donatism

Donatus Magnus was a Berber speaking North African Christian who was part of movement, named after him, which split with the Christian Church on the subject of those Christians who cooperated with Roman Emperor Diocletian's major persecution of Christians . Donatists would not allow collaboraters to rejoin the Church. Donatism ended up being an armed rebellion with Rome, the first armed rebellion within Christianity, and certainly across linguistic lines.

Although modern minds might think of northern Africa as a place which might suffer for comparison with Rome, at the time it was the home of Carthage, which did not suffer from the same comparison at the time.

The basis was simple. Certain members of the Christian Church, when the Roman magistrates made demands for Church property and books, did not protest. The Donatists and their opponents had the matter brought before Constantine, who referred the matter to a council, which ruled against the Donatists. Appeals and protests were of no avail, and after a while the Christians started seizing Donatist property and basically running them out of business. The Donatists, in turn, started burning down their opponent's churches, and it turned bloody with both sides engaging in, among other things, massacres.1 Like all Christian schisms, although the theological points don't seem to speak to the issue of language at all, it was Berber-speaking Christians who maintained this faith, a faith that lasted all the way through the Muslim rule of North Africa. Even if there were a few Bishops in Europe who might have sided with Donatus, no other group of people joined the cause.

In the 370s another Berber Christian named Firmus proclaimed himself Emperor and fought off the Roman Count sent to defeat the usurper. Firmus' represented the Berber Christian Donatists against the Emperor, whom Donatists saw as the devil.2 The sides taken in one of the earliest christian schisms seem to reflect more a linguistic separation of the peoples involved rather than any other sort of independent process.