01 — The Empire and the Persecutions
The world before 312: the tetrarchic reorganization of the Roman Empire under Diocletian, and the Great Persecution of 303–311 — the last and fiercest imperial assault on the Church, ended by a dying persecutor’s edict of toleration. This is the setting into which Constantine and Helena were born and in which the Church’s memory of the “peace of Constantine” takes its whole meaning.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox
The measure of the Constantinian turn is the persecution it ended. This section sets the stage: the exhausted third-century empire refounded by Diocletian on the collegiate rule of four emperors (the tetrarchy), and the systematic persecution launched from Nicomedia in 303 that put the Church under its heaviest and last general assault. Understanding both is necessary to read what follows — for the Church remembers Constantine above all as the emperor under whom the age of the martyrs gave way to the age of the councils.
Navigation
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| the-diocletianic-world.md | The third-century crisis; Diocletian’s tetrarchy; the reorganization of the empire; the place of Constantius Chlorus and the young Constantine within it. |
| the-great-persecution.md | The persecution of 303–311: the edicts, the martyrs, the regional variation (mild in the West under Constantius, savage in the East), and Galerius’s deathbed Edict of Toleration (311). |
See Also
- From Naissus to the Purple — Constantine’s emergence out of this world
- The Neomartyrs of the Ottoman Era — a later age of martyrdom under a non-Christian power, for contrast with the age Constantine closed