Why Valerian’s Story Still Matters
Emperor Valerian ruled Rome from 253 to 260 AD, and his reign ended in a way no Roman had ever seen: he became the first Roman emperor to be captured alive by a foreign enemy. That single fact has kept his name alive for almost eighteen centuries.
But Valerian was far more than a dramatic ending. He was an experienced senator who came to power at one of the most unstable moments in Roman history. Armies were rebelling, enemies were pressing on every frontier, a deadly plague was spreading, and emperors were rising and falling at a startling pace. Valerian tried to steady the ship, and for a few years it looked as though he might succeed.
If you are new to Roman history, do not worry. You do not need to memorize a long list of names or dates to follow this story. Think of it as the tale of one man, already in his sixties, who inherited a very hard job and made a series of choices, some practical and some deeply controversial, that shaped the fate of an empire.
Let us begin at the beginning.
Early Life: A Senator Before an Emperor
Valerian’s full name was Publius Licinius Valerianus. He was probably born around the year 200 AD, though the exact date is not recorded. That makes him roughly sixty years old when he took the throne, which was quite old for a Roman emperor, especially in an era when many rulers died young and violently.
He came from a respected senatorial family. In Rome, the Senate was the old governing class: wealthy men from established families who held public offices, advised the emperor, and often commanded armies. Valerian belonged to this world, and the ancient writers who described him agree that he was admired for his dignity, his good reputation, and his steady character. One later source, the Historia Augusta, even says the Senate once regarded him as its leading member. That book is not always reliable, so historians treat its praise with care, but the general picture of a well-respected nobleman seems believable.
We know very little about his childhood and youth. This is normal for Roman figures of that time. Ancient writers usually paid attention to emperors only once they came to power. What we do know is that Valerian built a long career in public service. He is thought to have served as a consul, one of the highest offices in Rome, and he held other important posts over the decades. He also married and had at least two sons. The most famous was Gallienus, who would later share the throne with him.
How Valerian Became Emperor in 253 AD
To understand Valerian’s rise, it helps to know what Rome was like in the middle of the third century. Historians often call this period the Crisis of the Third Century. Between 235 and 284 AD, Rome had more than twenty men who claimed the title of emperor, and most of them met violent ends. Soldiers made and unmade rulers. Civil wars drained the treasury and weakened the borders.
When Decius died fighting the Goths in 251, Trebonianus Gallus took over. His reign was troubled from the start. He made a peace deal with the Goths that many Romans found humiliating, and a serious plague was sweeping through the empire at the same time. People needed someone to blame, and the emperor was an easy target.
In 253, a general named Aemilian, who commanded troops along the Danube, defeated a Gothic raid and was promptly declared emperor by his own soldiers. He marched toward Italy to challenge Gallus. Gallus, worried, called for help from the legions stationed near the Rhine River, and he gave the task of bringing them south to Valerian.
But events moved faster than Valerian could. Before his army arrived, Gallus and Aemilian met in the north of Italy. Gallus’s own troops turned on him and killed him, and Aemilian’s victory seemed complete. Yet Aemilian’s rule lasted only a matter of weeks. Valerian’s troops proclaimed him emperor, and the soldiers of Aemilian, rather than fight a larger force, murdered their own leader as well. Valerian entered the story as the man who ended the chaos.
He was about sixty years old and had not seen the throne coming, but he accepted it. One of his first actions showed his thinking: he named his adult son Gallienus as co-emperor. The idea was simple and sensible. The empire was too large and too threatened for one man to protect. Valerian would take the eastern provinces, where the Persian threat was growing, and Gallienus would defend the west, including the Rhine and Danube frontiers.
An Empire Under Pressure: The Crises of Valerian’s Reign
Imagine being handed responsibility for a house that is on fire in several rooms at once. That is close to what Valerian and Gallienus faced when they took power. The troubles came from every direction.
Enemies at the borders
In the north and west, Germanic peoples such as the Franks and the Alamanni raided across the Rhine, and Gothic groups pushed against the Danube and the Black Sea region. In the east, a new and powerful Persian dynasty, the Sasanians, had replaced the older Parthian rulers a few decades earlier. Their king, Shapur I, was ambitious, skilled, and determined to expand at Rome’s expense.
