This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In the years after Mani's death in Persia, his missionaries carried his teaching west into the Roman Empire, gaining their first substantial foothold in Egypt before the faith spread onward into Syria, North Africa and Italy, following trade routes that had long carried people and ideas across the Mediterranean world.
The new faith arrived in Roman territory as a rival to both traditional Roman religion and the still forming Christian church, offering a systematic account of good and evil built around cosmic dualism at a moment when both of those older systems were still working out their own final shape. It found a genuine audience among Romans looking for an explanation of evil more structured than either alternative already on offer, drawing in a number of thoughtful adherents, Augustine of Hippo among the most famous, who studied and followed it seriously for nearly a decade before rejecting it in favor of the Christianity he would go on to shape.
That the faith could travel this far, this fast, from a homeland where its own founder had already been executed, said something about how well suited Manichaean missionary methods were to unfamiliar ground, trained preachers rather than a single charismatic leader, and a cosmology built to absorb rather than confront the traditions it met along the way.
What the missionaries' arrival changed for Manichaeism's spread was reach far beyond the faith's Persian point of origin. A religion driven out of favor at the Sasanian court found new ground within the empire that would soon become its most determined persecutor, planted widely enough across Egypt, Syria, North Africa and Italy that stamping it out again would eventually take an emperor's direct order.