Pope Saint Miltiades: The Thirty-Second Pope, the Emperor's Peace, and the Schism It Could Not Heal

The thirty-second in a series on the popes.

Every list of the popes has a hinge, and this is it. On one side lies the Church of the catacombs—hunted, illegal, burying its bishops in secret galleries under the Appian Way, three of Miltiades’ four immediate predecessors driven into exile or disgrace within a single decade. On the other side lies the Church of the basilicas—legal, propertied, endowed by the state, its bishop installed in a palace and asked by the emperor himself to sit in judgment on a schism. The reign of Miltiades is the seam where the one becomes the other. He was elected while the last edicts of persecution were still fresh, and he died in a Rome where the Christian emperor’s mother would soon be building churches. Almost nothing certain is known of the man. Everything is known about the moment, and he stood at the center of it.

This is the thirty-second entry in my series on the popes, and it follows immediately upon Eusebius, whose brief and troubled pontificate ended in exile on Sicily. The three reigns before Miltiades were short and battered—one bishop of Rome disgraced in the Great Persecution, two more banished by the emperor Maxentius over the bitter Roman quarrel about how to receive back the Christians who had lapsed under torture. Miltiades inherited that wounded Church. What he could not have foreseen is that within eighteen months of his election the persecuting empire would become a patron, and that the first use the new order would make of him was to hand him a schism no one could heal.

A Pope Elected in the Wreckage

To understand Miltiades one has to begin with the ruin he was elected to govern. The persecution launched by Diocletian in 303—the “Great Persecution,” the last and worst the Church would endure—had torn the Roman community for the better part of a decade. Churches were demolished, Scriptures burned, clergy imprisoned and made to sacrifice. When it eased, it left behind the same poison that would define Miltiades’ reign from a distance: the problem of the lapsi, the fallen, and of what to do with the clergy who had handed over the sacred books to be burned. Rome tore itself apart over the question. His predecessor Marcellus was banished by Maxentius amid the resulting street violence; Eusebius, who followed, was banished likewise, dying in exile on Sicily. The see stood empty in the interval, the Roman clergy leaderless.⁠¹

Then the persecution simply stopped. In April 311, dying of a horrible disease, the emperor Galerius—its chief architect—issued from Serdica an edict of toleration, conceding that the effort to force Christians back to the old gods had failed and grudgingly permitting them “again to be Christians, and to establish the places of their religious assemblies.”⁠² Within weeks the Roman church could elect a bishop in the open. On 2 July 311 it chose Miltiades—an African by birth, the Liber Pontificalis says, though nothing else of his origins survives.⁠³

The Rome he entered was ruled not by Constantine but by Maxentius, who held Italy and Africa and who, whatever his other faults, did not persecute. He now allowed the pope to recover the community’s confiscated buildings and property. The old Catholic Encyclopedia summarizes the sequence from the sources: the emperor “gave Pope Miltiades in Rome the right to receive back, through the prefect of the city, all ecclesiastical buildings and possessions which had been confiscated during the persecutions,” a restitution carried out by two Roman deacons, Strato and Cassianus.⁠⁴ One of Miltiades’ first recorded acts was an act of piety toward the office itself: he is said to have had the body of his exiled predecessor Eusebius brought back from Sicily and laid in a crypt in the Catacomb of Callixtus, gathering a banished bishop home to rest among the popes.⁠⁵ It is a small gesture, and revealing. The Church Miltiades inherited was still counting its dead and its lapsed. It had no idea what was about to happen to it.

The Sign at the Bridge

What happened to it happened nine miles up the Tiber, and Miltiades had no part in it. On 28 October 312 the armies of Constantine and Maxentius met at the Milvian Bridge on the northern approach to Rome. Constantine won; Maxentius drowned in the river as his troops broke; and the victor entered Rome the next day as master of the West.⁠⁶ The two ancient accounts of the battle both give it a supernatural cause, and they do not quite agree. Lactantius, writing within a few years, reports a dream on the eve of battle: Constantine “was directed in a dream to cause the heavenly sign to be delineated on the shields of his soldiers, and so to proceed to battle,” and marked on them “the letter X, with a perpendicular line drawn through it and turned round thus at the top, being the cipher of Christ.”⁠⁷ Eusebius, writing later and claiming Constantine’s own sworn testimony, adds a waking vision before the dream—“a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing the inscription, Conquer by this”—and the military standard, the labarum, made afterward to carry the monogram of Christ.⁠⁸

Whatever happened in the sky, the pope is absent from the accounts of it. No early source records a meeting between Miltiades and Constantine, no ceremonial reception, no papal blessing of the victor. The Catholic Encyclopedia says only, and carefully, that “the pope witnessed the final triumph of the Cross, through the defeat of Maxentius, and the entry into Rome of the Emperor Constantine.”⁠⁹ That is the honest measure of it: Miltiades was the bishop of Rome at the moment the Roman Empire acquired a Christian master, and his connection to the event is that he was there to see it. The man is a bystander to the hinge of his own age. But the office he held was about to become the chief beneficiary of the turn, and that is a different thing from bystanding.

