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After a hundred years of Vandal oppression, 217 bishops assembled in the Basilica of Faustus, at Carthage, named Justiniana in honour of the emperor the church which Hunnerich had taken from the Catholics, in which many bodies of martyrs were buried. To their intercession the council ascribed their deliverance from persecution.
Valentinian's miserable widow, daughter of the eastern, wife of the western, emperor, during a short two months the prey of her husband's murderer, became with her daughters the captive of the Vandal freebooter, and saw the elder compelled to marry his son Hunnerich, the future persecutor of the Church.
Belisarius found them at Carthage eighty years later, and sent them as prizes to Constantinople. Many thousand Romans of every age and condition Genseric carried as slaves to Carthage, together with Eudocia and her daughters, the eldest of whom Genseric compelled to marry his son Hunnerich.
The Herule Odoacer had been put to death in 493 by the Ostrogoth Theodorick, who, like Odoacer before him, reigned with cognisance and approbation of the eastern emperor for thirty-three years. Both Odoacer and Theodorick were Arians; so also Genseric and his son Hunnerich, who ruled the former Roman provinces in Africa; so the Visigoths in southern France and Spain; so the Burgundians at Lyons.
Eugenius, accused by the bitter Arian bishop Cyrila, was severely ill-treated, shut up with 4976 of the faithful, banished into the barest desert, wherein many died of exhaustion. Hunnerich stripped the Catholics of their goods, and banished them chiefly to Sardinia and Corsica. Consecrated virgins were tortured to extort from them admission that their own clergy had committed sin with them.
Many of these came to Constantinople, where the imperial court was witness of the miracle. The successor of this tyrant Hunnerich, king Guntamund, who reigned from 485 to 496, treated the Catholics more fairly, and, though the persecution did not entirely cease, allowed, in 494, the banished bishops to return.
It was only in private houses or in suburbs that the Catholics could celebrate their worship. The violence of his tyranny, which led many to doubt even the providence of God, brought the Catholic Church in North Africa into the deepest distress. Genseric's son and successor, Hunnerich, who reigned from 477 to 484, was at first milder.
It is to be observed that this absolute defeat of the Arian heresy in several countries is accomplished in spite of the power which, in all of them, was wielded by Arian rulers. In vain had Genseric, Hunnerich, Guntamund, and Thrasimund oppressed and tortured the Catholics of Africa, banished their bishops, and set up nominees of their own as Arian bishops in their places for a hundred years.
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