In 303, the Emperors Diocletian, Maximian, Galerius, and Constantius issued a series of edicts rescinding Christians’ legal rights and demanding that they comply with traditional religious practices. Later edicts targeted the clergy and demanded universal sacrifice, ordering all inhabitants to sacrifice to the gods. Persecutory laws were nullified by different emperors at different times, but Constantine and Licinius’ Edict of Milan has traditionally marked the end of the persecution.
About Diocletianic Persecution in brief
In 303, the Emperors Diocletian, Maximian, Galerius, and Constantius issued a series of edicts rescinding Christians’ legal rights and demanding that they comply with traditional religious practices. Later edicts targeted the clergy and demanded universal sacrifice, ordering all inhabitants to sacrifice to the gods. Persecutory laws were nullified by different emperors at different times, but Constantine and Licinius’ Edict of Milan has traditionally marked the end of the persecution. Although the persecution resulted in death, torture, imprisonment, or dislocation for many Christians, the majority of the empire’s Christians avoided punishment. Some historians consider that, in the centuries that followed the persecutory era, Christians created acult of the martyrs and exaggerated the barbarity of the persecutions. The Donatists in North Africa and the Melitians in Egypt would not be reconciled to the Church until after 411. The persecution failed to check the rise of the Church. By 324, Constantine was sole ruler of the Empire, and Christianity had become his favored religion. For the first two centuries of its existence, Christianity and its practitioners were unpopular with the people at large. Around 112, the governor of Bithynia–Pontus Pliny, was sent long lists of denunciations by anonymous citizens, which shied away from the public sphere. It was popular hostility—the anger of the crowd—which drove the earliest official action, which was not official action but public denunciation of Christians, which drove the first official action—which was the denunciation of Christians by Trajan, governor of Pontus Pljanus, in 112.
In the first 15 years of his rule, Diocletsian purged the army of Christians and condemned Manicheans to death, and surrounded himself with public opponents of Christianity. In 313, Constantine restored Christians to full legal equality and returned property that had been confiscated during the persecutors’ reign. In 306, the usurper Maxentius ousted Maximian’s successor Severus, promising full religious toleration. In 311, Maximinus ended the persecution in the East in 311, but it was resumed in Egypt, Palestine, and Asia Minor by his successor,. Maximinus’s successor, Constantine and licinius, signed the Edicts of Milan in 313, which offered a more comprehensive acceptance of Christianity thanGalerius’s edict had provided. In 303, Constantius was unenthusiastic, and later persecutory edicts, including the calls for universal sacrifice were not applied in his domain. In 302, the oracle’s reply was read as an endorsement of Galersius’s position, and a general persecution was called on February 24, 303. The persecution did, however, cause many churches to split between those who had complied with imperial authority, andThose who had remained “pure”. The donatists would notbe reconciled with the Churchuntil after 411, when they were reconciled.
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This page is based on the article Diocletianic Persecution published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 05, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
