The Edict of Serdica

The tone of the edict is what makes it remarkable. It is not a grant of toleration in any modern sense and it does not pretend to approve of what it permits. Galerius begins by rehearsing the policy: the Christians who had abandoned the practice of their ancestors were to be brought back to sound reason, and legislation was issued to that end. He then concedes that it did not work. Very many persisted, many were subjected to danger, and the result was that a great number now worship nothing at all, having been driven from the old rites and prevented from keeping their own.

From that admission the operative clause follows. In consideration of the emperor's customary clemency, the Christians may exist again and may reassemble their meeting places, provided they do nothing contrary to good order. And in return for this indulgence they are to pray to their own god for the emperor's safety, for the state and for their own, so that the commonwealth may continue unharmed on every side.

The edict was posted at Nicomedia on 30 April 311. Galerius, who had been the most determined of the persecuting emperors and had pressed Diocletian into the policy in 303, was by then gravely ill and died within days. Lactantius, who preserved the Latin text, was writing as a partisan and reports the illness in terms designed to read as divine judgement.

The relationship between this edict and the better known settlement of 313 is often reversed in popular accounts. Serdica came first and did the legally decisive thing: it converted Christianity from a proscribed practice into a permitted one across the eastern provinces where the persecution had been fiercest. What Constantine and Licinius agreed at Milan two years later went further in two respects. It extended a general freedom of religion to everyone rather than an indulgence to one group, and it ordered the restitution of confiscated property, including places of assembly, at public expense where a purchaser had to be compensated.

Serdica's own protection was also short lived in the east. Maximinus Daia, who governed the eastern provinces, published the edict but resumed pressure on Christians within a year through petitions from cities asking that they be excluded, a device that let him answer requests rather than issue orders. That renewed persecution ran until his defeat by Licinius in 313.

The text survives in two places, both partisan and both indispensable: in Latin in Lactantius, who wrote a polemic on the deaths of the persecutors, and in Greek in Eusebius, who included it in his church history. There is no independent copy, no inscription and no papyrus. That the wording rests entirely on Christian transmission is a fact worth keeping in view when reading its concessive phrasing.