The Vandal Kingdom held North Africa and the western Mediterranean islands from 439 to 534, and was the only barbarian successor state to build a serious navy.
The Vandal kingdom held Roman North Africa, together with Sardinia, Corsica, the Balearics and part of Sicily, from 439 until 534.
It was the wealthiest of the barbarian successor states, because it took the richest provinces the western empire had — the grain and oil country whose surplus had fed Rome.
It was also the only one to become a naval power, which made it a threat to the whole western Mediterranean rather than a regional kingdom.
The Vandals entered the empire across the Rhine at the end of 406 and spent two decades moving through Gaul and Spain, absorbing the Alans, whose name their kings kept in their title thereafter.
In 429 Geiseric took the whole people across the strait into Africa — a movement of tens of thousands, and one of the boldest decisions of the migration period.
They took Carthage in 439, and a treaty with the western empire in 442 recognised their possession of the richest African provinces. What had been an invading confederation was now a state.
Geiseric ruled until 477 and made the kingdom what it was. Holding Carthage gave him the fleets and the harbours of Roman Africa, and he used them.
In 455 he sailed on Rome and plundered it for a fortnight — more systematically and far less violently than the sack of 410, and the episode that attached the word "vandalism" to the name centuries later, quite unfairly.
In 468 the eastern and western empires combined for an enormous seaborne expedition to destroy him, and he burned it in the bay of Carthage with fireships. That disaster crippled the western empire financially and was still remembered in Constantinople sixty years later, when Justinian's advisers begged him not to try again.
The Vandals were Arian Christians ruling a Nicene Catholic population, and unlike the Goths in Italy they made an issue of it.
Huneric in particular persecuted the Catholic clergy in the 480s — exiles, confiscations and worse — and the memory of it left the African provincial population with no loyalty to the regime at all.
That mattered in 533. When a Roman army landed, the towns did not resist and the countryside did not rise for its king, and the kingdom's internal weakness proved more decisive than its army.
Geiseric (428–477) is the founder in every sense: he led the crossing, took Carthage, built the fleet, sacked Rome and destroyed the expedition of 468. Everything the kingdom was, he made.
Huneric (477–484) is remembered chiefly for the persecution of the Catholic church. Gunthamund (484–496) and Thrasamund (496–523) presided over a more settled and more Romanised court, with the persecution easing and Latin culture flourishing at Carthage.
Hilderic (523–530) was friendly to Constantinople and tolerant of Catholics, which made him unpopular with the Vandal nobility; Gelimer deposed him in 530 and reigned until 534, when Belisarius destroyed the kingdom.
The kingdom ran on the Roman administration it inherited. Taxation, cities, law and landholding continued largely as before, with a Vandal landowning elite installed above them.
Its wealth was agricultural and maritime: African grain and oil, and the shipping that moved them. Carthage remained one of the great cities of the Mediterranean throughout.
The Vandals themselves were a small ruling minority, never numerous, and the distance between the Arian Vandal aristocracy and the Catholic Roman population was never closed.