Gelimer was the last king of the Vandals, who seized the throne in 530 and lost his kingdom to Belisarius within four years.
Gelimer was the last king of the Vandals and Alans, ruling from 530 until 534, when Belisarius destroyed his kingdom in a single campaign.
He was a competent enough soldier and an unlucky one, and the two battles that ended his reign were both lost in ways that had more to do with timing than with generalship.
What survives of him is largely Procopius's portrait, which is vivid, sympathetic in places, and written by the secretary of the man who defeated him.
He was born around 480 into the Hasding royal house, the dynasty founded by Geiseric that had held Africa since 439.
By the 520s he was the leading figure of the anti-Roman party at court, in opposition to King Hilderic, who was Catholic-leaning, friendly to Constantinople and unpopular with the Vandal nobility.
In 530 he deposed and imprisoned Hilderic and took the throne — a move that had strong support at home and that handed Justinian precisely the pretext he wanted.
Procopius portrays him as capable, pious in the Arian faith, and given to sudden emotion in a way that repeatedly cost him at the decisive moment.
The defining episode is at Ad Decimum. With the battle in the balance and the Roman cavalry driven back, Gelimer came upon the body of his brother Ammatas and stopped to mourn and arrange his burial. The pause let Belisarius rally, and the battle was lost while the king was grieving.
The other great scene is his surrender. Besieged through a winter on Mount Papua, he is said to have asked his Roman besieger for three things: a loaf of bread, a sponge, and a lyre — so that he could sing a lament for his own misfortune. The detail is Procopius at his most literary and should be read as such, but it is the image of Gelimer that has lasted.
When Belisarius landed in 533 Gelimer was caught badly out of position, with his best troops and his brother Tzazon away suppressing a revolt in Sardinia.
His plan at Ad Decimum was sound — a three-part converging attack on the Roman column — and it failed on coordination, with each element arriving separately and being destroyed in turn.
He recovered enough to gather another army with Tzazon's returning troops and fight again at Tricamarum in December, where Tzazon was killed and the Vandal army broke for good.
He fled to Mount Papua in the Numidian highlands with a body of followers and was besieged there through the winter under conditions Procopius describes as wretched.
He surrendered in the spring of 534 on a promise of honourable treatment, and was taken to Constantinople to walk in Belisarius's triumph.
At the triumph he is said to have repeated the words of Ecclesiastes — vanity of vanities, all is vanity — as he was led past the emperor. He was offered patrician rank, refused to abandon Arianism and so could not receive it, and was settled with his family on estates in Galatia.
The Vandal kingdom he inherited had been the dominant naval power of the western Mediterranean for a century, and had sacked Rome in 455.
By the 530s it was militarily weaker than its reputation, divided over religion, and at odds with its Moorish neighbours, but the collapse was still faster than anyone in Constantinople expected.
Justinian's stated cause was the restoration of the deposed Hilderic — who was murdered in prison during the campaign, removing the pretext and the alternative at once.