Gallienus’ edict of toleration, AD 260

**The first time a Roman emperor ordered church property returned, and the archive holds the text.**

After his father’s capture by the Persians, Gallienus issued a rescript addressed to **Dionysius of Alexandria** and other bishops by name, directing that the places of worship be restored and that the bishops be permitted to carry out their customary functions. Eusebius preserves it.

## Why the archive treats it as a major event

**It begins what is usually called the Little Peace of the Church — roughly forty years, 260 to 303, with no general persecution.** And the archive can see the consequences in its own contents rather than having to assert them:

The **Synod of Antioch** deposing Paul of Samosata in 268, and **Aurelian** in 272 being asked to adjudicate which claimant held the church building — both of which the archive holds as events, and neither of which is conceivable during a persecution. **A church that can litigate over property in an imperial court is a church whose property the state recognises.**

The great libraries and schools of the period. Most of the archive’s third-century writing sits inside this window.

**And the scale of what followed.** The Great Persecution of 303 fell on a church that had been building openly for forty years, which is why its first act was **razing buildings** — there were buildings to raze. The AD 303 record of the search at Cirta, which the archive holds, is an inventory of the plate and cloth of a single congregation, and it exists because such things existed.

**One caution the record states:** the rescript is toleration by administrative act, not law. It restored property and permitted function; it did not make Christianity legal in the sense the Edict of Milan later did, and it bound no successor. **Forty years of peace rested on nothing stronger than the absence of a contrary order.**