The peasants in the provinces were unable to pay theirtaxes and rose up against their landowners. - P115
In those desperate times, when theland was in the grip of pestilence and lawlessness, many found consolation in thegood news of the Gospel. - P115
More and more free men and slaves became Christiansand refused to make sacrifices to the emperor. - P115
At the height of the crisis a man from a poor family succeeded in wrestingcontrol of the empire. This was the emperor Diocletian. - P115
Hewas particularly insistent that people should makesacrifices to the emperor, and so ruthlessly persecutedChristians throughout the empire. This was the last andmost violent of all the persecutions. - P115
After a reign of more than twenty years, Diocletian renounced his imperial titleand retired, a sick man, to his palace in Dalmatia. There he livedlong enough to see the futility of his battle against Christianity. - P115
It is said that his successor, the emperor Constantine, abandoned this struggle
on the eve of a battle against his rival,
Maxentius. - P115
He had a dream in which he saw the Cross, and heardthe words: ‘Beneath this sign you will be victorious. - P115
he issued a decree in 313 that Christiansshould no longer be persecuted. He himself remainedfor a long time, and was only baptised on his death-bed. - P116
Constantine no longer ruled the empire fromRome. In those days the chief threat came from the East.
the Persians having once again become powerful. So hechose as his seat the ancient Greek colony of Byzantium onthe Black Sea, upon which it was renamed Constantine‘sCity, or Constantinople. Today we know it as Istanbul.
- P116
By 395, the Roman empire didn‘t only have twocapitals, it had two states: the Western Empire, consistingof Italy, Gaul, Britannia, Spain and North Africa, wherepeople spoke Latin, and the Eastern Empire, consistingof Egypt, Palestine, Asia Minor, Greece and Macedonia, where they spoke Greek. - P116
Christians no longer met in underground passagesbut in grand churches with fine pillars. And the Crossnow becamesymbol of the deliverance from suffering,
the legions‘ battle emblem. - P116
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