Diocletianic Persecution

The Diocletianic or Great Persecution was the final and harshest campaign of the Roman state against Christianity. Beginning in February 303 under the emperor Diocletian and his fellow rulers, a series of edicts stripped Christians of their legal rights, ordered churches and scriptures destroyed, and eventually required everyone in the empire to sacrifice to the gods. Its intensity varied greatly from region to region, and it ended in stages between 306 and 313. It failed in its aim: within a generation Christianity had become the favoured religion of the emperor Constantine.

For two centuries Christians had faced suspicion and sporadic local violence, such as the executions in Rome after the Great Fire of AD 64, but no emperor had legislated against the faith as a whole. In the mid-3rd century the emperors Decius and Valerian demanded empire-wide sacrifice and executed church leaders, but these campaigns were cut short, and from 260 Gallienus began roughly forty years of peace. During that time the church grew quickly. One rough modern estimate suggests that Christians numbered about six million by 300, perhaps a tenth of the population, and large churches stood in many cities.

Diocletian, emperor from 284, presented his system of four co-rulers, the Tetrarchy, as a restoration of traditional Roman values. He linked himself with Jupiter, promoted the old gods and reformed coinage, taxation and law with an activist zeal unusual among emperors. In 302 he ordered the leaders of the Manichean sect burned. Around 299, after Christians were blamed for disrupting an imperial sacrifice at Antioch, soldiers were told to sacrifice or leave the army. Christian writers name his junior colleague Galerius as the driving force behind the persecution. According to Lactantius, the two disagreed over how far to go and consulted the oracle of Apollo at Didyma, whose reply was taken as a call for action.

On 23 February 303 the new church at Nicomedia, the imperial residence, was demolished, and the next day the first edict was published. It banned Christian worship, ordered scriptures and churches destroyed, stripped Christians of rank and of the right to defend themselves in court. Diocletian asked that it be enforced without bloodshed, but local judges often imposed death. A second edict that summer ordered the arrest of all clergy, filling the prisons. A third, in November 303, freed prisoners who agreed to sacrifice. A fourth, probably early in 304, required every man, woman and child to sacrifice on pain of death.

Enforcement depended on the ruler. In Gaul and Britain, Constantius applied only the first edict and seemingly with little enthusiasm. In Italy, Spain and Africa, Maximian enforced the edicts until he stepped down in 305. The East, under Diocletian, Galerius and later Maximinus, suffered most. Estimates of the dead vary widely: one historian put them at 3,000 to 3,500, another at more than 23,500, and the question remains disputed.

After Diocletian and Maximian abdicated in 305, the West moved quickly toward toleration. Constantine, acclaimed in 306, restored Christians' rights and property, and Maxentius granted toleration in Italy. In the East, the dying Galerius issued an edict at Serdica in April 311 allowing Christians to worship again, but Maximinus soon resumed persecution in his territories. In 313 Constantine and Licinius agreed on general religious freedom in what became known as the Edict of Milan, and Licinius's defeat of Maximinus ended the persecution in the East.

Many Christians were killed, tortured, imprisoned or exiled, but most escaped punishment. The persecution left lasting divisions between those who had handed over scriptures or sacrificed and those who had refused, giving rise to the Donatist schism in North Africa. How far later Christian writers exaggerated its scale has been debated since Edward Gibbon, but most modern historians still regard it as severe.

Our 300 map shows the Roman Empire under the Tetrarchy on the eve of the persecution.