The Peace and the Palace

The following winter the change became policy. Meeting at Milan early in 313, Constantine and his eastern colleague Licinius agreed on a settlement for the Christians, promulgated a few months later as a letter to the provincial governors—the document conventionally, if inaccurately, called the “Edict of Milan.” It was not technically an edict, and it was not issued at Milan; but its substance was revolutionary.⁠¹⁰ Its first principle was religious liberty, and not for Christians only: the emperors resolved, as Eusebius preserves it, “to grant both to the Christians and to all men freedom to follow the religion which they choose, that whatever heavenly divinity exists may be propitious to us and to all that live under our government.”⁠¹¹

Its second principle mattered more for the papacy, because it converted toleration into property. Where Galerius had merely permitted Christians to exist, the Milan settlement ordered the restitution of everything the persecutions had seized—not only individual meeting-places but the corporate holdings of the churches—and it did so, in Constantine’s follow-up correspondence, in language that named the beneficiary with legal precision. Writing to Anulinus, the proconsul of Africa, the emperor commanded that “if any such things belonged to the Catholic Church of the Christians, in any city or other place, but are now held by citizens or by any others, you shall cause them to be restored immediately to the said churches.”⁠¹² A second letter granted the bishop Caecilian of Carthage three thousand folles from the imperial treasury for the “ministers of the legitimate and most holy catholic religion,” and a third exempted the catholic clergy from public burdens.⁠¹³ In the space of a year the Church had gone from an outlawed association whose buildings could be razed to a legally favored corporation with a claim on the state treasury—and the state itself had begun deciding which body was the “Catholic Church” entitled to the money.

Rome felt the change in the most tangible way possible. Under Miltiades the bishop of Rome acquired, for the first time, a palace. The property was the Lateran—once the estate of the Laterani family, come to Constantine through his wife Fausta, so that it was still sometimes called the Domus Faustae, the House of Fausta—and the emperor handed it to the Roman church as the bishop’s residence. It would remain the papal seat for a thousand years.⁠¹⁴ The great basilica beside it, the mother church of Rome, was a Constantinian foundation of these same years, though it was dedicated only under Miltiades’ successor. What is certain is the residence: within a year of the Milvian Bridge, the bishop of Rome had a public address in the heart of the city, an imperial gift, and it was there, in the House of Fausta, that the first business of the new age was laid before him.⁠¹⁵

The Letter from the Emperor

That business came from Africa, and it was a schism—the schism that would outlast Augustine himself. Its roots lay in the same Great Persecution Miltiades’ reign had escaped. When the persecution demanded that clergy surrender the Scriptures, some had complied; these were the traditores, the “handers-over,” and to a rigorist party in the African church their sin was unforgivable and their sacraments void. The quarrel came to a head over the see of Carthage. Around 311 Caecilian was consecrated its bishop, and one of his consecrators, Felix of Aptunga, was accused—falsely, as it turned out—of having been a traditor. The rigorists refused to recognize Caecilian, consecrated a rival named Majorinus in his place, and, when Majorinus soon died, replaced him with the man who gave the movement its name: Donatus.⁠¹⁶

Then the Donatists did something new in the history of the Church: they appealed to the emperor. In the spring of 313 they submitted a petition to Constantine, asking him to appoint judges—and asking, shrewdly, for judges from Gaul, a province spared the worst of the persecution and so untainted by the traditor question. “O Constantine, most excellent Emperor,” it ran, “since thou dost come of a just stock … and Gaul is free from this wickedness, we beseech thee that thy piety may command that we be granted judges from Gaul.”⁠¹⁷ They wanted Gallic bishops, not a Roman verdict; the last thing the rigorists wanted was a hearing at Rome, which was already in communion with Caecilian. But the emperor did not do what they asked.

Constantine referred the case to the bishop of Rome. His letter survives, copied into Eusebius’ history, and it is the first of its kind ever received by a pope—an emperor placing an internal dispute of the Church before the successor of Peter. “Constantine Augustus to Miltiades, bishop of Rome, and to Marcus,” it begins, and after describing the accusations against Caecilian it directs that he and his accusers “should sail to Rome, that there, in the presence of yourselves and of Retecius and Maternus and Marinus, your colleagues, whom I have commanded to hasten to Rome for this purpose, he may be heard, as you may understand to be in accordance with the most holy law.” The emperor closes with a striking profession: “I have such reverence for the legitimate Catholic Church that I do not wish you to leave schism or division in any place.”⁠¹⁸ The three colleagues named—Reticius of Autun, Maternus of Cologne, and Marinus of Arles—were the Gallic bishops the Donatists had asked for, folded now into a tribunal the emperor had chosen to seat at Rome under the Roman bishop.⁠¹⁹

There was a precedent for treating communion with Rome as the test of legitimacy, and it too came from a pagan emperor. Forty years earlier, when the deposed heretic Paul of Samosata refused to surrender the church of Antioch, the emperor Aurelian had ruled that the building should go to whoever was in communion “with the bishops of Italy and of the city of Rome”—an outsider’s rule of thumb that quietly made Roman communion the mark of the true Church. Constantine, needing a rule to settle a Christian quarrel, reached for the same one.⁠²⁰ What he had in mind was probably an informal arbitration under his own authority. What Miltiades made of it was something else.

