Edict of Milan

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Edict of Milan did not make Christianity the official religion of Rome. That is the first misconception worth clearing up. What happened on the 13th of February 313 AD was something more nuanced and, in its way, more remarkable. Two emperors met in Mediolanum, the city we now call Milan, and agreed to extend a kind of peace to a group of people who had been imprisoned, stripped of property, and sentenced to labor in mines. The agreement gave Christians legal standing in the Roman world for the first time. But it also did something unexpected: it granted religious liberty to everyone. The questions worth sitting with are these. Why did two men who held the most powerful offices in the ancient world decide, in that moment, to change course? And was the decision really about faith, or was it politics dressed in religious language?

• 2. Roman Religion and the Problem of Christians

  ›

  Rome's sense of identity was built on collective piety. The Romans believed their success as a world power flowed from their careful maintenance of good relations with the gods, a quality they called pietas. Their religious world was capacious by design. When Greek settlers brought the cult of Apollo to the Italian peninsula, Rome absorbed it. Through a process the Romans called interpretatio graeca and interpretatio romana, the gods of conquered peoples were folded into the Roman theological hierarchy rather than erased. This flexibility was not just tolerance; it was strategy.

  The Judeo-Christian insistence that their God was the only God, and that all others were false, could not be fitted into that system. Christians refused to swear loyalty oaths directed at the emperor's divinity. More pointed still, their refusal to pay the Jewish tax was read not merely as a religious scruple but as a challenge to the state itself. Emperor Decius, who ruled from 249 to 251, issued edicts imposing hard restrictions on Christians. His successor Valerian continued that policy.

  A reprieve came with the reign of Gallienus, who ruled from 253 to 268. For nearly forty years after his accession, the Church faced no official sanctions. Eusebius of Caesarea called this the "little" peace of the Church. It would not last. With the fall of the Severan dynasty in 235, rivals for the imperial throne had learned to bid for support by either favoring or persecuting Christians, making the community a recurring pawn in imperial politics.

• 3. Galerius and the First Reprieve

  ›

  On the 30th of April 311, Emperor Galerius issued an edict posted at Nicomedia that officially ended the persecutions. It was not a warm document. Christians were described as people who had "followed such a caprice and had fallen into such a folly that they would not obey the institutes of antiquity." The language was grudging, but the effect was real. Galerius granted them an indulgence and asked in return that Christians pray to their God for his safety, for the safety of the republic, and for their own.

  The edict did not, however, restore the property that had been seized from Christians. Their meeting places and possessions remained in other hands. Two years later, that unfinished business would become central to whatever agreement Constantine and Licinius worked out in Milan.

  Galerius died shortly after issuing his edict. In the east, the Caesar Maximinus Daza, who had styled himself Augustus, received instructions to repeal the persecution. He told his subordinates to desist but did not release Christians from prisons or from the virtual death sentences that came from forced labor in the mines. Once Galerius was gone and could no longer constrain him, Maximinus enthusiastically resumed persecutions and encouraged petitions against Christians from local populations.

• 4. The Meeting in Milan

  ›

  Constantine, the Western Roman Emperor, and Licinius, who controlled the Balkans, met in Mediolanum and produced their agreement on the 13th of February 313. The original letters they sent to provincial governors have never been retrieved. What survives comes from two sources: Lactantius, in his work On the Deaths of the Persecutors, and Eusebius of Caesarea, in his History of the Church. The two versions diverge in marked ways.

  The document preserved in Lactantius is not an edict in any formal sense. It is a letter from Licinius to the governors of the eastern provinces he had just conquered by defeating Maximinus later that same year. It was posted at Nicomedia on the 13th of June 313. The letter begins by stating that Constantine Augustus and Licinius Augustus had met "so happily at Milan" and considered together "all that concerned the interest and security of the State." Their decision was to grant to Christians and to everybody the free power to follow the religion of their choice, so that "all that is divine in the heavens may be favorable and propitious" toward those under their authority.

  Eusebius translated both documents into Greek. His version of Licinius's letter most likely derives from a copy posted in the province of Syria Palaestina, probably at its capital Caesarea, in the late summer or early autumn of 313. When Eusebius later wrote his Life of Constantine, he eliminated Licinius's role entirely, portraying him as the evil foil to his hero Constantine. Scholars have noted this with interest.

• 5. Broader Than Its Reputation

  ›

  A stone inscription at Arycanda in Lycia preserves one of the petitions Maximinus received from populations under his control. The text calls Christians "long disloyal" and asks that they "should at last be put down and not be suffered by any absurd novelty to offend against the honour due to the gods." That inscription captures the world the Edict of Milan was written against.

  The edict is popularly understood as a document about Christianity alone. The text itself tells a different story. While it expressly grants liberty to Christians, who had been the object of special persecution, it goes further. A passage within Licinius's letter states: "we have also conceded to other religions the right of open and free observance of their worship for the sake of the peace of our times, that each one may have the free opportunity to worship as he pleases; this regulation is made that we may not seem to detract from any dignity of any religion."

  Licinius, who composed the letter with the intent of publishing it in the east upon his hoped-for victory over Maximinus, was himself a pagan. The policy the document expresses is therefore his as much as Constantine's. Constantine's own approach went further in practice: he tolerated paganism and other religions but actively promoted Christianity throughout his reign.

• 6. Property, Pragmatism, and Faith

  ›

  The Edict of Milan ordered the return of Christian meeting places and properties without payment or compensation. The state, not the current owners, would bear the cost of restitution. Provincial magistrates were directed to execute the order "at once with all energy" so that public order might be restored and divine favor preserved. Constantine ordered the restitution to come at state expense.

  For Christians, the practical consequences were profound. For the first time, it became possible to observe the liturgy publicly and in full. Eusebius captured the mood of Christians in his Church History, in the tenth book. This era entered the historical record as the "Peace of the Church."

  The phrase has traveled far. In Great Britain and Ireland, it has sometimes been applied to the end of persecution following Catholic emancipation, a process that ran from 1778 to 1926. In Germany, it can refer to the period of relative calm after the Kulturkampf, which lasted from 1871 to 1878.

  Whether Constantine's motivation was religious or political remains a live question. The document could be read as his first step in forging an alliance with the Christian God, whom he considered the most powerful deity, at a moment when he was concerned about social stability and the protection of the empire. The scholar Koszarycz argues that Constantine was superstitious enough to believe that the non-Christian gods still existed and that he did not want to upset the balance of good and evil. Restoring justice toward Christians, on this reading, was a way to stabilize the state. The majority of historians, however, believe his adoption of Christianity was genuine, a conclusion they draw from the ongoing favors he extended to the Church throughout the rest of his reign.

• 7. What Came After

  ›

  The Edict of Milan gave Christianity legal status and a reprieve from persecution. What it did not do was make Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. That step came with the Edict of Thessalonica in 380 AD, when Nicene Christianity received normative status. The distance between 313 and 380 is worth holding in mind. Two generations separated the moment when Christians were freed from the mines from the moment when their particular form of belief became the law of the empire.

  Whether scholars should call the 313 agreement an "edict" at all is itself a matter scholars now regard as settled. The debate over whether there was a formal Edict of Milan has largely concluded: most researchers reject the story as it has come down in church history, noting that the surviving document is a letter from Licinius, not an imperial proclamation in the classic form. The actual letters, as the sources confirm, have never been retrieved. What remains is a quotation in Lactantius and a Greek translation in Eusebius, each shaped by its author's own purposes. The Arycanda inscription, carved in stone in Lycia, is among the few pieces of evidence from the other side of that history, a record of the world those letters were written to change.