The Great Persecution

The last and fiercest general persecution of the Church, launched by Diocletian at Nicomedia on 23 February 303 and pursued in the East with escalating savagery until Galerius, dying, revoked it by an edict of toleration in April 311. It was mild in the West, where Constantine’s father Constantius barely enforced it, and murderous in the East, where Constantine grew up. The peace of Constantine is measured against this.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Edicts of 303–304

The persecution that the Church remembers as the Great Persecution — the Diocletianic persecution — began at the tetrarchic capital of Nicomedia. On 23 February 303, the feast of the Terminalia, imperial officers demolished the city’s cathedral, and the following day the first edict was posted: churches were to be destroyed, Scriptures surrendered and burned, Christian assemblies forbidden, and Christians of rank stripped of their status and legal protections (Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 12–13; trans. Creed, 1984; Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 8.2; trans. NPNF II/1). Lactantius, who was in Nicomedia and teaching rhetoric there, attributes the driving zeal to the Caesar Galerius, with Diocletian brought reluctantly along (Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 10–11; and see the assessment in Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981, ch. 2). Three further edicts followed within roughly a year, escalating from the clergy to the whole Christian population: the second and third (303) ordered the arrest of clergy and then offered them release on condition of sacrifice; the fourth (early 304) commanded all inhabitants to sacrifice to the gods on pain of death (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 8.2, 8.6; de Ste. Croix, “Aspects of the ‘Great’ Persecution,” Harvard Theological Review 47, 1954; Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981).

The Martyrs and the Confessors

The result was the most extensive martyrdom in the Church’s Roman history. Eusebius, an eyewitness in Palestine, devotes his eighth book and the separate Martyrs of Palestine to the sufferings he saw: burnings, beheadings, exposure to beasts, mutilation, and forced labor in the mines (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 8; The Martyrs of Palestine; trans. NPNF II/1). Among the martyrs whose cult would spread across the whole Church are St. George (traditionally martyred at Nicomedia or Lydda in this persecution), St. Demetrius of Thessaloniki, St. Catherine of Alexandria, and the many “great-martyrs” and soldier-martyrs of the era (for St. George and St. Demetrius as later venerated great-martyrs, see St. George the Great Martyr and St. Demetrios of Thessaloniki; the hagiographic and historical layers of these cults are pinned in those collections). Alongside the martyrs stood the confessors who survived, and the lapsi who sacrificed under threat and whose readmission would become a pastoral question at Nicaea and a schismatic one in the Donatist and Melitian disputes (see Constantine at Nicaea).

The persecution was not uniform. Its intensity varied sharply by region and by the will of the local emperor, and this variation is central to Constantine’s story.

West and East: The Decisive Difference

In the West, under the Caesar (from 305 Augustus) Constantius, Constantine’s father, the persecution was barely pursued. Constantius enforced only the first edict, and that minimally — pulling down some church buildings, according to Lactantius, but shedding no blood (Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 15; trans. Creed, 1984; Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981, on Constantius’s restraint). Whether from policy, temperament, or (as the later Christian tradition preferred) a sympathy for the Christian God, Constantius’s Gaul and Britain were a refuge. This is the atmosphere in which Constantine came to power in 306, and it framed the Christian tradition’s readiness to see the family as providentially disposed toward the faith even before Constantine’s own conversion (Eusebius, Life of Constantine 1.13–17, presenting Constantius as a monotheist favorable to Christians — a portrait to be read as Eusebius’s providential framing, not neutral report; trans. Cameron and Hall, 1999).

In the East, under Diocletian, Galerius, and then Maximinus Daia, the persecution was long and murderous, resumed by Maximinus even after 311. Constantine grew up at this eastern court and, on Eusebius’s account, saw the burning of the churches and the sufferings of the confessors with his own eyes (Eusebius, Life of Constantine 1.19). The contrast between the western house he came from and the eastern persecution he witnessed is the biographical ground of his later identification with the persecuted Church.

The Edict of Toleration (311)

The persecution in the East collapsed with its author. In April 311, dying of a horrific disease that Lactantius describes with grim satisfaction as divine judgment, the Augustus Galerius — the persecution’s prime mover — issued from Serdica (Sofia) an Edict of Toleration, in his own name and those of his imperial colleagues, admitting that the policy had failed to return Christians to the old gods and legalizing Christianity on condition that Christians pray for the safety of the emperor and the state (Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 34, giving the text; Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 8.17, giving a Greek version; trans. Creed, 1984, and NPNF II/1). This edict — not the later Edict of Milan — is the formal legal end of the Great Persecution in law, though Maximinus Daia renewed persecution in his eastern territories until his defeat by Licinius in 313 (Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981; Lenski, Cambridge Companion, 2012). The so-called Edict of Milan of 313 (see Milan, Legislation, and New Rome) went further — restoring confiscated property and granting positive freedom of worship — but it built on the toleration Galerius had already been forced to concede.

Why This Setting Matters

For the Orthodox reading of Constantine, the persecution is not background but foreground. The Church’s memory of the “peace of Constantine” is the memory of an ending: three centuries in which to confess Christ could mean death, closed within a single lifetime. The martyrs of Diocletian’s edicts and the councils of Constantine’s reign stand on either side of one threshold. This is why the Church could come to call an emperor isapostolos, “equal to the apostles” (see Equals-to-the-Apostles): not because he preached, but because under him the age of the martyrs gave way to the age in which the faith they died for could be freely confessed and conciliarly defined. The honest history that follows — the political calculation, the dynastic murders, the deathbed baptism — is written against this background, not in place of it.

References

Barnes, Timothy D. Constantine and Eusebius. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
de Ste. Croix, G. E. M. “Aspects of the ‘Great’ Persecution.” Harvard Theological Review 47 (1954): 75–113.
Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History 8; The Martyrs of Palestine. Trans. NPNF, Second Series, vol. 1.
Eusebius of Caesarea. Life of Constantine 1.13–19. Trans. Averil Cameron and Stuart G. Hall. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999.
Lactantius. De mortibus persecutorum 10–15, 34. Ed. and trans. J. L. Creed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.
Lenski, Noel, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.