The Great Persecution begins, AD 303

**The last and worst of the persecutions, and the one the archive can trace edict by edict.**

It opened on 23 February 303 at Nicomedia with the demolition of the church opposite the imperial palace. The first edict ordered **churches razed, the scriptures surrendered and burned**, Christians of rank stripped of privilege, and assembly forbidden. Three more followed within two years: the clergy imprisoned; the clergy compelled to sacrifice on pain of death; and in 304 **a universal order to sacrifice**, applying to everyone.

## Why the first edict is the one that mattered

**It was aimed at buildings and books rather than at people**, and that is what makes it visible in the archive's holdings. The AD 303 search of the church at **Cirta** — which the archive holds as a separate event on the same year — is the first edict being executed, with a clerk writing down the plate and the clothing as he confiscated it.

**And the demand for scripture created a category of sin.** A man who handed over books was a *traditor*, and the question of whether such clergy kept their orders split the African church for a century in the **Donatist** controversy. **The persecution's most durable effect on the church was internal**, which is the same pattern the archive recorded for Decius fifty years earlier.

## The scale, and the limits of the evidence

**Eusebius is the principal witness and he was there** — in Palestine, and he saw the executions at Caesarea. His *Martyrs of Palestine* and the eighth book of the *History* are eyewitness. **But he says himself that he is selecting**, recording only what he judged useful and passing over much, and the archive notes that: the numbers cannot be reconstructed from him.

**Its severity was uneven by region**, which the archive can see in its own contents — heavy in the East and in Africa, comparatively light in Gaul and Britain under Constantius. **The martyrs this archive holds from these years cluster where the enforcement was hardest.**