When Thrones Became Gods: The Empire That Killed in Christ’s Name

“And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration.”

(Revelation 17:6)

Across the centuries the city of Rome has worn two faces: the empire of Caesars and the empire of popes. In both guises it has claimed divine authority and in both it has spilled blood in the name of that authority. From Nero’s torches that lit the imperial gardens with dying believers to the tribunals of later pontiffs that condemned dissenters and reformers, the pattern remained: the power to kill sanctified by the pretense of holiness.

The following account traces that continuity of violence. It begins with the emperors who hunted the first followers of Christ and ends with the rulers of the church who inherited the same imperial throne and too often repeated the same cruelties. The purpose is not to assail faith, but to expose what unfolds when a finite man; whether he claims to speak for God or to stand in God’s place; presumes the divine right to silence others with the sword or the stake.

Under the emperors of Rome the small, scattered groups who gathered in houses to pray in the name of Jesus of Nazareth were treated as a subversive and irrational cult. The empire bound its unity to its religion: every city had its gods, and above them all stood the emperor’s genius, the demonic spirit of Rome itself. To refuse sacrifice before his image was to refuse citizenship. Loyalty was expressed in incense and blood, and the Christians offered neither. Their allegiance to one invisible God, their secrecy, and their refusal to take part in public rites made them, in Roman eyes, enemies of the human race. From that refusal grew centuries of accusation, trial, and execution.

The first to turn the state deliberately against them was Nero. He ruled from 54 to 68 CE, and after the great fire of 64 reduced much of the capital to ashes, suspicion fell on him. To divert the anger of the mob he chose a scapegoat—the followers of Christ, already whispered about in the streets as haters of mankind. Tacitus, who detested their creed but pitied their fate, wrote that “an immense multitude” was convicted not of arson but of “hatred of the human race.” They were covered in animal skins and torn to pieces by dogs, crucified along the roads, or set alight at night to illuminate the imperial gardens while Nero drove his chariot among them.

Among those caught in this first wave were the apostles Peter and Paul, according to early tradition, and unnamed women whom the first letter of Clement remembers as “the Danaids and Dircae”; figures bound to bulls and dragged to their deaths in the arena. Their suffering was meant to entertain and to warn, a public ritual of humiliation designed to erase both their faith and their humanity. The charge against them was not any act of violence or sedition but simply that they existed, that they confessed another king whose kingdom was not of this world.

Domitian, who ruled from 81 to 96 CE, carried on the pattern of persecution though in a more calculated and ideological form. The empire he inherited from his father, Vespasian, and his brother Titus was stable, prosperous; and centered on himself. Ancient writers such as Suetonius and Dio Cassius record that Domitian preferred to be addressed as Dominus et Deus noster, “our Lord and God.” He had these titles inscribed in official documents and spoken in his presence; courtiers who failed to do so were seen as disloyal. To the Roman mind, worship of the ruler was not blasphemy but patriotism, an act that kept the gods (demons) of the state favorable.

For the Christians, that claim cut to the heart of their faith. They confessed one Lord and one God, and He was not the emperor seated on the Palatine. Domitian’s insistence on divine honors transformed political loyalty into idolatry. Refusal to perform the rituals; burning incense before the emperor’s image, swearing by his genius; was read as rebellion against Rome itself.

His own family did not escape suspicion. The historian Suetonius notes that he executed his cousin, the consul Flavius Clemens, on charges of “atheism” and “Jewish manners”; phrases that almost certainly referred to sympathy with the monotheistic sect that denied the demonic gods of the empire. Clemens’s wife, Domitilla, was exiled to the island of Pandateria. Later Christian tradition held that the apostle John suffered banishment to Patmos in the same wave of repression.

Compared with Nero’s carnival of cruelty, Domitian’s campaign was quieter and more bureaucratic, but its logic was the same: the emperor could tolerate any worship but that of a God greater than himself. The blood shed in his reign flowed from envy as much as fear; envy of a deity who demanded no temples, no statues, and no sacrifices, yet commanded a loyalty the soulless Caesars could never truly possess.

