Note 26 — Chapter II · THE MEDITERRANEAN COLONIZATION OF AFRICA

The Vandals were a Gothic people supposed to be not far from the Angles and Saxons in origin. After sweeping down on France and Italy and settling in Baetica or southern Spain—a region to which they are supposed to have given their name, Vandalusia, corrupted by the Arabs into Andalusia—they built ships, on the Spanish coast, crossed over with a host of Spanish camp followers into Morocco, and with the aid of the Berbers swept the Roman power before them till they conquered the whole country to the frontiers of Tripoli. They also acquired Sardinia. By degrees they concentrated their settlement on northern Tunisia, and here, mingling with the Roman colonists and the Berber indigenes, they gradually lost all their fighting spirit. But probably they added a not unimportant element of European (Aryan) blood to the mixed populations of North Africa, a region more or less ruled by their Teutonic kings for 116 years.