The Synod in the House of Fausta

Miltiades did not convene an imperial commission of four. He convened a council. To the three Gallic bishops named by the emperor he added fifteen bishops of Italy, and the tribunal that assembled in the Lateran was a Roman synod meeting under the presidency of the Roman bishop. Optatus of Milevis, our fullest source, records the scene precisely: the bishops “met in the House of Fausta on the Lateran, on the second of October which was a Friday, in the year when Constantine for the fourth, and Licinius for the third time, were Consuls”—that is, in 313—and he lists them by name, Miltiades of Rome at their head.⁠²¹ “When these nineteen Bishops had taken their seats together,” Optatus writes—the pope, his three Gallic colleagues, and fifteen Italians—“the case of Donatus and that of Caecilian were brought forward.”⁠²² The emperor had asked for a hearing; Miltiades had turned it into the judgment of a Church court.

The verdict, delivered after three days, went against the Donatists on both the man and the principle. Donatus was condemned in his own person: the bishops found, Optatus reports, that “he acknowledged having both rebaptised, and laid his hand in Penance upon Bishops who had fallen away—a thing foreign to the Church.” Caecilian’s accusers, confronted, “admitted that they had nothing of which they could accuse Caecilian,” and he “was pronounced innocent.”⁠²³ The two charges against Donatus are worth pausing over, because they are the whole of Donatism in miniature: he had rebaptized—treating the sacraments of the “impure” catholic church as null—and he had reordained, laying hands anew on clergy who had lapsed. Both practices assumed that the validity of a sacrament depends on the holiness of its minister. That assumption is what the Church rejected, at the Lateran and ever after.

Miltiades’ own conduct as judge became, a lifetime later, a set piece in Augustine’s war against the Donatists, and it is from Augustine that we get the sharpest picture of the man. The Donatists complained that the bishop of Rome had usurped a jurisdiction that belonged to the African church. Augustine turns the charge around. “Perhaps you will say,” he writes, “that Melchiades, bishop of the Roman Church … had no right to usurp the place of judge in a matter which had been already settled by seventy African bishops… . But what will you say if he in fact did not usurp this place? For the Emperor, being appealed to, sent bishops to sit with him as judges.”⁠²⁴ Miltiades did not seize the case; the emperor handed it to him. And then, Augustine says, he judged it with a restraint that shames the rigorists. He refused to depose the clergy on the losing side against whom nothing had been proved, laid the blame on Donatus alone, and offered communion to everyone else—even to bishops ordained by the schismatic Majorinus—if they would take it. The tribute Augustine pays him for this is the one line about Miltiades everyone remembers: “O excellent man! O son of Christian peace, father of the Christian people!”⁠²⁵

It is tempting to read the whole episode as a clean assertion of papal supremacy, and later Catholic writers did. Optatus himself, writing a generation afterward, would make communion with the cathedra Petri, the chair of Peter, the decisive mark of the true Church.⁠²⁶ But the honest historian has to hold two things at once. It is genuinely remarkable, and a real datum for the standing of the Roman see, that an emperor’s instinct in 313 was to lay a Church dispute before the bishop of Rome, and that the bishop of Rome answered by convening a synod and pronouncing on communion. Yet the initiative was the emperor’s, not the pope’s; the parties had appealed to Caesar, not to Peter; Constantine set the terms of the hearing and named its members; and, as the sequel would show at once, the emperor did not regard the Roman verdict as final. The episode shows Rome’s prestige, and the pope’s capacity to act as a court of the Church. It does not yet show a developed juridical primacy of the kind later centuries would claim, and it would be an anachronism to pretend otherwise.⁠²⁷

The Schism That Would Not Close

The proof that the Roman verdict was not final came immediately. The Donatists refused to accept it, complaining that the bishops who condemned them had been “too hasty and precipitate,” and they appealed again—not from the emperor to the pope, but from the pope to the emperor. And Constantine, extraordinarily, agreed to hear it again. He summoned a far larger council to meet at Arles in southern Gaul, writing to the bishops to assemble there “before the kalends of August.”⁠²⁸ The Council of Arles opened on 1 August 314—and by then Miltiades was seven months dead. He did not preside at Arles; he had not lived to see the second act of the drama his synod had failed to end. His successor Sylvester did not attend either, sending only legates, while the council was chaired by Marinus of Arles, one of the very Gallic bishops who had sat with Miltiades at the Lateran.⁠²⁹

The precedent, not the verdict, is what endured. The pattern set in 313—a Church dispute referred to the emperor, adjudicated at his command, and reopened at his pleasure—would run straight through the century. When Arles failed to end the schism, Constantine judged the matter himself; and eleven years later, faced with a far greater controversy, the same emperor would summon the bishops of the whole world to Nicaea. The peace that Miltiades received was the peace that made all of this possible, and the entanglement was built into it from the start. The historian Angelo Di Berardino puts the irony sharply: dissatisfied that the Roman synod had not simply ended the schism, Constantine began to discover the limits of ecclesiastical authority to enforce its own judgments—and thereafter he no longer turned directly to the Apostolic See, but proceeded through advisers of his own, asking whether he had trusted too much in the prestige of the Roman Church.⁠³⁰ The same imperial favor that raised the Church up had reached into its inner life, and would not withdraw.