Under the emperors Trajan and Hadrian, who ruled between 98 and 138 CE, persecution took on a new and chilling orderliness. It was no longer the whim of a single deranged ruler, as under Nero, nor the jealous self-deification of Domitian; it was now written quietly into the procedures of Roman law. The empire had learned to suppress faith not through mob fury but through official process.

One of the clearest windows into this period comes from the correspondence between the governor Pliny the Younger and Emperor Trajan around the year 112. Pliny, governing the distant province of Bithynia-Pontus on the Black Sea, found his courts crowded with citizens accused of being Christiani. Unsure how to handle them, he wrote to Rome for guidance. His letter survives, and it reads like a bureaucratic manual for persecution. He explains that he questioned the accused repeatedly, threatening them with execution unless they renounced Christ and offered wine and incense before the image of the emperor. Those who persisted, he executed “for the stubbornness and inflexible obstinacy of their faith.” Others, who denied the charge and proved their loyalty by sacrificing to the gods, he released.

Trajan’s reply set the precedent that would endure for more than a century. Christians were not to be sought out actively; There was to be no empire-wide inquisition; such machinery of terror would come centuries later under the popes; but if they were accused and refused to recant, they were to be punished by death. It was a policy that appeared moderate to Roman eyes: no witch-hunts, but no tolerance either. The faith of Christ was treated as a crime of conscience, a refusal to obey the civic cult that held the empire together. With that exchange, the persecution of believers was institutionalized. The machinery of the state, from the provincial governor to the local magistrate, now had a legal script for extinguishing the church.

Within these walls Rome proved its power—dragging the faithful before beasts for refusing to call a mortal “lord.” Their blood turned the empire’s glory into its shame.

Among the victims of this system was Ignatius of Antioch, a bishop arrested in Syria and sent under guard to Rome to face the beasts in the arena. His journey became a moving record of early Christian courage. From one stop to another he wrote letters to the churches, urging unity and faith. In one he described his approaching death with a mixture of dread and exaltation: he longed, he said, “to be ground by the teeth of wild beasts, that I may be found pure bread for God.” To the Romans, he was a criminal obstinately defying the emperor’s will; to the faithful, he became a symbol of the soul that could not be conquered by law or sword.

Marcus Aurelius, who reigned from 161 to 180 CE, has come down to later centuries as the philosopher-emperor, author of the Meditations and exemplar of Stoic virtue. Yet behind the calm language of his philosophy, the empire he ruled was convulsed by plague, invasion, and economic strain. To the anxious population these disasters demanded a cause, and in the Roman mind the failure of the old gods was always someone’s fault; never, of course, the possibility that they were no gods at all. The Christians, who rejected sacrifice and avoided the festivals of the cities, were accused of angering the divine powers that guarded the state.

Although no edict of extermination survives from Marcus himself, he allowed provincial governors to act on popular hysteria. In Gaul, particularly in the twin cities of Lyon and Vienne, that tolerance of violence turned into massacre. The letter preserved by the church of Lyons describes citizens seized by mobs, interrogated, and tortured with iron hooks and red-hot chairs. When the games opened in 177, the condemned were paraded through the amphitheatre. Among them was Blandina, a young slave girl who, according to the eyewitness account, “was hung on a stake and exposed to the beasts, but none touched her.” After scourging, burning, and repeated assaults, she was finally wrapped in a net and thrown before a bull. The crowd that had come to be entertained saw in her endurance a defiance stronger than any army.

In the East, the same year witnessed another martyrdom that became legendary. Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna and disciple of the apostle John, was an old man when soldiers came for him. The proconsul urged him to save himself: “Swear by the fortune of Caesar; say, ‘Away with the atheists.’” Polycarp looked at the jeering crowd and answered, “Eighty and six years have I served Him, and He has done me no wrong. How then can I blaspheme my King who saved me?” Condemned to the flames, he was bound to the stake, but the account says the fire curved away from his body until a soldier ended his life with a sword.

