ABSTRACT
In the summer of 451 the emperor Valentinian III issued an order to the praetorian prefect Firminus to provide the exiled and dispossessed dignitaries of Proconsularis and Byzacena with landed estates in Mauretania Caesariensis and Sitifensis.1 This administrative measure for fugitives from the realm of the Vandals shaped the traditional view of the way in which the settlement of the Vandals in North Africa was organized by their king, Geiseric. Ludwig Schmidt postulated that the Vandals were a notable exception from the model of settlement then prevalent, namely the ordered settlement on the basis of hospitalitas: the Roman system of temporary quartering of soldiers in private houses according to the provisions of C.Th. VII, 8,5 from 398 AD, formulated in 1844 by Karl Theodor Gaupp,2 and later called by Ferdinand Lot ‘la regime du hospitalité’.3 Schmidt saw the basis of the Vandal settlement in massive expropriations: a regular dividing up of the private estates by land measurement with the rope and distribution of this land to the military units of the millenae in the province of Africa Proconsularis. The land meted out to the Vandals was freed from the obligation to pay taxes and these were the sortes Vandalorum noted by Victor of Vita and Procopius.4 Schmidt’s view was shared by Christian Courtois5 and Hans-Joachim Diesner.6 The general picture of Germanic settlement in the fifth century was challenged by Walter Goffart in 1980,7 who questioned the system of hospitalitas as basis for a division of land and postulated a system of tax allotments as basis for the regular payment of annonae to the federate
1 Nov. Val. 34, ( 451 AD). 2 E. T. Gaupp, Die Germanischen Ansiedlungen und Landtheilungen in den Provinzen des
Römischen Westreiches in ihrer völkerrechtlichen Eigenthümlichkeit und mit Rücksicht auf verwandte Erscheinungen der alten Welt und des späteren Mittelalters dargestellt (Breslau, 1844), p. 198.
