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The Ruling That Ended the Donatist Schism in Conquest

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The Ruling That Ended the Donatist Schism in Conquest

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

No ancient source, hostile or otherwise, gives even a chronicle-style aggregate figure for deaths across the century of intermittent circumcellion violence and imperial repression. Augustine's own letters and sermons, the fullest surviving contemporary source, name specific individual incidents, but neither Augustine nor any other named ancient writer attempts a running total, and no modern historian has reconstructed one from the surviving legal and ecclesiastical record, so this atlas records the toll as unknown rather than inventing a figure the sources never offered.

What the sources do record precisely is the conflict's legal ending. The Conference of Carthage in 411 CE, convened by imperial order and attended by bishops of both churches, ruled against the Donatists, and Emperor Honorius's Edict of Unity the following year stripped Donatist clergy of legal standing, confiscated Donatist church property for the Catholic church, and imposed fines and exile on those who continued to worship as Donatists. Circumcellion violence and Donatist worship nonetheless persisted in parts of North Africa for years afterward despite the ruling, and the schism was ended in practice only by the Vandal conquest of the region in the 430s, which swept away the entire ecclesiastical settlement the Roman state had spent a century imposing.

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