Under Marcus Aurelius the persecutions were not imperial policy so much as imperial permission. By allowing fear and rumor to rule, the philosopher-emperor revealed how fragile Roman reason became when faced with a faith it could not comprehend. The Stoic ideal of virtue proved powerless before the hysteria of the crowd and the quiet resolve of those who died rather than call a mortal or Nephilim, “lord.”

“And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” — John 1:5, KJV

By 193 CE the emperor Septimius Severus sought to weld a vast and divided empire into unity through devotion to the traditional gods and to the imperial cult. He forbade conversion either to Christianity or to Judaism, regarding both as stubbornly subversive faiths that refused to honor Rome’s demonic, divine hierarchy. The decree was enforced unevenly, but in North Africa it fell with particular weight. In Carthage a small group of new believers were arrested for preparing to be baptized. Among them were Perpetua, a young noblewoman nursing an infant, and Felicity, her household servant.

From the prison where they awaited death Perpetua kept a diary; a document unique in antiquity, the voice of a condemned woman speaking for herself. She described the darkness of the cell, the pleading of her father to recant, and the serenity that descended on her before the games. When the day came, she and her companions were led into the amphitheatre before a shouting crowd. Felicity, having given birth only days earlier, walked beside her. They were scourged, gored by a wild cow, and finally executed by the sword. Their courage, calmly recorded in Perpetua’s own words, would echo through centuries of Christian memory as the image of steadfast faith confronting imperial terror.

The middle of the third century brought a new and even broader storm. The emperor Decius, ruling from 249 to 251, issued an edict that required every inhabitant of the empire to perform sacrifice to the Roman gods (Titans/self deified mortals) and to obtain a certificate of compliance, the libellus. It was the first persecution not born of local panic but of imperial policy: religion turned into a loyalty test. Those who refused were imprisoned, tortured, or killed; those who yielded under pressure were marked as apostates. The crisis shook the church itself, forcing believers to ask whether the mercy of Christ could restore those who had denied Him under duress.

Decius fell in battle, but his successor Valerian revived and refined the policy. He targeted the church’s structure directly; its bishops, priests, and deacons. The aim was not only to punish belief but to dismantle its leadership and seize its wealth. Cyprian of Carthage, bishop and writer, was beheaded for refusing to sacrifice. In Rome, Sixtus II and his deacons were executed during the Eucharist itself. One of them, Lawrence, according to tradition, was ordered to hand over the church’s treasures. He presented the city’s poor and sick, declaring, “These are the treasures of the Church.” For his defiance he was bound to an iron grid and slowly roasted alive, a death so horrific that later legend could only soften it with his gallows humor: “Turn me over; I am done on this side.”

By the middle of the century the empire had turned its administrative genius toward the destruction of a faith that no longer met in catacombs alone but in every city and village. The persecutions of Severus, Decius, and Valerian revealed an empire fighting not an enemy army but an idea—a loyalty higher than Rome, a kingdom without walls, whose citizens would rather die than burn a pinch of incense before a man who called himself divine.

After brief respite, Diocletian began the Great Persecution in 303. Churches were razed, Scriptures burned, and every Christian commanded to renounce the faith. Thousands died by sword, fire, and starvation; some were mutilated or sent to the mines. Among the names remembered are Agnes, a young girl stripped and executed, and soldiers such as Sebastian and George who refused to sacrifice. Galerius, once an enforcer of the policy, finally issued the Edict of Toleration in 311 admitting failure and ending three centuries of repression.

Two years later, in 313 CE, the Edict of Milan issued jointly by Constantine and Licinius proclaimed full freedom of worship throughout the empire. The empire that had once hunted the followers of Jesus now extended to them the hand of patronage. Constantine raised basilicas where temples had stood, restored confiscated property, and draped the cross over the standards of his legions. What had been a proscribed sect became the favored religion of the state, and the Church moved from the catacombs to the palace.