Beneath the politics lay a genuine theological question, and it is worth naming because Miltiades’ synod gave the first Roman answer to it and Augustine would give the definitive one. The Donatists were not wrong that the traditores had sinned; they were wrong about what sin does to a sacrament. If a baptism or an ordination is only as valid as the holiness of the minister who confers it, then no Christian can ever be sure of his own baptism, since he cannot see into the soul of the priest who baptized him. The Catholic answer, worked out over the following century, was that the sacraments belong to Christ and not to the minister—that they are valid ex opere operato, by the work worked, so that even an unworthy priest confers a real sacrament—and that the Church on earth is a corpus permixtum, a mixed body of saints and sinners together until the harvest, not a pure remnant that must expel the fallen. Miltiades’ synod ruled the case in 313, condemning Donatus for rebaptizing; Augustine answered the question a hundred years later. The two belong together, and the answer has held ever since.⁠³¹

What Miltiades Did, and What Was Done in His Name

Strip away the great events that happened around Miltiades and the man himself nearly vanishes. The Liber Pontificalis tries to fill the void the way it usually does, by crediting him with liturgical decrees, and the way it usually does, the decrees dissolve on inspection. It says he forbade the faithful to fast on Sunday or Thursday, “because the pagans celebrated those days as a sacred fast,” and that he ordered the fermentum—a particle of the bishop’s consecrated bread—sent to the churches of the city as a sign of eucharistic unity.⁠³² Both customs are real; neither can honestly be traced to Miltiades. The prohibition of Sunday fasting was ancient and universal long before him, and the fermentum is a Roman practice whose origin is simply unknown—first clearly described only a century later, by Pope Innocent I. The Liber Pontificalis has done what it so often does: retrojected the settled customs of a later Roman church onto an early name to give them the dignity of antiquity.⁠³³

More striking is what was forged in his name. In the ninth century the compilers of the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals—the great medieval workshop of canonical forgery—fathered three letters on Miltiades, and one of them conveniently has the third-century pope declaring that the gravest cases of bishops must be reserved to the Apostolic See.⁠³⁴ The forgery is a kind of confession. Later ages, certain that a pope who had judged the Donatist case must have claimed the authority to do so, manufactured the claim and put it in his mouth. The one solid thing Miltiades actually did—convene a synod at the emperor’s request—was real; the sweeping jurisdiction the Middle Ages needed him to have asserted was invented and back-dated. His obscurity made him, like several of his early predecessors, a convenient blank on which later centuries wrote what they required.

Even his sanctity took the shape of a mistake. Miltiades died on 10 or 11 January 314, in a Church at peace, and was buried in the Catacomb of Callixtus on the Via Appia among the bishops of Rome. The oldest Roman calendar, the Depositio Episcoporum of the year 354, records the burial exactly—“the tenth of January, of Miltiades, in the cemetery of Callixtus”—and it records it in the list of bishops, not in the parallel list of martyrs.⁠³⁵ He was not a martyr; he could not have been, for he died in the first years of the peace, with no persecutor left in the West to kill him. Yet for a thousand years the Church kept him as “Saint Melchiades, Pope and Martyr,” on 10 December—a date and a title both born of error. The Liber Pontificalis itself misdated his burial to December, a copyist reading Ianuarias as December; and a ninth-century martyrology added, on no early authority whatever, that he had “suffered under Maximian.” The modern reform undid both mistakes at once: the current Roman Martyrology commemorates him on 10 January, his true burial day, and drops the martyr’s title, restoring the plain testimony of the men who buried him.⁠³⁶

The Hinge

Reduce Miltiades to what can be documented and the portrait is thin: an African elected bishop of Rome in the summer the persecutions ended; the pope who recovered the community’s confiscated property, brought his exiled predecessor’s body home, and lived to see a Christian emperor enter Rome; the bishop to whom that emperor first entrusted a Church dispute, and who turned an imperial commission into a Roman synod that condemned Donatus and cleared Caecilian; dead in the peace, in January 314, and buried among the popes in the Catacomb of Callixtus. That is the whole of it, and every clause can be shown.

But the thinness is the point. Miltiades is not important for anything he was; he is important for where he stood. He is the last pope of the age of the martyrs and the first of the age of the emperors—the man who received a peace he did not make and presided over a schism he could not heal, and whose reign contains, in embryo, both halves of everything the papacy would become. The gift of the Lateran and the imperial treasury made the Church rich and public and safe; the letter from Constantine and the synod in the House of Fausta bound it, from that moment, to the power of the state, on terms the state would set. Both began under Miltiades. He was a small man at the seam of history, and the seam is where the whole garment turns. The Church that went into his reign buried its bishops in secret; the Church that came out of it would crown emperors. He did not do it. He was simply, and consequentially, there.

Next in the series: Pope Saint Sylvester I (coming soon).

Further Reading

The standard modern reference on the early popes is J. N. D. Kelly and Michael J. Walsh, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2010), sober and brief on Miltiades and the limits of what can be claimed for him. The most readable narrative of the Constantinian turn is Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes, 4th ed. (Yale University Press, 2014), whose chapter on the emergence of the Church from the catacombs sets Miltiades in his moment. The richest scholarly entry is Angelo Di Berardino, “Milziade, santo,” in the Enciclopedia dei Papi (Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2000), densely footnoted to the primary sources.

The primary sources are few and public. For the Constantinian documents and the letter to Miltiades, Eusebius, The Church History, Book X, in the translation of Arthur Cushman McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 1 (1890); for the vision at the Bridge, Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors, and Eusebius, Life of Constantine, Book I. The indispensable source for the Lateran synod is Optatus of Milevis, Against the Donatists, Book I, best read now in Mark Edwards’s translation, Optatus: Against the Donatists (Liverpool University Press, 1997), with the public-domain version of O. R. Vassall-Phillips (1917) freely available. On the schism itself, the classic study is W. H. C. Frend, The Donatist Church (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952)—now heavily qualified, and best paired with Brent D. Shaw, Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Augustine’s own verdict on Miltiades is in his Letter 43, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st series, vol. 1.

