But whatever may have been the extent of the Christian Church, it received a blow from the Vandal persecutions from which it never recovered. For nearly a century the Arian Vandals persecuted the orthodox with relentless fury; sent their bishops into exile, forbade the public exercise of their religion and cruelly tortured those who refused to conform to the religion of their conquerors. [353] When in 534, Belisarius crushed the power of the Vandals and restored North Africa to the Roman Empire, only 217 bishops met in the Synod of Carthage [354] to resume the direction of the Christian Church. After the fierce and long-continued persecution to which they had been subjected the number of the faithful must have been very much reduced, and during the century that elapsed before the coming of the Muhammadans, the inroads of the barbarian Moors, who shut the Romans up in the cities and other centres of population, and kept the mountains, the desert and the open country for themselves, [355] the prevalent disorder and ill-government, and above all the desolating plagues that signalised the latter half of the sixth century, all combined to carry on the work of destruction. Five millions of Africans are said to have been consumed by the wars and government of the Emperor Justinian. The wealthier citizens abandoned a country whose commerce and agriculture, once so flourishing, had been irretrievably ruined. “Such was the desolation of Africa, that in many parts a stranger might wander whole days without meeting the face either of a friend or an enemy. The nation of the Vandals had disappeared; they once amounted to an hundred and sixty thousand warriors, without including the children, the women, or the slaves. Their numbers were infinitely surpassed by the number of Moorish families extirpated in a relentless war; the same destruction was retaliated on the Romans and their allies, who perished by the climate, their mutual quarrels, and the rage of the barbarians.” [356]