Yet this triumph carried an irony deeper than any defeat. The empire did not so much convert as absorb the faith it could not destroy. Rome baptized itself with Christianity, but the water ran thick with the residue of its old demonic gods. The ancient rites of empire; processions, titles, incense, and imperial pomp; survived beneath new names. The worship of the emperor as divine gave way to veneration of a ruler who now claimed to reign by divine right. The old pagan habit of uniting throne and altar endured, only the symbols changed.

In embracing the Church, Rome remade it in its own image. The same city that had drenched its arenas with the blood of martyrs learned to cloak its will to power in sacred robes. The instruments that once executed believers were sanctified as instruments of rule. From Constantine onward, religion and empire marched together: the cross carried beside the sword, faith enlisted to unify the realm, and false doctrine shaped to stabilize the throne. The persecution ended, but the habit of coercion; the belief that divine truth must be enforced by human power; remained. In time, the heirs of the Caesars would wield that habit again, not against pagan Rome but against those who questioned the authority of the new Catholic empire.

When imperial authority faded in the West, the bishops of Rome filled the vacuum. Over the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the false authority of the papal institution accumulated temporal wealth and political might. In the early medieval centuries violence and corruption infected the papal court; the period from about 904 to 964, called the “pornocracy,” saw popes dominated by Roman noble families, assassinations, and open scandal. Pope John XII, who reigned from 955 to 964, was accused of murder and sacrilege.

In the eleventh century Gregory VII sought to free the church from the overt control of kings and nobles, yet his reform did not end the marriage of power and sanctity; it simply shifted where that power was held. Claiming to act as the guardian of apostolic purity, he wielded excommunication as a political weapon against emperors and princes, drawing Europe into the civil wars of the Investiture Controversy. The rhetoric was spiritual; the reality was territorial. The papal office, claimed to represent apostolic succession, had become the highest prize in a world of Italian city-states and noble houses competing for wealth and dominance. Control of the papacy meant control of lands, taxes, and armies. Behind the language of reform, the chair of Peter (a succession Peter never asserted and early history never records) was often filled or emptied according to the fortunes of powerful Roman families; the Tusculani, the Crescentii, later the Orsini and Colonna; whose sons and nephews alternated between mitres and swords. Apostolic succession became, in practice, succession by dynasty.

A generation after Gregory’s reforms, Urban II proclaimed the First Crusade in 1095, casting it as holy war and promising eternal reward to those who fought. The expedition culminated in the capture of Jerusalem and the slaughter of its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. Under Innocent III, papal authority reached its zenith: he directed kings as vassals and turned the Fourth Crusade not against Islam but against fellow Christians in Constantinople in 1204. The same pope sanctioned the Albigensian Crusade of 1209–1229, in which entire towns of southern France were destroyed to eradicate the Cathar heresy. When asked how to distinguish heretics from the faithful, his legate Arnaud Amalric replied, “Kill them all; God will know His own.”

The consolidation of papal monarchy continued under Gregory IX, who in 1231 established the papal Inquisition; an administrative system of courts run by mendicant friars empowered to search out and punish deviation. Over the next two centuries these tribunals used imprisonment, torture, and execution to enforce proto-orthodoxy. Sixtus IV extended their model to Spain in 1478, granting Ferdinand and Isabella authority over the notorious Spanish Inquisition. Papal bulls such as Cum nimis absurdum of Paul IV in 1555 confined the Jews of Rome to a walled ghetto, the physical symbol of a church that now ruled by decree rather than by persuasion.

The Renaissance popes displayed more openly what earlier centuries had veiled: the papacy as a family inheritance and political instrument. Alexander VI, born Rodrigo Borgia, elevated his children to princely rank and filled the curia with his relatives, turning St. Peter’s throne into the seat of a clan. Julius II marched at the head of armies in armor, seeking to recover the papal States by force. Leo X, of the Medici dynasty, treated the papacy as a Florentine bank and patronage system; to fund his luxury and building projects he revived the sale of indulgences, a practice that provoked Martin Luther’s protest in 1517. The Counter-Reformation that followed enforced obedience through censorship and the stake: the philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned in 1600 for speculative cosmology, and Galileo Galilei was tried in 1633 under Urban VIII for teaching the motion of the earth.

