizing the stone architecture, the building's geography, and cross-referencing the site with ancient historical texts. Lapeyre's folly turned out to be quite majestic, both an eyesore and a wonder. So much of the building's outer stone veneer, and everything above ground level, has long gone. All that survives are the deep, dungeonlike foundations of the structure, ugly rubble cemented with crude plaster in the “vulgar” Late Antique style. This was no elegant Roman building crafted according to strict Vitruvian principles. These walls were never meant to be seen, let alone undressed by a critical scientific eye. Originally they had been clad in an exquisite veneer, long plundered for new buildings.

The “palace” measures 40 feet wide and 108 feet in length. An extension to the south annexes adjoining ruins by a further 30 feet. The main wing is a rectangular structure with a raised apse to the north originally covered with shining gray marble. This was without doubt the site of the original
stibadium,
where the high and mighty feasted. A puzzling feature in the same wing is a vast central rectangular foundation, 30 feet long and 16 feet wide, which veers deep down into the ground. The question of what kind of installation needed such massive footings perplexed me. Was this the Vandal palace's dungeon, which Procopius describes as a room filled with darkness called Ancon by the Carthaginians, and into which anyone with whom the tyrant was angry was thrown?

Dark it was, true, but far too small, I concluded. However, I did recall that the barbarian soul was softened in North Africa by flowing water. During his march to Carthage, Belisarius's army passed Grasse, forty miles east of the capital, which was renowned as “a palace of the ruler of the Vandals and a park the most beautiful of all we
know. For it is excellently watered by springs and has a great wealth of woods. And all the trees are full of fruit” (
Wars
3.17.9–10). Landscaping was key to Vandal aesthetics and I was certain that the rectangular foundation at the heart of the Carthage palace was a placement for a fountain. The soft sound of flowing water would have been a perfect feature for aristocratic meetings and feasting, and just like Vespasian's Temple of Peace a fitting backdrop to the display of the Temple treasure of Jerusalem.

North of the main rectangular hall of the building is a separate room, an audience chamber with triconchal wings, exactly like the palace of Butrint and other high-status Late Antique buildings. The floor levels are no longer intact today, but the raised dining
stibadium
base can still be seen beneath vegetation before being swallowed by a modern road. Adjacent sits a second apse.

Architecturally, the layout of Lapeyre's mystery building works perfectly as a palace. It also occupies the dominant view of Carthage's ports, the perfect geography of power: visitors to the palace would have been in awe of the unhindered vista down onto the port—master of all it surveyed—just as the jaws of merchants sailing into harbor would have dropped at the majestic sight of a marble palace gleaming against Carthage's skyline. If an emperor or king was going to build a palace anywhere in the capital, the exact space occupied by the triconchal structure was that spot.

I would have happily closed the case if it were not for two problems. First, the problem of dating and the coin of Constans I; secondly, however I juggled the evidence, the edifice was simply too small for a palace. Was I wrong after all, simply building my own castles in the air?

The dating dilemma was not so grave since Lapeyre, in his eagerness to get to the Punic levels, simply dug the palace out like a dog ferreting for a bone. No pottery, coins, or any other finds survive from inside the building. Further, I knew that we could discount the limited evidence based on one lousy coin, especially since the fourth to early fifth centuries AD were decades of extreme inflation. This meant that copper coins were largely worthless. A scarcity of metal resources also ensured
that early fourth-century coins remained in circulation for over one hundred years.