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.