Hippo Regius, three months blockaded: an empty harbour and a crowded house

HIPPO REGIUS, Numidia, August 31, 430 AD — Hippo Regius is a walled port on the coast of Numidia, built on the west side of the bay that takes its name from the city, the Hipponensis Sinus (the bay of Hippo). The Numidian kings kept a residence here, and the city takes the surname Regius from them. The town lives by its harbour and by the roads that run out along the coast both ways and inland to the farming country. Since about the end of May the Vandals have been camped in front of the walls, and the sea coast has been closed by their blockade. That is three months without the trade the harbour lives on.

The invaders came by ship from Spain and worked through the provinces, sparing neither the people nor the priests nor the churches. Count Boniface, the general the Empress Placidia had set over Roman Africa, had called them in during his quarrel with the imperial court. Count Boniface then changed his mind and sent again and again to ask the Vandals to leave Africa, offering them whatever they wanted. The Vandals refused, and Count Boniface had to fight them. He lost the battle and fell back on this city, a strong walled town in the part of Numidia that lies on the sea. The defence is in Count Boniface’s hands, with an army of allied Goths inside the walls; Gizeric commands the camp outside. Three days ago the people of Hippo buried their bishop. Saint Augustine died on August 28, 430 AD, in the third month of the siege, and was buried before the day was out.

Saint Possidius, Bishop of Calama, has been inside the walls since before the blockade closed. Of the innumerable churches of Africa, St. Augustine saw three survive: Carthage, Hippo and Cirta. Across the province Mass is said in private houses or not at all. It is the humid end of an African summer.

The quarter by the water

The Christian buildings stand together in a five-sided block on the seafront, in the port area, an eighth of a mile east of the forum and close to the market place. The bishop’s church is inside it: three aisles, rows of pillars, a nave a hundred and seven feet long and forty-nine wide. The altar stands in front of a raised apse, with the bishop’s chair and the benches for the presbyters behind it, at the back of the apse. A narthex runs across the front, and the baptistery stands by the main door, on the east. Around it are living rooms, offices, a chapel with three apses, and a hall where synods meet, with a library.

Five years ago the presbyter Eraclius built another chapel on to the main church, at St. Augustine’s request, for the relics of Saint Stephen. Miracles have taken place there. Eraclius has run the daily business of the see since St. Augustine named him as his successor in the Church of Peace on September 26, 426 AD.

The house and the money

The bishop’s house is in the same block. St. Augustine made it a residence for his clergy when he became bishop, and they have lived a common life in it since, fed and clothed at the common expense. The same kitchen has been feeding the bishops of the inland towns as well: St. Possidius ate there with St. Augustine during the siege. Calama, where St. Possidius is bishop, lies south-west of here, between Hippo and Cirta. St. Possidius and the other bishops who took refuge in Hippo have all stayed. St. Possidius said St. Augustine saw bishops and clergy who had escaped the enemy “despoiled and stripped of all their goods and begging in abject poverty”, and that there was not enough to relieve them all.

Two things pay for those meals: the rents of the properties the church owns, and what the people put in. St. Augustine spent from those same funds on himself, on everyone living in the house, and on the poor of the city. When the clergy quarrelled over the properties he told the congregation he would rather live on their offerings and was ready to hand the estates back, and the laymen would not take them. When the money ran out he said so in church and told the people he had nothing to give the poor.

The country outside the walls has been overrun. St. Possidius said St. Augustine watched cities destroyed, the people living on the land killed and the buildings on their farms wiped out with them, and others driven out and scattered. Those who fled into the mountain forests and the caves were robbed of what they had to live on, and starved.

What has not stopped

The bishops shut in here meet constantly and pray together. Before the invasion reached Hippo, Bishop Honoratus of Thiabe wrote to ask whether the clergy might flee. St. Augustine answered him with a description of a church when the danger is at its height: “Do we not realize how great a gathering there usually is in the church of both sexes and of every age, some clamoring for baptism, others for reconciliation, still others for acts of penance: all of them seeking consolation and the administration and distribution of the sacraments?”

What is there now

The city stood where Annaba stands today, on the Algerian coast. The ruins lie about two miles from the middle of the modern town, and the modern port reaches to the edge of the ancient one. Excavation has uncovered the forum, the theatre, the baths, the temples, the market place, the harbour and the villas. The Christian quarter has been dug out too: the three aisles of the bishop’s church, the apse, the place where his chair stood. The road past the site marks roughly where the shoreline was, with the sea close behind it. The harbour still ships out the produce of the country inland. A basilica dedicated to St. Augustine stands above the excavated quarter; from its front steps the Christian quarter lies in the foreground and the sea beyond.