Constantine the Great

Britain, Gaul and Spain, summer of 306

Constantius I died at Eboracum in 306 and his army acclaimed Constantine on 25 July. Lactantius says the new ruler's first governmental measure restored Christians to the practice of their worship.

Scholarly reconstruction places the restitution of confiscated Christian property in Britain, Gaul and Spain in the summer of that year — roughly seven years before the Constantine–Licinius agreement at Milan.

Toleration that stopped at a border

This was a regional Constantinian policy, not empire-wide toleration. Constantine held only part of the West, and persecution or renewed restrictions continued under other rulers, particularly Maximinus Daia in the East.

Galerius, the senior emperor, accepted Constantine only at the lower rank of Caesar and went on dominating the tetrarchic government outside Constantine's territory.

Whether a Christian could worship openly depended on which emperor controlled the ground beneath their feet.

The document itself is lost

No text of the 306 measure survives. What survives is Lactantius's retrospective summary at On the Deaths of the Persecutors 24.9, which modern scholarship reads as evidence that Constantine stopped persecution and granted Christians freedom in the western territory he controlled.

The exact day and the original wording are unknown, and the mechanics of the earliest restitution are reconstructed from later testimony rather than from a surviving decree.

The 313 agreement was also not the first relief Christians received: Constantine acted in 306, Maxentius likewise tolerated Christians in the West, and Galerius issued an empire-wide edict in 311.