From Punic Ruin to Christian See

Rome razed Carthage in 146 BCE at the end of the Third Punic War, enslaving or dispersing its surviving population, and the site lay largely unbuilt for roughly a century until Julius Caesar and then Augustus refounded it as a Roman colony. It grew rapidly into the second city of the Latin-speaking western empire and, by the second century CE, its leading center of Christian thought. Tertullian, writing there around 200 CE, was among the first major Christian authors in Latin; Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, was martyred in 258 CE during the persecution under the emperor Valerian and left an influential body of writing on church unity.

The young Augustine of Hippo studied rhetoric in Carthage before his conversion, and the city later hosted the councils that shaped North African Christianity's response to the Donatist controversy, a dispute over whether clergy who had handed over scriptures during Diocletian's persecution could validly administer the sacraments afterward. A Council of Carthage in 397 CE also affirmed a list of New Testament books matching the twenty seven eventually recognized across the wider church, an early and influential step toward a settled canon, even as the city's own political fortunes passed from Rome to Vandal and then Byzantine rule before the seventh century Muslim conquest ended its life as a major urban center.