The Edict of Milan

The story

When Christians were persecuted

For the first three centuries after Christ, Christians were a minority within the Roman Empire. They did not worship the Romans' gods and did not take part in public rites, and for this reason, at certain times, they were suspected, arrested and punished for their faith. The persecutions were stronger at some moments and in some areas, less so in others. We remember these events with respect for those who suffered for their beliefs.

At the end of the 3rd century the emperor Diocletian reorganised the empire by entrusting it to four rulers, the tetrarchy (a Greek word meaning “rule of four”), established in 293. In those years there were new and harsh persecutions of Christians, linked above all to Galerius. But in 311 Galerius himself, ill, changed his mind: with the Edict of Serdica he granted a pardon to the Christians and allowed them to practise their religion.

Constantine and the Milvian Bridge

In 312 two men were contesting control of Rome and the West: Constantine and Maxentius. On 28 October 312 they clashed at the Milvian Bridge, a bridge over the Tiber, near the city. Constantine won. According to Christian tradition, before the battle Jesus Christ appeared to him in a dream and showed him a sign, with the words In hoc signo vinces, “by this sign you will conquer”. Historians debate what really happened: it is not a certain fact, but a tradition.

The meeting at Milan

At the beginning of 313 Constantine, emperor of the West, met in Milan another emperor, Licinius, who ruled the eastern part of the empire. Milan was then the capital of the West. The occasion was a wedding: Licinius was marrying Constantia, Constantine's sister. The two took advantage of the meeting to discuss the empire's problems, and decided on a common line on religion.

What did they decide? That everyone should be free to follow the religion they preferred: not only Christians, but all the inhabitants of the empire. It was also ordered that places of worship and property that had been taken from the Christians be returned to them, even if in the meantime they had been legally bought by others. It was a way of making up for the wrongs of the persecutions.

An edict that perhaps was not an edict

Despite the name, historians are cautious. The text we know is not an edict signed in Milan. It is a letter, a rescript, that is, an official reply, which Licinius had posted at Nicomedia, in the East, with twelve points, in force from 13 June 313. The Latin preamble has been handed down to us by the Christian writer Lactantius, in the book De mortibus persecutorum (“On the Deaths of the Persecutors”).

Many scholars think it was a rescript that put into effect the edict of Galerius of 311. Some believe that the two emperors met in Milan only to talk, and that the provisions were written elsewhere, in Bithynia. For this reason today people often speak of the “Agreement of Milan”. Even so, the name “Edict of Milan” has remained, as has 313, the date everyone remembers.

From tolerance to support

After 313 the religious policy of the emperors changed: from simple tolerance they moved to support for Christianity. Constantine favoured the Christian communities, and two years later, in 315, the Senate dedicated to him a triumphal arch which can still be seen today in Rome, near the Colosseum.

The path continued in the following decades. On 27 February 380 the emperors Gratian, Theodosius I and Valentinian II, who was then eight or nine years old, issued at Thessalonica an edict, known by the first words of its text, Cunctos populos, which declared Christianity, in the form of the Nicene creed, the official religion of the empire. It hit above all other Christian currents, such as Arianism; bans on pagan cults came shortly after, in 391–392. In the following decades restrictions on the traditional cults increased and paganism was progressively outlawed.

So the passage from persecuted religion to state religion did not happen with a single act, but slowly, over almost seventy years, between 313 and 380.