Augustine of Hippo Ordains Slavery's End in North Africa

I was already at the church gate when the boy came running from the harbor road. His feet slapped the dust in uneven beats, and he shouted that three women had been taken from the olive grove beyond the last cistern. I dropped the water jar I carried and followed without asking more. The air smelled of salt and hot stone, the way it always did when the mangones ships lay at anchor.

We reached the grove before full dark. One woman lay on the ground with her ankle twisted. The other two stood with ropes around their wrists, faces blank as if the fight had already left them. A local man I knew from the market held one rope and would not meet my eyes. When I spoke his name he let go and stepped back into the trees.

Augustine arrived with two deacons and the girl who had been taken the month before. She pointed at the man who had just released the rope and said he had stood at her parents’ door the night she was taken, offering to buy wood. Augustine looked at the ropes on the ground and asked the woman with the twisted ankle if she could walk. She tried once and fell. He told one deacon to carry her and the other to stay with the remaining captives until morning. Then he turned to me and said we would need Alypius again.

The letter was written two nights later in the room behind the baptistery. Augustine sat at the table with the lamp pulled close so the oil would not smoke. He wrote that the mangones had grown bolder since the last imperial order and that children were now being taken in daylight. He asked Alypius, already in Ravenna, to speak with Honorius about giving bishops power to examine sales and free those held against the old laws. The pen scratched steadily. When he finished he read the lines aloud to the three of us who waited, then sealed the tablet himself.

Four days after that a second raid reached the hill farms. I went with the group Augustine sent. We carried no weapons, only the names of the laws Constantine had set down. At the first house the kidnappers had already loaded two boys onto a cart. One of the deacons stepped forward and named the penalty for selling free children. The men on the cart looked at one another. They cut the ropes and walked away into the dark without speaking.

The rescued boys were brought to the church courtyard. One of them was the brother of the girl who had been taken earlier. She recognized him at once and began to cry, the first sound I had heard from her since the rescue. Augustine questioned her again that same evening, asking exactly how the men had entered the house. She said they came at night and her parents and brothers stood still because any move would have brought knives. Her brother, the one now standing beside her, had followed the cart at a distance until the men stopped to water the mules. He waited until they slept and led her out.

Augustine listened without writing anything down. When she finished he sent for the brother and asked him to repeat the account. The boy added that the men had spoken of selling the children beyond the sea where no one would ask questions. Augustine nodded once and told both of them they could stay in the church compound until their parents were found.

The letter to Alypius reached Ravenna in the spring. Alypius returned with a rescript that allowed bishops to examine any sale of persons under twenty-five years and to declare it void if the terms had been changed after the first agreement. The document was read from the steps of the basilica on a market day. People stopped to listen, some still carrying baskets. No one cheered. The mangones ships stayed another week, then sailed without taking on new cargo.

We continued to watch the roads. One morning a woman was brought to Augustine after she had locked two girls in a storeroom and tried to sell them to a trader from the coast. She claimed the girls were her own and that she needed the money for bread. Augustine asked the girls their mother’s name. They gave a different name. The woman was handed over to the civil magistrate that afternoon.