In the middle of the fifth century the Christian power in North Africa fell under the domination of the Arian Vandals. S. Augustine died in 430 while the foe was at the gates of his city. In 439 Carthage fell, and Roman civilisation was extinguished. The rule of the Vandals was not only Arian but barbarous. It is not unlikely that their victory was won with the aid of the remaining Donatists and the heathen Moors. With the reign of Gaiseric some degree of toleration was allowed to the Catholic Church, but the persecution which had marked the earlier days of the Arian power now took the form of confiscation and the suppression of public worship. The Church suffered grievously, and not least in the class of persons ordained to the ministry and consecrated to the episcopate. But still the Catholics were the great majority, and it was seen that the Arian Vandals were in danger of absorption by the subtle influence of the truth. It was a last effort of Gaiseric's to deprive the Catholics of their leaders, which eventually brought about their restoration. The Bishop of Carthage and several of his clergy were put on board a ship and told to escape whither they could. They reached Naples, {104} and their piteous plight and the news they brought helped to direct the attention of the imperial power to its lost heritage. [Sidenote: The Vandal persecution.] Meanwhile the suffering Church, enjoying now a scanty toleration, now suffering a severer persecution, continued to make converts and to produce martyrs. In 477 Gaiseric died. A year before his death he had allowed the Catholics to reopen their churches and to bring back their bishops and clergy from exile. And still their missionary efforts had never been relaxed. Church life still continued; inscriptions remaining to-day preserve the epitaphs of men buried in the darkest days with Catholic rites; and in the interior ancient monasteries remained undisturbed. Hunneric, the next Vandal king, though nominally an Arian, set himself to extirpate heresies which he did not accept: Manichaeans under his sway received treatment more severe than Catholics. Indeed, the Catholics began to raise their heads under the leadership of Eugenius, who was elected in 479 to the see of Carthage, the only bishopric in the country which held metropolitan rank. The Bishop of Carthage was the spiritual head of the whole province, held 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