Laws Ending Persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire

About the Author

Imperial legislation was generally drafted by an official known as the quaestor of the sacred palace. The Edict of Galerius emanated from the court of Galerius in the Balkans. The Letter of Licinius, whose terms had been agreed between Licinius and Constantine, was drafted in the court of Licinius and published at Nicomedia in northwestern Asia Minor. Both documents survive in slightly differing forms in the Latin pamphlet On the Deaths of the Persecutors of the Christian courtier Lactantius and in Greek translation in the Church History of Eusebius of Caesarea.

Galerius became caesar in the college of four emperors (the tetrarchy), formed by the emperor Diocletian in 293. His resounding victory over the Persians in 298 enabled him to persuade Diocletian to start the Great Persecution in 303; both Lactantius and Eusebius characterize Galerius as the evil genius behind the Great Persecution. Throughout 303–311 Galerius sustained strong hostility toward Christians. In 311 he was found to be suffering from a debilitating disease, possibly cancer of the bowel, described by his Christian detractors with “singular accuracy and apparent pleasure” (Gibbon, p. 443). Among the documents he issued on his deathbed in the spring of 311was the Edict of Galerius, a law restoring freedom of worship to Christians. By the autumn, Maximinus, who succeeded him as ruler of the eastern Mediterranean basin, had resumed persecution.

Licinius, an old comrade in arms of Galerius's, was made an emperor in November 308 in the hope that he would supplant the usurper Maxentius, who was then ruling in Italy. After the death of Galerius in 311, Licinius was left in sole control of the Balkans, including the important Danube frontier. Constantine's conquest of Maxentius in October 312 left Licinius uncomfortably placed between Constantine, now controlling everything in the West, and Maximinus, the persecuting emperor ruling the eastern Mediterranean basin. Licinius chose alliance with Constantine and in February 313 married Constantine's sister in the northern Italian city of Milan (Mediolanum). Licinius and Constantine agreed that persecution of the Christians, renewed by Maximinus in his territories in 311, should be brought to an end. This goal was achieved by the Letter of Licinius. In 316 Constantine attacked Licinius; peace was made the following year, increasing the area controlled by Constantine. In 324, partly on the pretext that Licinius was planning to persecute the Christians, Constantine attacked again, besieged Licinius in Nicomedia, and on September 19 forced him to surrender. He was put to death in spring 325.

Constantine I became an emperor on July 25, 306. His first imperial act was to stop persecution of Christians in the territories he controlled (Britain, Gaul, and Spain). In 312 he attacked his neighbor Maxentius, ruler of Italy and North Africa, killing him and capturing the city of Rome. Early in 313 Constantine married his sister to Licinius, emperor ruling in the Balkans. The alliance permitted Licinius to eliminate the persecuting emperor of the East, Maximinus, and to issue the Letter of Licinius; although the letter was issued at Nicomedia by Licinius, it arose from his negotiations at Milan with Constantine. After he overthrew Licinius, Constantine founded Constantinople as a new imperial residence, unencumbered by civic pagan religious ritual. In 325 he summoned Christian bishops to the Council of Nicaea to settle theological controversies, and at some point he made pagan sacrifice illegal. He died in 337 and was buried in the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople. The Life of Constantine, written by Eusebius of Caesarea, contains many documents composed by the emperor himself. We know Constantine from his own words to a degree rare for a Roman emperor, and from them Constantine emerges as a Christian conviction politician.

Lactantius (ca. 250–ca. 325) was a professor of Latin rhetoric employed by the emperor Diocletian at his imperial residence at Nicomedia in northwestern Asia Minor and then, in his extreme old age, as tutor to the son of the emperor Constantine. Lactantius spent the Great Persecution writing the Divine Institutes, the first comprehensive exposition of Christianity in the Latin language. His pamphlet On the Deaths of the Persecutors, written soon after the persecution ended, is a narrative of the age of the Great Persecution and the rise of Constantine, recounted from the point of view of a well-informed, if highly partisan, political insider. It preserves both of the texts translated here in their original Latin form (though with some abbreviation).

Eusebius (ca. 260–339) was a Christian scholar from Caesarea on the coast of Palestine and after the Great Persecution became bishop of the church in that city. He wrote commentaries on the Bible and Preparation for the Gospel, which explains in voluminous detail how all that was best in Greco-Roman civilization found its natural fulfillment in Christianity. His brief narrative the Martyrs of Palestine gives a harrowing account of the suffering of his Christian comrades during the Great Persecution, including the martyrdom of his own beloved master, the scholar Pamphilus. Eusebius's Church History, which he rewrote several times to keep up with the events of his lifetime, remains the most important source for the history of Christianity in its first three centuries. In his old age he wrote the four-book Life of the Emperor Constantine, which is particularly valuable because it transcribes numerous contemporary documents. Both of the documents were translated into Greek by Eusebius for incorporation in the Church History.