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In 313, Constantine and Licinius issued the Edict of Milan decriminalizing Christian worship. The emperor became a great patron of the Church and set a precedent for the position of the Christian emperor within the Church and raised the notions of orthodoxy, Christendom, ecumenical councils, and the state church of the Roman Empire declared by ...
Constantine I [g] (Latin: 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.
King Ezana after converting to christianity. Tiridates III of Armenia, King of Armenia, in 301; Ezana of Axum, King of Aksum, 320; Constantine I, Roman emperor, in 337; Mirian III of Iberia, King of Iberia, c. 337
[5]: 60, 61 According to Church historians writing after his death, Constantine had by then converted to Christianity, making him the first Christian Roman emperor. In his Oration to the Assembly of the Saints Constantine says he was not a child or a youth when he converted.
Gibbon theorized that paganism declined from the second century BC and was finally eliminated by the top-down imposition of Christianity by Constantine, the first Christian emperor, and his successors in the fourth century AD. Map of the Roman Empire with the distribution of Christian congregations of the first three centuries AD
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.
[22] [23] Theodosius also wrote laws to eliminate heresies, but made no requirement for pagans or Jews to convert to Christianity. [24] [25] [26] However, the sixth century Eastern Roman emperor Justinian I and the seventh century emperor Heraclius attempted to force cultural and religious uniformity by requiring baptism of the Jews.