This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
A century-long sectarian conflict opened in Roman North African Christianity in 312 CE, when a rival bishop was consecrated in Carthage against Caecilian, whom the rigorist faction that became the Donatist church regarded as tainted because his own consecrating bishop had allegedly surrendered scripture to Roman officials during the Diocletianic persecution. The dispute hardened into a lasting schism with its own parallel bishops and churches, and, in the circumcellions, an armed rural following: bands of itinerant laborers, the rural poor and runaway slaves who called themselves soldiers of Christ and carried out attacks on Catholic clergy and property in the Donatist cause, including, per Brent Shaw's study, the mutilation of at least one Catholic bishop.
Roman emperors intervened repeatedly across the century, alternating toleration with repression, and by its final decades the Catholic side's leading figure was Augustine, bishop of Hippo. The schism turned on a question of ecclesiastical purity, whether a bishop consecrated by a traditor, one who had surrendered scripture during persecution, could validly ordain others, and the Donatist church held that its sacraments alone remained untainted. Shaw reads the circumcellions as combining that theological rigorism with genuine rural social grievance, so that the conflict was never purely doctrinal even at its most violent.