Punished for Belief: State Persecution and Heresy Courts from Nero to Elizabeth I

After the great fire of July 64 CE, Nero blamed a group the Roman populace called Chrestians, and Tacitus records that those who confessed were arrested first and others convicted on their information. This is the first recorded instance of the Roman state killing people for being Christian, though it was confined to the city of Rome.

Christian tradition names Domitian, who reigned from 81 to 96 CE, as a second persecutor, citing the execution of Titus Flavius Clemens and the banishment of Flavia Domitilla. The page notes that the tradition rests almost entirely on Eusebius, writing over two centuries later, and that modern historians doubt a systematic persecution took place.

In 250 CE Decius ordered every subject to sacrifice before a magistrate and obtain a signed certificate called a libellus. The edict did not name Christians, yet because refusal was the offense it became the first systematic, empire-wide persecution of them, lasting about eighteen months until Decius died fighting the Goths in June 251.

Valerian issued two edicts, in 257 against Christian assembly and clergy, and in 258 ordering bishops, priests and deacons executed. It ended in 260 when his son Gallienus restored confiscated church property and formally tolerated Christian worship, the first imperial protection Christianity received.

Authorized by Pope Sixtus IV in 1478 at the request of Ferdinand II and Isabella I, this tribunal was placed under royal rather than papal control. Its main target was the sincerity of conversos, converts from Judaism and Islam, and it lasted until its formal abolition in 1834.

Pope Paul III established the Portuguese Inquisition on 23 May 1536 at the request of King John III. It ran tribunals at Lisbon, Coimbra and Evora, chiefly pursuing New Christians suspected of secretly keeping Jewish practice, and was abolished on 31 March 1821.

Created in 1542 by Paul III through the bull Licet ab initio, the Roman Inquisition answered to the papacy rather than to any crown. It is best known for the 1633 trial of Galileo and the 1600 execution of Giordano Bruno, and it survives in changed form as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Under Mary I of England, who restored Roman Catholicism and revived the medieval heresy laws, Protestants were burned between 1553 and 1558. The page cites at least 280 burnings recognized by contemporary sources and cautions that John Foxe, the main record, wrote as a Protestant polemicist.

The Portuguese crown set up a tribunal at Goa in 1560 that opened its work in 1561, an overseas inquisition whose targets included New Christians and Goan converts suspected of crypto-Hindu practice. It ran until abolition in 1812, after which most of its records were destroyed.

After Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth I in 1570, penal statutes escalated, and the 1585 Act made it high treason for a Jesuit or seminary priest merely to be in England. Priests and those who sheltered them were executed, which the page presents as the reverse direction from the Marian burnings.

A formal Holy Office tribunal answering to the crown was established in New Spain in 1571 under Pedro Moya de Contreras, after an earlier episcopal phase under Juan de Zumárraga. One historian cited on the page estimates about 50 people were executed, and the tribunal had no jurisdiction over Indians except for printed material in indigenous languages.