By the seventeenth century the papacy had become a monarchy in all but name; its legitimacy traced not through humble fishermen but through generations of bankers, nobles, and warlords who had learned to dress imperial ambition in sacred vestments. What began as a claim of apostolic succession had evolved into the continuation of Rome’s old instinct to rule, now baptized and enthroned.

Even outside Europe papal authority shaped conquest. Bulls such as Dum Diversas (1452) and Romanus Pontifex (1455) granted Portugal and Spain permission to enslave non-Christians and divide the new lands between them. In the nineteenth century Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors condemned freedom of conscience and democracy, and in the twentieth century the Vatican signed concordats with Mussolini and Hitler; Pius XII’s silence during the Holocaust remains one of the most painful controversies of modern religious history.

Across this long history runs a tragic pattern: the instruments once used to kill the innocent were later wielded by those who claimed to guard their memory. The emperors of Rome sought to extinguish faith through spectacle and fear; the medieval curia used the same logic of compulsion in the name of faith. The early martyrs; men and women like the Danaids, Dircae, Blandina, Perpetua, and Felicity; stood against an empire. Their descendants in later centuries sometimes became what their ancestors had endured.

From Nero’s torches to Diocletian’s edicts, from the crusading banners to inquisitorial dungeons, blood was shed under pretexts of piety and order. The emperors demanded sacrifice to a mortal “lord”; believers refused and died. Later, rulers in sacred robes learned the same lesson of leverage: when power drapes itself in holiness, it will always find a reason to spill blood. But Christ gave no such license. He rebuked the sword in Gethsemane; “Put up again thy sword… for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword” (Matt. 26:52); and commanded love of enemies, not their destruction (Matt. 5:44). Every pyre, every rack, every forced oath stands under the judgment of those words.

Nero, who burned the innocent as lamps. Domitian, who demanded to be hailed “Lord and God.” Decius and Valerian, who turned worship into paperwork and made death the penalty for conscience. Diocletian, who tried to erase a people by burning their Scriptures and destroying their assemblies. Then the age of patronage: armies marched under the cross into Jerusalem and made streets run red; the Fourth Crusade fell on Constantinople, a Christian city, while the Albigensian campaign leveled whole towns. Tribunals were built to sanctify cruelty; confessions were wrenched out with iron; fires were lit and called holy. Ghettos were decreed; books were banned; philosophers and scientists were silenced or burned. Concordats were signed with tyrants; fugitives were sheltered for reasons of state while victims were left to the silence that power loves.

Call the thing by its name: murder in the name of Christ is treason against Christ. Scripture leaves no refuge for it. “He that hateth his brother is a murderer” (1 John 3:15). “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord” (Rom. 12:19). “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). No decree, no throne, no council can convert bloodshed into obedience.

The pattern is older than any one office: men seeking worship instead of offering it, grasping at divinity while trampling those made in the image of God. They demanded incense before idols of marble, then demanded it before idols of office. They called their violence order, their fear orthodoxy, their ambition holiness. But the gospel they betrayed is not ambiguous. It asks for truth, mercy, and witness; even unto death; but never for the death of another to preserve its prestige.

So let the record stand, and let the reader judge. The light still shines in darkness, and the darkness still cannot master it (John 1:5). Every martyr torn by beasts, every dissenter broken by courts, every soul fenced in by walls or silenced by decrees, bears witness against the lie that God needs an executioner. If Christ is Lord, then murder in His name is blasphemy, and those who claimed to protect the faith by killing have proved only this: they worshipped power and wealth, not Christ or His Father, the only Holy Father.

“For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities… Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her.”

— Revelation 18:5, 8