Early Medieval Europe 300-1000
Roger Collins
Number of quotes: 13
Book ID: 78 Page: 9
Section: 3B
The new Tetrarchic (that is ‘four ruler’) system did not eliminate the possibility of military revolt, but it certainly limited the extent to which a rebel general in a particular province could threaten the stability of the imperial regime.
Quote ID: 2132
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 78 Page: 10
Section: 3B2,4A
The ideology was represented in art, above all by the elimination of elements of individuality in the portraiture of the rulers. Thus in the coins of these emperors only the inscriptions indicate which of the rulers is being portrayed. The styles vary from mint to mint but the individual rulers are given identical features. {24} The quintessential imperial image of this period may be found in the three-dimensional porphyry sculptures of the four emperors, now embedded in the wall of the Church of San Marco in Venice.
Quote ID: 2133
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 78 Page: 10
Section: 3B
At the same time civil and military authority within the provinces was generally divided and parallel hierarchies created within both divisions. The smaller provinces were themselves then grouped into larger units, called dioceses, and these were placed under the direction of a new class of official called Vicarii, or Deputy Praetorian Prefects.
Quote ID: 2134
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 78 Page: 12
Section: 3B,3C
In general it could be said that the whole thrust of the changes introduced around the turn of the century by Diocletian and by Constantine was aimed at the production of a more regimented and rigid society. Laws that required sons to follow in the professions of their fathers, laws that fixed prices, laws that established exact hierarchies in the civil and military administration, and laws that forbade an increasing range of opinions and practices all cohere in terms of the kind of social ideals that underlie them. {31}….
In this sense the culmination of occasional persecution of the Christians in the course of the third century in the so-called Great Persecution initiated by Diocletian in 303 is hardly surprising.
Quote ID: 2135
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 78 Page: 12
Section: 3B
It began with the brief reign of Trajan Decius (249-51), who in 250 issued an edict requiring his provincial governors, urban magistrates and local Commissioners for Sacrifices to obtain certificates from the citizens to establish that they had taken part in the obligatory public sacrifices to the gods and to the Genius (or guiding spirit) of the Emperor on certain specified days. At least one witness was required to sign the statement.
Quote ID: 2136
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 78 Page: 12
Section: 3B
More sustained and systematic were the measures taken in the middle of his reign by the emperor Valerian, who issued two laws against the Christians.
Quote ID: 2137
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 78 Page: 13
Section: 3B
These laws were repealed in 261 by Valerian’s son Gallienus, who also restored their property to Christian individuals and communities. No further state action was taken against them until the time of Diocletian.The sources of evidence for all of the persecutions are generally later in date than the events themselves, and are written from a Christian point of view. Only the chance survival of an odd document, such as the witnessed certificate of attendance at sacrifices sent to the Commissioners for Sacrifices ‘in the Village of Alexander’s Island’ in Egypt by one Aurelius Diogenes ‘son of Satabus…aged 72; scar on right eyebrow’, gives any contemporary and non-Christian perspective on events. {35}
Quote ID: 2138
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 78 Page: 13/14
Section: 3B
Thus for a Christian to participate in a pagan sacrifice, even in a passive way, was a positive act of apostasy, a renunciation of belief. This was unfortunate when the making of such sacrifices was the principal way in which acts of public loyalty to the emperor were expressed. In many ways such a sacrifice was a political act in a religious form.
Quote ID: 2139
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 78 Page: 18
Section: 3C
...with the conversion of Constantine to Christianity. For an event of such importance, at least in the long term, the evidence relating to it is extraordinarily sparse and contradictory. It comes principally in the form of the accounts of the emperor’s vision and subsequent conversion on the eve of the battle given in the De Mortibus Persecutorum (Deaths of the Persecutors) of Lactantius (c.317) and in the Greek Life of Constantine and Ecclesiastical History of Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea. {8}Pastor John’s note: Xty existed?
Quote ID: 2140
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 78 Page: 18
Section: 3C
All in all Constantine was a very different sort of Christian in the 330s from what he had been in 312. {10}
Quote ID: 2141
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 78 Page: 19
Section: 2B2,3C
Constantine preserved on the coins issued by his government for several years after his conversion the reverse legend of Soli Invicto Comiti – ‘To the Unconquered Sun, Companion (of the Emperor)’. The last of these was struck in 323. {12}
Quote ID: 2142
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 78 Page: 19
Section: 3C
in the matter of religion there was little initially very startling about the prospect of an emperor who believed himself to be specially favoured by and to have a personal relationship to a or the divinity. Heliogabalus and Aurelian had done the same, and the notion of the emperor’s divine comes or companion had become a standard one in the imperial ideology of the Tetrarchy. {13}
Quote ID: 2143
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 78 Page: 24
Section: 3A4,3C
It has not been possible for subsequent generations to idealise the first Christian emperor. His treatment of defeated enemies, such as the family of Licinius, was perhaps not untypical of his age, but he was as lethal to his own family as to his foes.
Quote ID: 2145
Time Periods: 4
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