The heritage of the Vandals is traditionally judged to be of rather low importance. Apart from a few place names (Vandalusia would have become Andalusia, through the Arabic Al Andalus), it is especially in modern vocabulary that their heritage is most evident.
In many languages, in fact, the qualifier “vandal” has a connotation of terror, blind destruction, looting, ransacking. In French, the word vandal was used for the first time in a pejorative sense by Voltaire in 1734. In 1794, Abbé Grégoire, then deputy to the Convention, was the first to use the term vandalism (P. Riché):the Vandals thus became the stereotype of the barbarian peoples of the High Middle Ages in French historiography.
Their reputation as looters and destroyers is in fact greatly exaggerated by the ancient chroniclers, men of the Catholic Church in Africa or its supporters, in particular, Victor de Vita. In reality, the Vandals did not cause more destruction than the other Germanic peoples who invaded the Roman Empire at the same time.
Their Aryan kingdom in North Africa is organized with an exemplary method. Tolerant in the religious field towards their Catholic or Jewish subjects, they break the attempts of the Catholic clergy to resist their authority. “The Vandals being Arians cruelly persecuted the […] Catholics. Many clerics suffered martyrdom.” They also plundered the lands of wealthy Roman Christian landowners, and imposed heavy land taxes on their subjects.
Their looting of Rome, carried out without destruction or massacres, is a model of organization:the Vandals make an agreement with Pope Leo I, in order to recover the wealth of the city without violence. They divide Rome, for this purpose, into islets which are visited successively, and whose valuables are systematically carried away.
Thus, in the eyes of the Catholic clergy, the Vandals have two unpardonable wrongs:
- they practice Christianity of the Arian rite, considered by Catholics as a serious heresy, cause the death of Saint Augustine, recognized as one of the fathers of the Roman Church, and violently persecuted Catholics;
- they attack the riches of Rome and the Church.
Relaying this resentment, Catholic historiographers therefore torpedoed and "demonized" the word Vandal by the untruth it conveyed, while the name of the Alans people, associated with the Vandals, was transmitted to the French language under the form of a common first name, which has no pejorative connotation.