Roman Africa

Created after Rome destroyed Carthage in 146 BCE, later merged with conquered Numidia into Africa Proconsularis, whose grain and olive-oil shipments became indispensable to feeding the city of Rome. Remained part of the Western Roman Empire until the Vandals, having crossed from Hispania, captured Carthage itself in 439 CE and built their own kingdom on its ruins. Rome initially left Carthage's ruins uninhabited after the Third Punic War's total destruction, but Julius Caesar and then Augustus refounded the city as a Roman colony, and it grew back into the second-largest city in the western empire, a center of Latin literature and rhetoric that produced figures like the theologian Tertullian and, later, Augustine of Hippo, whose Confessions and City of God were written in this same province. The region's exceptional grain and olive-oil production -- second only to Egypt's grain output in feeding Rome -- made it one of the empire's essential breadbaskets, and its wealthy landowning families sat among the most prominent in the Roman Senate. Africa Proconsularis also endured serious unrest, including the Gordian revolt of 238 CE, when the province's aristocracy backed an aging local governor's bid for the imperial throne against the hated emperor Maximinus Thrax, plunging Rome into a year of multiple rival emperors. The Vandal conquest of 439 was catastrophic for Rome specifically because it cut off this vital grain supply, worsening the food crises that plagued Italy in the empire's final western decades, and the Vandal Kingdom that replaced Roman rule would itself be reconquered by the Byzantines a century later.

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