This post is part of an ongoing series on the popes. You can read about Saint Peter, the first pope, Saint Linus, the second pope, Saint Anacletus, the third pope, Saint Clement, the fourth pope, Saint Evaristus, the fifth pope, Saint Alexander I, the sixth pope, Saint Sixtus I, the seventh pope, Saint Telesphorus, the eighth pope, Saint Hyginus, the ninth pope, Saint Pius I, the tenth pope, Saint Anicetus, the eleventh pope, Saint Soter, the twelfth pope, Saint Eleutherius, the thirteenth pope, Saint Victor I, the fourteenth pope, Saint Zephyrinus, the fifteenth pope, Saint Callixtus I, the sixteenth pope, Saint Urban I, the seventeenth pope, Saint Pontian, the eighteenth pope, Saint Anterus, the nineteenth pope, Saint Fabian, the twentieth pope, Saint Cornelius, the twenty-first pope, Saint Lucius I, the twenty-second pope, Saint Stephen I, the twenty-third pope, Saint Sixtus II, the twenty-fourth pope, Saint Dionysius, the twenty-fifth pope, Saint Felix I, the twenty-sixth pope, Saint Eutychian, the twenty-seventh pope, Saint Caius, the twenty-eighth pope, Saint Marcellinus, the twenty-ninth pope, Saint Marcellus I, the thirtieth pope, and Saint Eusebius, the thirty-first pope.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Pope Saint Miltiades?

Miltiades (also spelled Melchiades) was the thirty-second Bishop of Rome, counting Peter as first, reigning from 2 July 311 to his death on 10 January 314. An African by birth according to the Liber Pontificalis, he was elected just as the Great Persecution ended, and his reign coincided with the decisive turn of late antiquity: Constantine’s victory at the Milvian Bridge (312), the toleration agreed at Milan (313), and the imperial gift of the Lateran palace to the bishop of Rome. In 313 the emperor referred the Donatist schism to him, and Miltiades convened a Roman synod that condemned Donatus and acquitted Caecilian of Carthage.

Was Pope Miltiades a martyr?

No. He was venerated for centuries as “Saint Melchiades, Pope and Martyr,” but he died in peace in January 314, after the persecutions had ended, with no persecutor left in the West. The oldest Roman calendar, the Depositio Episcoporum of 354, lists him among the buried bishops, not among the martyrs. The martyr’s title arose from later confusion—a ninth-century martyrology added, without early support, that he had “suffered under Maximian”—and the modern Roman Martyrology has dropped the title, commemorating him simply as a pope on his true burial day, 10 January.

What did Miltiades have to do with the Edict of Milan?

The so-called Edict of Milan, the agreement of 313 by which Constantine and Licinius granted religious liberty and ordered the restitution of confiscated Christian property, was an act of the emperors, not of the pope, and Miltiades was not a party to it. But he was the reigning bishop of Rome throughout, and its consequences transformed his office: the Roman church recovered its confiscated buildings, the imperial correspondence identified the beneficiary as “the Catholic Church,” and Constantine gave the bishop of Rome the Lateran palace as his residence. Miltiades is the first pope whose Church was legally favored and materially endowed by the Roman state.

What was the Lateran synod of 313?

It was the first Church council convened at an emperor’s request and placed before the bishop of Rome. When the Donatists appealed to Constantine over the disputed see of Carthage, the emperor referred the case to Miltiades and three Gallic bishops. Miltiades enlarged the commission into a synod of nineteen bishops that met in the Lateran palace (the Domus Faustae) in October 313. It condemned Donatus—for rebaptizing and for reordaining lapsed clergy, practices it called “foreign to the Church”—and pronounced Caecilian of Carthage innocent. The Donatists rejected the verdict and appealed again to the emperor, who convened the larger Council of Arles in 314.

Does the Lateran synod prove the pope’s authority over the whole Church?

It is evidence of Rome’s high prestige, but it should not be over-read. It is genuinely significant that Constantine’s instinct in 313 was to lay a Church dispute before the bishop of Rome, and that Miltiades responded by convening a synod and pronouncing on communion—Augustine later defended him precisely on the ground that the pope “did not usurp” the role but received it. Yet the initiative was the emperor’s; the parties had appealed to Caesar, not to Peter; Constantine set the terms of the hearing; and when the Donatists were dissatisfied, the emperor simply reopened the case at Arles. The episode shows the Roman see functioning as a center of appeal within the Church, but not the developed juridical primacy that later centuries would claim.

When is the feast of Pope Saint Miltiades?

His commemoration in the current Roman Martyrology is on 10 January, the day of his burial recorded in the fourth-century Depositio Episcoporum. For most of the Church’s history his feast was kept on 10 December under the title of martyr, but both the date and the title were errors—the December date arose from a copyist’s misreading of his January burial notice, and the martyr’s title from later legend. The post–Vatican II reform corrected the commemoration back to 10 January and removed the erroneous title.

Footnotes

1. 1. On the Great Persecution and its aftermath at Rome, see Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VIII, trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 1 (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1890). On the Roman quarrel over the lapsi that led to the banishment of Marcellus and Eusebius, and the vacancy before Miltiades, see J. P. Kirsch, "Pope St. Miltiades," in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 10 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911), available at NewAdvent.org: the see "was vacant for some time, probably because of the complications . . . on account of the apostates (lapsi)."

