foundation · 249 · Carthage
Cyprian was a wealthy and successful rhetorician who had been baptised only two or three years before, sold much of his property, and was pressed into the priesthood and then into the see by the acclamation of the people of Carthage. Five senior presbyters objected, on the reasonable ground that he had leapt over everyone; they never accepted him, and the party they formed is behind every quarrel of the next decade — the lapsed, the confessors who issued certificates of peace on their own authority, and the rival bishop set up against him. He is also the reason so much of this period can be reconstructed at all, because unlike almost anyone else of his century he wrote letters constantly and they were kept.
To fill the see of Carthage — and, as it turned out, to hand it to a man who had been a Christian for about three years.
A bishop with no time served and enormous authority, and a hostile faction inside his own clergy from the first day.