Vandals under Genseric in Africa, was a disastrous failure. It was undertaken on a prodigious scale, implying the possession of wealth and resources which it is difficult to understand when we think of the losses and calamities which the empire had had to suffer. More than 1,100 ships and more than 100,000 troops are said to have sailed from Constantinople to Carthage. Genseric's fire-ships baffled and confounded this great armament, and the Vandal king again swept the Mediterranean with his fleets. Leo the Great must have seen with bitter disappointment this fatal and ignominious conclusion to his enterprise, and he must have known well, too, that the end of the empire of the West could not be far distant.
It was reserved for his successor Zeno to witness the catastrophe early in his reign. Zeno was called to the throne in 474 on the strength of being the late emperor's son-in-law. He was an Isaurian, and therefore a barbarian in Greek estimation. The accounts, or rather notices, we have of his reign are not flattering, but it is quite possible that they may be biassed. He had at least his share of trouble and misfortune during his reign of seventeen years, and perhaps in disgust and weariness he may have taken his ease and pleasure, as Greek writers say that he did, to the neglect of his imperial duties. Not only had he to see the Goths again under the walls of his capital, and to patch up a miserable peace with their great chief Theodoric, but he was also harassed by palace intrigues and serious outbreaks among the citizens. In the first year of his reign he had to flee from Constantinople, out of the way of an
