Carthage
From Conservapedia
Carthage was an ancient city on the northern coast of Africa, near modern day Tunis in Tunisia. Originally a Phoenician colony, it grew to be a great naval power that exerted influence across the Mediterranean Sea.
Roman domination
The emerging power of Rome led to inevitable conflict, and they first clashed in Sicily in the middle of the 3rd century B.C. Carthage and Rome went on to fight the three monumental Punic Wars, until Carthage was destroyed, and its lands seized, following the Third Punic War. During its time as a Roman principality, Carthage developed a thriving Christian community. St. Augustine of Hippo hailed from what was once Carthaginian land, as did the Donatists, a Christian sect which Augustine succeeded in branding as heretical.
After Rome
Carthage stayed in Roman hands until the fall of the western Empire. By 500 A.D., the Visigoths controlled the former Carthaginian lands. The Byzantine Emperor[1] Justinian invaded Africa fifty years later, in an attempt to reconquer all of the lands lost when the Western Roman Empire fell. His general Belisarius liberated the lands that been Carthage in the ancient equivalent of a blitzkrieg[2], and integrated the territory into Byzantium.
This tenure proved brief. While Belisarius' armies went on to fight - and eventually win - a Pyrrhic victory in Italy, the resulting loss of life, decimation of the Italian peninsula, and loss of Byzantine treasury, left the empire an easy target for the Islamic armies which would emerge a century later. After the initial onslaught of Mohammed's armies, Carthaginian lands fell from Roman hands for the rest of history.
