Galerius
c. 258 CE–c. 311 CE · Sofia
Galerius was the eastern Augustus of the Tetrarchy and is identified in the contemporary Christian sources (notably Lactantius) as the principal instigator of the Diocletianic ("Great") Persecution of Christians, which Diocletian launched, reportedly at Galerius's urging, beginning in 303. Gravely ill near the end of his life, in April 311 he issued the Edict of Serdica (Edict of Toleration), which formally ended the persecution and granted Christians legal recognition (religio licita) to practice their religion. He died days later, in early May 311 (traditionally 5 May), shortly after the edict was promulgated.
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SofiaBulgaria
We know they were here, but the specifics of what they did at this stop aren’t recorded yet in our corpus.
About Sofia
Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, stands on the site of Roman Serdica. The edict of toleration issued there in 311 by the emperor Galerius was the first to legalise Christianity, and a church council met in the city in 343. After centuries of Ottoman rule, Sofia became the capital of the new Bulgarian state in 1879. Its mainly Sephardic Jewish community opened the Sofia Synagogue, one of the largest in Europe, in 1909. Modern figures linked to the city include the Russian émigré theologian Georges Florovsky, whose family settled there in 1920, and Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, who served as papal envoy to Bulgaria in the 1920s and 1930s.
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Galerius’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
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