2. 2. Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 34, trans. William Fletcher, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7: Galerius conceded "to permit them again to be Christians, and to establish the places of their religious assemblies; yet so as that they offend not against good order." The edict was issued at Serdica on 30 April 311; it is also preserved in Eusebius, HE VIII.17. Galerius restored the right to assemble but not the confiscated property—the advance the Milan settlement of 313 would make.

3. 3. Liber Pontificalis, "Miltiades" (§XXXIII): "Miltiades, natione Afer." The regnal dates follow the fourth-century Liberian Catalogue, which gives the consecration as 2 July 311 (VI non. Iul.); the Liber Pontificalis itself reads "7 July" (non. Iul.), one of its many small chronological divergences. See Louise Ropes Loomis, The Book of the Popes (Liber Pontificalis) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1916), 40–41, and the critical edition of Louis Duchesne, Le Liber Pontificalis (Paris: Thorin, 1886–1892), vol. 1, 168. J. N. D. Kelly and Michael J. Walsh, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), s.v. "Miltiades," treat him as an obscure figure whose life before his election is essentially unknown.

4. 4. Kirsch, "Pope St. Miltiades," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 10 (1911): the emperor "gave Pope Miltiades in Rome the right to receive back, through the prefect of the city, all ecclesiastical buildings and possessions which had been confiscated during the persecutions," the restitution being carried out by the deacons Strato and Cassianus. The emperor in question is Maxentius, who controlled Rome until October 312 and who did not persecute; cf. Augustine, Breviculus collationis cum Donatistis III.18.34.

5. 5. Kirsch, "Pope St. Miltiades," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 10 (1911): "Miltiades caused the remains of his predecessor, Eusebius, to be brought back from Sicily to Rome, and had them interred in a crypt in the Catacombs of St. Callistus." No contemporary source expressly attributes the translation to Miltiades; the ascription follows the tradition reported by the Catholic Encyclopedia.

6. 6. The Battle of the Milvian Bridge was fought on 28 October 312; Maxentius drowned in the Tiber as his army broke, and Constantine entered Rome the following day. (The 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia's "27 October" is an error; the standard date is 28 October.)

7. 7. Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 44, trans. William Fletcher, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7: Constantine "was directed in a dream to cause the heavenly sign to be delineated on the shields of his soldiers, and so to proceed to battle. He did as he had been commanded, and he marked on their shields the letter X, with a perpendicular line drawn through it and turned round thus at the top, being the cipher of Christ." Lactantius reports a dream only, and does not use the word labarum.

8. 8. Eusebius, Vita Constantini I.28–31, trans. Ernest Cushing Richardson, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 1: "he saw with his own eyes the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing the inscription, Conquer by this" (I.28); the standard afterward made "the symbol of the Saviour's name, two letters indicating the name of Christ . . . the letter P being intersected by X in its centre" (I.31). Eusebius, writing decades after the event and claiming Constantine's own oath as his authority, gives both a waking vision and a night dream; Lactantius has only the dream. The two accounts are not easily harmonized.

9. 9. Kirsch, "Pope St. Miltiades," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 10 (1911). No early source—not Eusebius, not Optatus, not the Liber Pontificalis—records a personal meeting or ceremonial encounter between Miltiades and Constantine at the emperor's entry into Rome in 312. The documented links between the two men are the gift of the Lateran and the referral of the Donatist case in 313.

10. 10. The "Edict of Milan" is the name conventionally given to the religious settlement agreed between Constantine and Licinius at Milan early in 313. The surviving text is not a formal edict and was not published at Milan: it is a letter posted by Licinius to provincial governors, of which Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 48, and Eusebius, HE X.5.2–14, preserve versions. Its novelty over Galerius' toleration of 311 lay chiefly in the restitution of confiscated property.

11. 11. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica X.5.4, trans. McGiffert, NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 1. The parallel text in Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 48, trans. Fletcher, ANF vol. 7, grants "that the Christians and all others should have liberty to follow that mode of religion which to each of them appeared best."

12. 12. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica X.5.15–17, trans. McGiffert, NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 1, Constantine's letter to Anulinus, proconsul of Africa; Eusebius introduces it by noting that "the grant was made to the Catholic Church alone." The letter distinguishes property held by individuals from the corporate holdings of "their society and congregation" (X.5.11), ordering all of it restored without compensation.

13. 13. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica X.6.1, trans. McGiffert, NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 1: "Constantine Augustus to Cæcilianus, bishop of Carthage. Since it is our pleasure that something should be granted in all the provinces of Africa and Numidia and Mauritania to certain ministers of the legitimate and most holy catholic religion . . . I have . . . directed him to make provision to pay to your firmness three thousand folles." The exemption of the catholic clergy from public duties follows at X.7. Both privileges are pointedly reserved to the catholic body under Caecilian, against the rival African party.

14. 14. A. Barnes, "Saint John Lateran," in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910): "The palace came eventually into the hands of Constantine . . . through his wife Fausta, and it is from her that it derived the name by which it was then sometimes called, 'Domus Faustæ'. Constantine must have given it to the Church in the time of Miltiades . . . for we find a council against the Donatists meeting within its walls as early as 313." The Encyclopedia's suggested date "not later than about 311" cannot be right, since Constantine did not control Rome until after the Milvian Bridge (October 312); the secure fact is that the residence was in the Roman church's hands by October 313.

