Historians count ten traditional persecutions of Christians in the early Church – up until the Edict of Milan in 313 under Emperor Constantine, who converted to Catholicism; well, sort of, for, knowing he would do any number of dubious deeds in running the Empire, he waited until his deathbed to be baptized, and then by the semi-Arian trimmer Eusebius of Caesarea.
Until that time, Christians never really knew when the next wave of punitive laws would come down from the princes of this world, and two of the worst and most severe were the decrees of Decius in 250 and Valerian
