Event · AD 303 · Cirta, Numidia
The search of the church at Cirta, AD 303
The search of the church of Cirta — Munatius Felix inventories the plate and seizes the codices
**The most extraordinary document the archive holds for the material life of a congregation, and it is a police record.**
On 19 May 303, under Diocletian’s first edict, the curator **Munatius Felix** went to the church at Cirta with a notary and required the clergy to hand over the scriptures. The proceedings were minuted, and the minutes survive in the *Gesta apud Zenophilum*, produced in a later trial — which the archive holds as its own event of 320.
## The inventory
**This is why it matters.** Felix's clerk wrote down what was in the building, item by item: **two golden chalices, six silver chalices, six silver urns, a silver cooking pot, seven silver lamps, two candlesticks, seven short bronze lampstands with their lamps, eleven bronze lamps with chains** — and then the clothing: **eighty-two women's tunics, thirty-eight veils, sixteen men's tunics, thirteen pairs of men's boots, forty-seven pairs of women's boots, nineteen peasant clasps.**
**The clothing is the find.** Those are not vestments; they are stock — a congregation holding a store of ordinary garments and footwear, in quantity, sorted by kind. **It is the plainest evidence in the archive that a fourth-century church ran organised material relief**, and it exists only because a Roman official was counting things he intended to confiscate.
## And the handover is recorded verbatim
The clergy produced one large codex and then argued. Felix pressed the readers by name; **Paul** and the subdeacons gave up books; the fossor **Victor** and others are named as present. **The archive holds the men named in the minutes as figures.**
**What the document also is: the origin of the Donatist schism.** Handing over scripture made a man a *traditor*, and the question of whether such clergy retained their office is what split the African church for a century. **Silvanus**, present at Cirta as a subdeacon, was later tried on exactly that ground in 320.
The sources for this event
Every source the record rests on, with what it says and what it cannot carry.
Gesta apud Zenophilum
c. AD 320[The curator **Munatius Felix**, with his notary, at the church of Cirta on 19 May 303. The clerk’s inventory: **two golden chalices, six silver chalices, six silver urns, a silver cooking pot, seven silver lamps, two candlesticks, seven short bronze lampstands with lamps, eleven bronze lamps with chains** — then **eighty-two women’s tunics, thirty-eight veils, sixteen men’s tunics, thirteen pairs of men’s boots, forty-seven pairs of women’s boots, nineteen peasant clasps.** **The clothing is the find**: not vestments but stock, held in quantity and sorted by kind — the plainest evidence in the archive that a fourth-century congregation ran organised material relief. It survives **only because a Roman official was counting what he meant to confiscate.**]
*The Gesta apud Zenophilum, with the Acts of Munatius Felix* — **held in this library**: the seizure of 19 May 303 and the trial of 13 December 320 in one dossier. Latin; the minutes survive appended to Optatus of Milevis, whom the archive also holds. ⚠ They survive because an anti-Donatist found them useful — stated rather than discounted: court minutes this mundane are not the shape a forgery takes.
Read the source text →Figures in this event (4)
Scholarship
- Optatus: Against the Donatiststr. Mark Edwards, 1997Includes the Gesta apud Zenophilum. In copyright.