A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

In the last decade of the third century Diocletian became increasingly influenced by a clique of army officers from Rome’s Adriatic provinces in the Balkans, headed by Galerius, one of the colleagues whom Diocletian had chosen to help him govern the empire. Gradually this rabidly anti-Christian group, some of them enthusiasts for Neoplatonism, persuaded Diocletian to follow his inclinations and from 303 a full-scale attack was launched on the Christians, beginning with clergy. Churches were torn down, sacrifices ordered and Christian sacred texts confiscated. Persecution was not so intense in the West, where Diocletian’s colleague Constantius had some sympathy with Christianity, but elsewhere pressure intensified after Diocletian retired from public life in 305. Although this ‘Great Persecution’ proved to be the last in the history of the Roman Empire and ended two decades later with an extraordinary turnaround in the Church’s fortunes, it was far more savage than most previous assaults on Christianity; nearly half all recorded martyrdoms in the early Church period are datable to this period.