Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Constantine's vision and the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in a 9th-century Byzantine manuscript. During the reign of the Roman emperor Constantine the Great (306–337 AD), Christianity began to transition to the dominant religion of the Roman Empire.
Constantine I [g] (Flavius Valerius Constantinus; 27 February c. 272 – 22 May 337), also known as Constantine the Great, was a Roman emperor from AD 306 to 337 and the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity.
Constantine and his successors brought wealth, peace, and the opportunity to build a strong local position, to the churches. Christianity had already shown itself as able to distribute money in support of its religious causes; following the Roman tradition of endowments, Constantine became a donor of over-powering generosity.
Christianity then rapidly grew in the 4th century, accounting for 56.5% of the Roman population by 350. [43] By the latter half of the second century, Christianity had spread east throughout Media, Persia, Parthia, and Bactria. The twenty bishops and many presbyters were more of the order of itinerant missionaries, passing from place to place ...
Christianity in the 4th century was dominated in its early stage by Constantine the Great and the First Council of Nicaea of 325, which was the beginning of the period of the First seven Ecumenical Councils (325–787), and in its late stage by the Edict of Thessalonica of 380, which made Nicene Christianity the state church of the Roman Empire.
In the year before the First Council of Constantinople in 381, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire when Theodosius I, emperor of the East, Gratian, emperor of the West, and Gratian's junior co-ruler Valentinian II issued the Edict of Thessalonica in 380, [1] which recognized the catholic orthodoxy [a] of Nicene Christians as the Roman Empire's state religion.
Though by 800 Western Europe was ruled entirely by Christian kings, Eastern Europe remained an area of missionary activity. The First Bulgarian Empire was the first of the Eastern European nations to adopt Christianity as a state religion in 868. It declared independence of Constantinople and Rome soon after.
The Edict of Serdica was issued in 311 by the Roman emperor Galerius, officially ending the Diocletianic persecution of Christianity in the East. [1] With the passage in 313 AD of the Edict of Milan, in which the Roman Emperors Constantine the Great and Licinius legalised the Christian religion, persecution of Christians by the Roman state ceased.