Zewnętrzne przyczyny upadku Kościoła w Afryce Północnej w świetle współczesnej literatury przedmiotu

Abstract

The reasons of the fall of the ancient Christianity in North Africa, usually identified with the destructive influence of Islam seems to have been much more complicated. The contemporary historians have de voted attention to some aspects of the North-African history, which could have contributed to the total disappearance of the Church once being the pride of the West. None of them, however, tried to describe scientifically the issue in all its complexity. Meanwhile, the acquirements we possess let us state that this fall has been caused by the co incidence of many unfavourable factors. Only a part of them influ enced the African Church from the outside. These last factors described in the above article started to be of the great importance since the Vandal conquest in 489 A.D. The persecutions taken up for several times by the arian Vandal kings have caused many martyrdoms and started the emigration of the catholic population to Europe. The Vandal rule have stimulated this emigration also indirectly, being un able to stop the raids of the nomadic Berber tribes from the South. The emigration increased in the Byzantie period. The Constantinople emperors not only failed to defend the country and brought about the ruin of the economics by their fax policy. Nominally protecting the Church as a matter fact they have weakened it by implanting in Africa the Christological controversies not known there before. The Islamie conquest and rule have completed the fall of the ancient African Church. Though the status of the „People of the Book” assured Christians a freedom 'of worship, still the conditions which were connected with this law led the last Christian communities to decay. Already very weakened, couldn’t they survive open persecutions. They occured admitedly rarely, braking the practice of the tolerance, but they did. After one of them, that of Abd-al-Mumin in 1159 A.D. there were no more Christians in North Africa. There should had been, however, still some other reasons of the fall of the African Christianity. The outside factors were similar to this which influenced the Church in Egypt or Syria. Those Church suffered setbacks or were eclipsed in some measure, but only in North Africa the Christianity was supplanted. One should look for them in its internal, ecclesiastical problems.