Did the Vandals Conquer Malta? This Video Suggests They Did

I am sharing this short, one-minute video about the history of the Vandals because it suggests that Malta came under Vandal rule. The claim is conveyed not through words but through graphic representation: Malta appears on the map as one of the territories conquered by the Vandals.

Why is this claim interesting or important? Maltese historiography, beginning with Giovanni Francesco Abela and continuing into the early nineteenth century, maintained that Malta had come under Vandal rule. This interpretation was later challenged, principally because no surviving written source explicitly states that the Vandals conquered Malta.

The historical chronology becomes even more complicated because, during the same broad period, another northern people moved southwards: the Ostrogoths. It has also been claimed that Malta came under Ostrogothic rule.

What makes this short video particularly interesting, therefore, is that it represents a revival of the idea that the Vandals took Malta. This interpretation is plausible, although the surviving written sources do not conclusively attest it.

In fact, no surviving source explicitly records the conquest of Malta by the Vandals. However, indirect evidence, particularly passages from Victor of Vita and Malta’s position within the Vandal-controlled central Mediterranean, has led historians to consider Vandal rule possible. The subsequent relationship with the Ostrogoths is similarly uncertain. Thus, the presence of the Ostrogoths in Malta, like the Vandal occupation of the island, is plausible but not conclusively documented.

A Vandal occupation would mean that the Aghlabid conquest was not the first invasion of Malta launched from North Africa. We normally associate the Arab conquest of Malta with the Aghlabid conquest of Sicily and North Africa. Yet, several centuries earlier, the Vandals had established their kingdom in North Africa, with its centre at Carthage, in present-day Tunisia, and expanded their power across the central and western Mediterranean.

Even before the Vandals, Malta had formed part of the Punic world dominated by Carthage. This was not necessarily an “invasion” in the same sense as the later Vandal or Aghlabid conquests. Nevertheless, it placed Malta within a political and cultural system whose principal centre lay on the North African coast.

Thus, although we tend to imagine Maltese history from a predominantly Eurocentric perspective, there were important periods when the island’s rulers came from the south rather than the north. The Aghlabid conquest was therefore not an isolated event but the last of at least two major transfers of power linking Malta directly to North Africa.