15. 15. The Lateran basilica (the Basilica of the Saviour, later St. John Lateran) was a Constantinian foundation of these years but was dedicated only under Miltiades' successor, Sylvester I; it should be distinguished from the residence (the Domus Faustae), which was already the papal seat in 313 when the Donatist synod met there. See Barnes, "Saint John Lateran," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910), and Optatus, Against the Donatists I.23 (n. 21 below) for the synod's location.

16. 16. On the origins of the schism see Optatus of Milevis, Against the Donatists, Book I, trans. O. R. Vassall-Phillips (London: Longmans, 1917), available at Tertullian.org, and Augustine, Epistula 43. Caecilian was consecrated bishop of Carthage c. 311; the charge that his consecrator Felix of Aptunga (Augustine's Felix Aptungitanus) had been a traditor proved false. The rigorists consecrated Majorinus against him, and on Majorinus's death replaced him with Donatus. Whether the Donatus condemned at the Lateran was Donatus "the Great," Majorinus's successor at Carthage, or the separate Donatus of Casae Nigrae, was already uncertain in antiquity; Vassall-Phillips (note to I.24) judges the question impossible to settle with certainty.

17. 17. Optatus, Against the Donatists I.22, trans. Vassall-Phillips (1917): "O Constantine, most excellent Emperor, since thou dost come of a just stock, and thy father (unlike other Emperors) did not persecute Christians, and Gaul is free from this wickedness, we beseech thee that thy piety may command that we be granted judges from Gaul." The petition was submitted by "Lucianus, Dignus, Nasutius, Capito, Fidentius and the rest of the Bishops who adhere to Donatus." Optatus records Constantine's irritation at being asked to judge (I.23): "You ask a judgement from me in this world, although I myself am waiting for the Judgement of Christ."

18. 18. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica X.5.18–20, trans. McGiffert, NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 1, under the heading "Copy of an epistle in which the Emperor commands that a synod of bishops be held at Rome." The Loeb translation of Kirsopp Lake and J. E. L. Oulton renders the address "to Miltiades bishop of the Romans and to Mark."

19. 19. Eusebius, HE X.5.19, names the three colleagues as "Retecius and Maternus and Marinus"; their sees are supplied by Optatus, Against the Donatists I.23 (Vassall-Phillips): "Maternus from the city of Cologne, Reticius from the city of Autun, Marinus of Arles." These are the Gallic judges the Donatists had requested. Constantine appointed three Gallic bishops, not four; sources that give "four" are in error.

20. 20. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VII.30.19, trans. McGiffert, NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 1: Aurelian ordered the church of Antioch given "to those to whom the bishops of Italy and of the city of Rome should adjudge it." On this precedent and its relevance to Constantine's choice of Rome, see the discussion in [my entry on Pope Saint Felix I](/saint-felix-i-twenty-sixth-pope/), the pope of the Paul of Samosata affair, and Angelo Di Berardino, "Milziade, santo," Enciclopedia dei Papi (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2000).

21. 21. Optatus, Against the Donatists I.23, trans. Vassall-Phillips (1917): "These three Bishops from Gaul and fifteen others, who were Italians, arrived in Rome. They met in the House of Fausta on the Lateran, on the second of October which was a Friday, in the year when Constantine for the fourth, and Licinius for the third time, were Consuls"—i.e., 313. The consular formula fixes the year; Augustine's divergent dating (Constantine III and Licinius II, = 312) is generally rejected in favor of Optatus. The verdict was reached after three days' inquiry (so the Catholic Encyclopedia and the Liber Pontificalis tradition), placing the close of the synod on or about 4 October 313.

22. 22. Optatus, Against the Donatists I.24, trans. Vassall-Phillips (1917): "When these nineteen Bishops had taken their seats together, the case of Donatus and that of Caecilian were brought forward." The number nineteen is Optatus's own, and it counts Miltiades together with the three Gallic and fifteen Italian bishops he lists by name in I.23. (The Catholic Encyclopedia's "eighteen" counts the bishops apart from the presiding pope; the "fifteen" sometimes cited is the Italian contingent alone. All three figures describe the same assembly.)

23. 23. Optatus, Against the Donatists I.24, trans. Vassall-Phillips (1917): the judgment against Donatus was "that he acknowledged having both rebaptised, and laid his hand in Penance upon Bishops who had fallen away—a thing foreign to the Church"; his witnesses "admitted that they had nothing of which they could accuse Caecilian," who "was pronounced innocent."

24. 24. Augustine, Epistula 43.14, trans. J. G. Cunningham, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st series, vol. 1. The Latin (ed. Nuova Biblioteca Agostiniana): "An forte non debuit Romanae Ecclesiae Melchiades episcopus cum collegis transmarinis episcopis illud sibi usurpare iudicium, quod ab Afris septuaginta . . . fuerat terminatum? Quid quod nec ipse usurpavit? Rogatus quippe imperatori iudices misit episcopos." Augustine consistently spells the pope's name "Melchiades."

