Siliqua in the name of Honorius Carthage

The Vandals captured Carthage in 439 AD and almost immediately began striking coinage — a deliberate act of administrative continuity rather than innovation. By issuing silver in the name of Honorius, a Western emperor who had died in 423, the Vandal kingdom under Geiseric projected legitimacy through a fiction: the currency of a ruler long dead, issued by a kingdom Rome refused to formally recognize until the treaty of 442.

The choice of Honorius specifically, rather than the reigning emperor, remains a studied ambiguity — neither overt challenge to Constantinople nor submission to it.