a superiority over the
bishops outside the limits of Proconsularis, and was, as it were, the
patriarch of the African Church. For twenty-three years the see had
had no pastor, and the restoration marked a distinct step towards the
ending of the Vandal domination. But there was a final effort;
Hunneric, unable to decoy the Catholics, determined to exterminate
them; a writer of the time tells that nearly five thousand clergy were
banished to the desert, where their fate was a practical martyrdom. A
conference was {105} summoned in 484, at which it was endeavoured to
make the Catholic clergy abate the strictness of their orthodoxy, but
Eugenius stood firm. Persecution again followed. The writer already
mentioned, Victor Vitensis, says, "The Vandals did not blush to set
forth against us the law which formerly our Christian emperors had
passed against them and other heretics for the honour of the Catholic
Church, adding many things of their own as it pleased their tyrannical
power." Thus evil deeds bring their necessary consequences. A bitter
persecution swept over the land, and till the death of Hunneric, at the
end of the year, atrocities of the most terrible kind were perpetrated.
It was a brief age of martyrs, and rooted the Church more firmly in the
affections of its children. It was an age, too, of saints, and
Fulgentius shines out by the side of Eugenius as a pattern of Christian
devotion and asceticism. In the years that followed king succeeded
king, and the condition of the Church became gradually more tolerable,
till under Hilderic much of the old organisation was restored and the
monastic houses were established in a condition of considerable
independence. When Gelimer usurped the Vandal throne, the power of
Justinian was able to intervene, and in 533 Belisarius recovered North
Africa for the Empire. [Sidenote: Reconquest of Africa by Belisarius,
533.] The restoration of the direct rule of the emperors was of
necessity the restoration of Catholicism to dominance. But materially
the Church had received blows from which she never fully recovered.
Her possessions, buildings, treasures had for the most part passed from
her hands: and many sees, many parishes, {106} still remained without
pastors. Such was the result of "the violent captivity of a century."

[Sidenote: The revival of the North African Church.]

Justinian aimed at restoring all things to their first estate. "We
would be the guardians and