Maximinus Daza

Early career

Maximinus was born in Felix Romuliana (located within modern Serbia). In 305, his maternal uncle Galerius became the eastern Augustus and adopted Maximinus, who had risen to high distinction in the Roman army, as a son and heir, giving to him the rank of Caesar (that is, the junior eastern ruler), with jurisdiction in Syria and Egypt.

Civil war

In 308, after the elevation of Licinius to Augustus, Maximinus and Constantine I were declared filii Augustorum ("sons of the Augusti"), but Maximinus probably started styling himself as Augustus with support of his troops during a campaign against the Sassanids in 310. Galerius died in 311, and Maximinus divided the Eastern Empire between Licinius and himself. Maximinus, who was already married, proposed to divorce his wife and marry Galerius' daughter Valeria; when Valeria refused he confiscated her and her mother's property and exiled them to Syria.

When Licinius and Constantine I began to make common cause, Maximinus entered into a secret alliance with the usurper Maxentius, who controlled Italy. He came to an open rupture with Licinius in 313; on 30 April the two rivals fought the Battle of Tzirallum in the neighbourhood of Heraclea Perinthus. Maximinus' 70,000-man army sustained a crushing defeat and he fled, first to Nicomedia and afterwards to Tarsus, where he died the following August.

Persecution of Christians

Maximinus has a controversial name in Christian annals for renewing their persecution after the publication of the Edict of Toleration by Galerius, acting in response to the demands of various urban authorities asking to expel Christians. In one rescript replying to a petition made by the inhabitants of Tyre, transcribed by Eusebius of Caesarea, Maximinus expounds a pagan orthodoxy, explaining that it is through "the kindly care of the gods" that one could hope for good crops, health, and the peaceful sea, and that not being the case, one should blame "the destructive error of the empty vanity of those impious men [that] weighed down the whole world with shame". In one extant inscription (CIL III.12132, from Arycanda) from the cities of Lycia and Pamphylia asking for the interdiction of the Christians, Maximinus replied, in another inscription, by expressing his hope that "may those [...] who, after being freed from [...] those by-ways [...] rejoice [as] snatched from a grave illness".

After the victory of Constantine over Maxentius, however, Maximinus wrote to the Praetorian Prefect Sabinus that it was better to "recall our provincials to the worship of the gods rather by exhortations and flatteries". Eventually, on the eve of his clash with Licinius, he accepted Galerius' edict; after being defeated by Licinius, shortly before his death at Tarsus, he issued an edict of tolerance on his own, granting Christians the rights of assembling, of building churches, and the restoration of their confiscated properties.

Pharaoh of Egypt

As Christianity continued to spread in Egypt, the title of Pharaoh was increasingly incompatible with the new religious movements. Maximinus's status as a non-Christian accorded the priests of Egypt an opportunity to style him as Pharaoh, in the same manner that other foreign rulers of Egypt had been styled before. That said, the Roman emperors' role as god-kings was only ever acknowledged domestically by the Egyptians, being largely ignored by the emperors themselves. Maximinus would prove to be the last person afforded the traditional titulature of Pharaoh – no Christian Roman/Byzantine emperor, nor Islamic or modern leader, has revived the title since. As the last monarch to employ traditional pharaonic titulature, Maximinus' death can be seen as marking the end of a 3,400-year-old office.

Death

Maximinus' death was variously ascribed "to despair, to poison, and to the divine justice".

Based on descriptions of his death given by Eusebius, and Lactantius as well as the appearance of Graves' ophthalmopathy in a Tetrarchic statue bust from Anthribis in Egypt sometimes attributed to Maximinus, endocrinologist Peter D. Papapetrou has advanced a theory that Maximinus may have died from severe thyrotoxicosis due to Graves' disease.

Maximinus was married at the time of his death, and he left behind an 8 year old son named Maximus and a 7 year old daughter whose name is unknown. They were both executed by Licinius.

Eusebius on Maximinus

The Christian writer Eusebius claims that Maximinus was consumed by avarice and superstition. He also allegedly lived a highly dissolute lifestyle:

And he went to such an excess of folly and drunkenness that his mind was deranged and crazed in his carousals; and he gave commands when intoxicated of which he repented afterward when sober. He suffered no one to surpass him in debauchery and profligacy, but made himself an instructor in wickedness to those about him, both rulers and subjects. He urged on the army to live wantonly in every kind of revelry and intemperance, and encouraged the governors and generals to abuse their subjects with rapacity and covetousness, almost as if they were rulers with him.
Why need we relate the licentious, shameless deeds of the man, or enumerate the multitude with whom he committed adultery? For he could not pass through a city without continually corrupting women and ravishing virgins.

According to Eusebius, only Christians resisted him.

For the men endured fire and sword and crucifixion and wild beasts and the depths of the sea, and cutting off of limbs, and burnings, and pricking and digging out of eyes, and mutilations of the entire body, and besides these, hunger and mines and bonds. In all they showed patience in behalf of religion rather than transfer to idols the reverence due to God. And the women were not less manly than the men in behalf of the teaching of the Divine Word, as they endured conflicts with the men, and bore away equal prizes of virtue. And when they were dragged away for corrupt purposes, they surrendered their lives to death rather than their bodies to impurity.

He refers to one high-born Christian woman who rejected his advances. He exiled her and seized all of her wealth and assets. Eusebius does not give the girl a name, but Tyrannius Rufinus calls her "Dorothea," and writes that she fled to Arabia. This story may have evolved into the legend of Dorothea of Alexandria. Caesar Baronius identified the girl in Eusebius' account with Catherine of Alexandria, but the Bollandists rejected this theory. Given Maximinus's previous persecutions of Christians, there is doubt as to the credibility of Eusebius.

Family tree