A Muslim prince asks Rome to send north Africa another bishop

The Latin speaking church of north Africa, the church of Cyprian and of Augustine of Hippo, survived the Arab conquest of Carthage in 698 and then shrank for five centuries into a small and largely urban body. By the later eleventh century it had a single bishop left. At that point a Muslim ruler, al-Nasir, wrote to Pope Gregory VII asking him to consecrate a second one, a man named Servandus. Gregory did so in 1076 and replied to al-Nasir in warm terms. It is an odd and generous moment in a long decline. A hundred years later the Almohad dynasty offered the Jews and Christians of the region a choice between conversion and death, and an Arab commentator recorded that some became Muslim and the rest were killed. What remained of that church afterwards was its books, carried across the Mediterranean, where Augustine became foundational for Catholic and Protestant Europe alike.