Capsa was aRoman colonia located in the south of modern-dayTunisia. Before Roman times Capsa was a center of theCapsian culture.
The Roman colonia was very important under the Roman emperors and reached 100,000 inhabitants at the end of the second century. Under the Byzantines the city was for some years the capital of the Byzantine province "Byzacena" and enjoyed a period of economic revival. General Solomon build in 540 AD a new city wall and named the city "Capsa-Justiniana".
After Roman centuries it was a center of the last Christian andromance speaking people inNorth Africa. The corresponding modern city isGafsa.
The modern city ofGafsa was calledCapsa when was part ofRoman Africa and was an important city near theFossatum Africae.
The Roman city was conquered by theVandals, but soon was independent: Capsa was the capital of aRomano-berber kingdom (calledKingdom of Capsus) in the sixth century until the Arab invasion.
The "Roman pools" are three basins with high walls of reused ashlar. Set in the open air, around springs rising from the bottom of the pools, they are aligned E-W according to the direction of the outflow of the water and connected by underground channels. The W pool consists of two covered rooms. Princeton E.[1]
What remains of Roman Capsa are two pools, theRoman baths of Gafsa dedicated to Neptune and the nymphs (these are the only visible monuments of Roman times and actually are a tourism attraction). Roman cisterns are still evident in the city ruins and still can be used. Indeed the pools consist of two 4 meter deep pools enclosed by high walls made of cut stone, that bear traces of inscriptions. The two pools communicate with each other through a dry-walled vault and are reinforced by small arches: they are fed by springs that gush out at the bottom of the tanks at a temperature of 31 °C.
Little remains of the ancient Gafsa, but can be still seen the wonderful Roman tanks, deep more than eight meters wide, seventeen and twenty-three long.[2]
However a number of ancient finds have been made in the "casbah" area of actual Gafsa; for example, a large mosaic (4.7 x 3.4 m) was found 300 m E in an undetermined Roman monument of Capsa. Now at the Bardo Museum in Tunis, it depicts an amphitheater circus scene.[3]
Capsa is considered, by historians like Camps[4]and Laverde, the place on north Africa were survived until the thirteenth century the last speakers of theAfrican Romance. Spoken Latin or Romance is surely attested in Capsa andMonastir by al-Idrisi in the 12th century.[5]
During the Roman era the city was theseat of an ancientbishopric[6]
Documents give the names of a few of the bishops of Capsa.[7] Indeed in the 3rd century, Donatulus took part in the council that Saint Cyprian convoked in Carthage in 256 to discuss the problem of the "Lapsi".
In the 4th century, at the Council of Carthage (349 AD), Fortunatianus of Capsa was present, mentioned as the first among the bishops of Byzacena. A Donatist bishop of Capsa called Quintasius was at the council held at Cabarsussi in 393 AD by a breakaway group of Donatists led by Maximianus.In the 5th century, at the joint Council of Carthage (411 AD) presided byMarcellinus of Carthage and attended by Catholics and Donatists, Gams and Morcelli say Capsa was represented by the Donatist Donatianus, and that it had no Catholic bishop. According to the more recent Mesnage, Donatianus was instead the Donatist bishop of Capsus in Numidia, and Capsa in Byzacena was represented by the Catholic Fortunatus and the Donatist Celer, whom the earlier sources attributed to Capsus. All three sources agree in attributing to Capsa the Vindemialis who was one of the Catholic bishops whom Huneric summoned to Carthage in 484 AD and then exiled. However, the latest editions of the "Roman Martyrology", which commemorates Vindemialis on 2 May, call him bishop of Capsus in Numidia.
Capsa still had resident bishops at the end of the 9th century, being mentioned in a "Notitia Episcopatuum" of Leo VI the Wise (886–912), but a community may have lasted until the early 12th century (or even the early 13/14th century[8]).
Capsa during Roman times has had an importance similar to the nearbyThysdrus in what is now central-southernTunisia and as a colony of veterans from centralItaly it was a center ofRomance African language (and, in a minor level, of Christianity).
In other words, the presence of these veterans and their families created a kind of "Romanized stronghold" in the region, that survived for many centuries during the early Middle Ages.
Capsa became amunicipium of veterans of theLegio III Augusta (based inLambaesis) underTrajan and subsequently acolonia fully Romanized. It seems that in the early 4th century,Diocletian personally transferred the headquarters of the Legio III Augusta from Lambaesis to another, unknown base within the region that probably was Capsa.
Capsa grew in importance underHadrian. Later, during the decades ofSeptimius Severus the town had more than 100,000 inhabitants and was a key important commercial center of theRoman limes in Africa.
Under the Byzantines, it was their main centre of defence against the Berber desert nomads of the region, with a fort built byJustinian's generalSolomon. The Byzantines called the cityJustiniana, endowed it with huge walls in 540 AD and amplified their work of Christianization.
In the next century the city was the capital of theKingdom of Capsus, ruled by Romanised Berbers.
Successively, when the Arabs arrived in the late seventh century the city was partially destroyed and many of his inhabitants were sent as slaves towardDamascus in a long march through the north African coastal desert that decimated most of them. The historian Decret François[9] wrote that this massacre was the beginning of the "extermination" of Christian Romanized Africa, one of the first ethnic cleansings in history (theMaghreb region actually is fully Muslim and Arab/Berber).
The strategic Roman road between Capsa and the port of Gabes, originally built by Tiberius in 14 BC, had to allow above all the III Legio Augusta to move with relative ease in that vast area and to prevent the tribes of the desert - theGetuli of the mountainous Numidia and theGaramantes of the Libyan desert - to attack the Roman cities and villas. Between Capsa and Gabes the Legion stopped for rest and created five stations.
Romano-Berber cities in Roman North Africa | ||
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Sorted by contemporary national borders | ||
| Morocco | %2c_Algeria_04966r.jpg) | |
| Algeria |
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| Tunisia | ||
| Egypt | ||
| Spain | ||
| Kingdoms and provinces | ||
| Related articles | ||
1 UNESCO World Heritage Sites2 Proposed | ||