How and When Vandal Africa was "Imperialized"
The paper deals with the forming and evolution of political ideology in one of the first barbarian kingdoms in the epoch of the Roman Empire’s decline, the Vandal kingdom in North Africa (429-534). It is not questioned in scholarship at present that the Roman imperial background was the base of this ideology and that it is quite proper at any rate to speak about the «imperialization» of Vandal Africa; however, the specific features and dynamics of such a process bring up for discussion a number of questions: what can be considered the main criteria for this «imperialization»; at what moment one can see it as absolutely complete; etc. The present paper is an attempt to join this discussion. In the paper the evolution of terminology associated with the king’s power and its representation in the 5th century AD are regarded as the main indicator of the «imperialization». The author present the results of his observations of the dynamics of the political vocabulary’s evolution in our sources dealing with Vandal Africa; in particular, the appearance of the phrase dominus noster rex in the legends of coins, historical writings (Victor of Vita) and panegyrics (Dracontius) is considered in this paper. On the base of these observations the idea - expressed not once, also in a number of works written during the last decade (A. Merrils, A. González García) - of the «earlier» date of the Vandal kingdom’s «imperialization», i.e. of connecting these changes with the reign of Huneric (477-484), is doubted and, at the same time, the more traditional opinion on its «later» dating, the reign of Gunthamund (484-496), is supported.