Saldae was an important port city in the ancient Roman Empire, located at today's Béjaïa. It was generally a crossroads between eastern and western segments of Northern Africa, from the time of Carthage to the end of the Byzantine Empire from the continent.
History
Saldae was first inhabited by Numidian Berbers. A minor port in Carthaginian and in early Roman times, it was a border town between Rome and Juba, located to the east of the ancient Berber kingdoms.
Roman era
It was made officially a Roman colony -named Civitas Salditana- during the reign of Roman emperor Octavianus Augustus. It is mentioned in Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites reports: The city grew in size with new buildings and the emperor Vespasian settled the city with many Roman veterans, increasing its population and importance in the province of Mauretania Caesariensis, and when that was divided, in the new Late Roman province of Mauretania Sitifensis. The city was under the Roman ius and its citizens were endowed with full civil rights. Saldae was a center of a Mauretania Caesariensis area fully Romanised, that in the late third century was even fully Christian. In the 3rd century AD, Gaius Cornelius Peregrinus, a decurion of Saldae, was a tribunus of the auxiliary garrison at Alauna Carvetiorum, in northern Britain. An altar dedicated by him was discovered shortly before 1587 in the north-west corner of the fort, where it had probably been re-used in a late-Roman building.
In the 5th century, Saldae became the capital of the short-lived Vandal Kingdom of the Germanic Vandals, which ended in about 533 with the Byzantine conquest, which established an African prefecture and later the Exarchate of Carthage. After the 7th-century Arab conquest, Saldae declined and had practically disappeared by the end of the first millennium. In the 11th century, it was refounded as Béjaïa by the Berber Hammadid dynasty, which made it their capital, and it became an important port and centre of culture.
Ecclesiastical history
With the spread of Christianity, Saldae became a bishopric. Its bishop Paschasius was one of the Catholic bishops whom the Arian Vandal king Huneric summoned to the Council of Carthage and then exiled. Christianity survived the Arab conquest, the disappearance of the old city of Saldae, and the founding of the new city of Béjaïa. A letter of Pope Gregory VII exists, addressed to clero et populo Buzee, in which he writes of the consecration of a bishop named Servandus for Christian north Africa.
Titular see
No longer a residential bishopric, Saldae is today listed by the Catholic Church as a titular see. It has had a long list of incumbents, mostly of the lowest rank, a few of intermediate rank:
This titular see has, confusingly, for a long time concurrently had a counterpart called Bugia, the Italian form of Béjaïa, the modern name of former Saldae. Thus Bugia was the alternative title borne lastly by George Hilary Brown, titular bishop from 5 June 1840 until 22 April 1842, when he became residential bishop of Liverpool.