25. 25. Augustine, Epistula 43.16, trans. Cunningham, NPNF 1st ser., vol. 1: "O excellent man! O son of Christian peace, father of the Christian people!" Latin: "O virum optimum! o filium christianae pacis, et patrem christianae plebis!" The praise is for Miltiades' restraint: he "did not presume to depose from his own rank those peers against whom nothing had been proved," blamed Donatus alone, "and was prepared to send letters of communion even to those who were known to have been ordained by Majorinus."

26. 26. Optatus, Against the Donatists II.2–3 (Vassall-Phillips), makes communion with the cathedra Petri, the chair of Peter, the decisive mark of the true Church, and goes first to Rome to prove the Donatists schismatic. Optatus wrote c. 364–384, a generation after the events, and represents a developed Catholic reading of them; he is not a contemporary witness to Miltiades' own understanding of his role.

27. 27. Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes, 4th ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), calls Constantine's referral of the Donatist case the first direct imperial intervention in the affairs of the Church—the emperor, not the pope, functioning as the effective supreme authority at this stage, since he set the terms of the hearing and, dissatisfied with its result, simply reopened the case at Arles. On the emperor's controlling role see also H. A. Drake, "The Elephant in the Room: Constantine at the Council," in The Cambridge Companion to the Council of Nicaea, ed. Young Richard Kim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

28. 28. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica X.5.21–23, trans. McGiffert, NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 1, Constantine's letter to Chrestus of Syracuse summoning bishops to Arles "before the kalends of August"; the emperor calls the second council because the Donatists complained that those who had decided at Rome "had been too hasty and precipitate."

29. 29. The Council of Arles opened on 1 August 314. Miltiades had died on 10 or 11 January 314 (n. 35), some seven months earlier, and did not preside; his successor Sylvester I did not attend in person but was represented by the presbyters Claudian and Vitus and the deacons Eugenius and Cyriacus. The council was chaired by Marinus of Arles, one of the three Gallic bishops who had sat with Miltiades at the Lateran. Arles reaffirmed the Roman verdict and Caecilian's innocence, and ruled (against the Donatists) that consecration by a traditor did not invalidate the act.

30. 30. Angelo Di Berardino, "Milziade, santo," Enciclopedia dei Papi (2000), who frames the 313 synod as the first of a long series of councils convoked at the emperor's initiative, and observes that Constantine, finding that the Roman judgment did not by itself end the schism, discovered the limits of ecclesiastical authority to enforce its own decisions and thereafter proceeded through his own advisers rather than the Apostolic See.

31. 31. The Donatist controversy turned on whether the validity of a sacrament depends on the holiness of its minister. The Catholic position, given its classic form by Augustine (c. 393–411), is that the sacraments are Christ's and are valid ex opere operato, so that even an unworthy minister confers a true sacrament, and that the Church on earth is a corpus permixtum of wheat and tares until the harvest (cf. Matt. 13:24–30). Miltiades' synod condemned the Donatist practice of rebaptism in 313; Augustine supplied the developed theology a century later. See further [my treatment of Donatism and Augustine](/donatism/).

32. 32. Liber Pontificalis, "Miltiades" (Loomis, The Book of the Popes, 40): he "decreed that no one of the faithful should in any wise keep fast upon the Lord's day or upon the fifth day of the week, because the pagans celebrated those days as a sacred fast," and "appointed that consecrated offerings should be sent throughout the churches from the bishop's consecration; these are called the leaven [fermentum]." The entry also notes that in his reign "Manicheans" were found in the city.

33. 33. Kirsch, "Pope St. Miltiades," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 10 (1911), judges that of the fermentum "there is nothing definite to show that it was introduced by Miltiades, as the 'Liber Pontificalis' asserts," and treats the fasting decree as a Roman custom of a later time retrojected onto his name. On the fermentum as a Roman practice of unknown origin, first amply described only by Pope Innocent I (Epistula 25.5, c. 416), see Di Berardino, "Milziade, santo," Enciclopedia dei Papi (2000). The prohibition of Sunday fasting was ancient and universal.

34. 34. Three letters attributed to Miltiades in the ninth-century Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals are forgeries; see Philipp Jaffé, Regesta Pontificum Romanorum, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1885), nn. 171–73, and Di Berardino, "Milziade, santo," Enciclopedia dei Papi (2000). One of them has Miltiades reserving the gravest episcopal cases to the Apostolic See—a later claim of Roman primacy back-dated onto his name.

35. 35. Depositio Episcoporum (in the Chronograph of 354), ed. Theodor Mommsen, Chronica Minora, vol. 1, MGH Auctores Antiquissimi 9 (Berlin, 1892): "IIII idus Ianuarias, Miltiadis in Callisti"—the tenth of January, in the cemetery of Callixtus. He appears in the list of buried bishops, not in the parallel Depositio Martyrum. The Liberian Catalogue gives his death as 11 January (III id. ian.); the two differ by a day. Text available at Tertullian.org.

36. 36. The Liber Pontificalis misdates the burial to "IIII id. Decemb." (10 December), a copyist's substitution of December for January; the ninth-century Martyrology of Ado added the unsupported claim that Miltiades "suffered under Maximian," and the medieval calendars kept him as "Pope and Martyr" on 10 December. The current Martyrologium Romanum (2004) commemorates him on 10 January as a pope, without the martyr title, restoring the witness of the fourth-century Depositio Episcoporum; see Di Berardino, "Milziade, santo," Enciclopedia dei Papi (2000). His relics were translated in the ninth century to the basilica of Santa Prassede under Pope Paschal I.