Inatteso conservatorismo in terra vandalica: l'eredità della lex Manciana nelle Tablettes Albertini

Roman Africa was one of the most economically and culturally vital places
of the occidental empire: during the fifth century AD, following its conquest by
the army of Gensericus, composed of Vandals and Alans, the Romans lost control
of this important part of the empire. The Tablettes Albertini, an epigraphic
document drawn up between 493 and 496 AD, offer a wealth of information
that, in order to be interpreted correctly, must always be compared with historical,
geographical, archaeological and numismatic, botanical and climatological
data. Through stringent archaeological analyses, it has been shown that the
African economy did not suffer a collapse, only a slow parallel fold, decidedly
less, than that of the other regions of the pars Occidentis. The Vandals, from
many points of view, underwent an osmosis that appears almost complete with
Latin culture: within a few decades they appear to be perfectly integrated. It is
evident, from an agrarian point of view, for example, that the lex Manciana,
whose origin is Flavian, but known through epigraphic documents in its updating,
is still mentioned in the Tablettes Albertini: it was a complex system of distribution
and control of agricultural resources for which the emperor as dominus,
or the so-called conductores, gave the management of the imperial latifundia
to colonists, who in reality had a sort of perpetual use over the land, since
they could in turn even sell it or bequeath it, in exchange for a fee based on the
percentage of the harvest. This kind of land is still mentioned after the fall of
the pars Occidentis and about sixty years after the beginning of the Vandal hegemony:
in fact, these measures had given impetus to the African economy, motivating
tenants and settlers to make the best use of the land under management,
to implement the expanses of land intended for agriculture and to increase their
profitability, to the point that this way of exploitation of the land had an unusual
duration over time, reaching up to the Vandal era in an area on the border
of the limes, where people lived in close contact with the native populations.
It is probable that the Vandals did not revolutionize the land organization and
that, apart from the expropriation that took place at the expense of the large
aristocratic owners, they, appreciating its efficiency, substantially preserved the
Roman system of land management.