Shapur’s armies struck hard in the early 250s. Roman cities in Syria came under attack, and the great city of Antioch, one of the richest in the eastern provinces, was captured for a time. Valerian traveled east to deal with the problem, and by around 257 he managed to win Antioch back.
A deadly plague
At the same time, a terrible epidemic known today as the Plague of Cyprian spread through the empire. It is named after Cyprian, a bishop of Carthage who described it. Historians are not certain which disease it was, but it caused widespread death and fear, weakening armies and cities alike. This plague would later play a role in Valerian’s downfall.
Money and daily life
The empire’s finances were also strained. Armies were expensive, and emperors had been paying for them partly by reducing the amount of silver in Roman coins. The coins still looked the same, but they were worth less. Over time, prices rose and trust in the currency fell. Ordinary people felt this in their daily lives, even if they did not understand the cause.
Valerian’s response
Valerian and Gallienus worked as a team, dividing the empire between them. Gallienus spent much of his time on the Rhine and Danube fronts, fighting off invaders and holding the frontier together. Valerian concentrated on the east, strengthening defenses and trying to restore order.
It was in this atmosphere of fear and pressure that Valerian made one of the most controversial decisions of his reign, one that still shapes how he is remembered.
Valerian and the Persecution of Christians
One part of Valerian’s reign deserves careful and honest treatment: his policy toward Christians. This is a sensitive subject, so it is worth understanding both what happened and why.
In Roman religion, public ceremonies and sacrifices to the gods were seen as a way of keeping the empire safe. When disasters struck, such as plague, invasion, or defeat, many Romans believed the gods were angry. Christians refused to take part in these sacrifices because of their beliefs, and that made them stand out, and sometimes made them targets, in anxious times.
At first, Valerian’s reign was relatively calm for Christians. Some Christian writers of the time even noted that his household was friendly toward them. Then, around 257, the situation changed sharply. Writers from that period suggest that officials close to the emperor, including a powerful finance minister named Macrianus, influenced the decision. Whatever the exact reason, Valerian issued a series of edicts, which were official orders from the emperor.
The first edict (257)
The first edict ordered Christian leaders to take part in Roman religious ceremonies. It also banned Christians from gathering for worship and from entering their cemeteries, which were important meeting places. The goal seems to have been to cut off the community’s leadership and break up its organization rather than to hunt down every ordinary believer.
The second edict (258)
The second edict was much harsher. It ordered that bishops, priests, and deacons be put to death if they refused to sacrifice. It also targeted Christians of high social rank: senators and other nobles could lose their status and property, and may have been executed if they did not give in. Women of noble families could lose their property and be sent into exile, and members of the imperial household who were Christians could be sent to forced labor.
Famous victims
Two well-known figures died under these orders in 258. Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage in North Africa, was beheaded after refusing to sacrifice. He is remembered as a calm and dignified figure who accepted his fate. Pope Sixtus II was also put to death in Rome along with several of his deacons. Later tradition, which historians treat cautiously, adds that a deacon named Lawrence was killed a few days afterward.
How it ended
Valerian’s persecution did not last long. His capture in 260 changed everything. His son Gallienus, who now ruled alone, quickly ended the campaign against Christians, restored their property, and allowed them to meet openly again. This was one of the first times the Roman government officially tolerated Christianity.
It is important to remember that Valerian’s reasons were political and religious in the Roman sense: he was trying to bring unity and divine favor to a suffering empire. That explains his thinking, but it does not excuse the suffering it caused. Understanding both sides is part of reading history fairly.
The War With Persia and the Battle of Edessa (260 AD)
By 259 and 260, the fight in the east had reached its decisive point. To understand it, we need to meet Valerian’s great opponent: Shapur I, the king of the Sasanian Persian Empire.
Shapur was a formidable ruler. He had already defeated a Roman army, taken cities, and carried off thousands of prisoners, whom he resettled inside Persia. He was proud of these victories. In fact, he later had a long inscription carved on a rock face at a site called Naqsh-e Rustam, describing his campaigns against three Roman emperors. This text, known as the Res Gestae Divi Saporis, is one of our most important sources, and it gives us a rare view of the story from the Persian side.
The march to Edessa
Valerian gathered a large army and marched toward Mesopotamia to confront Shapur. The target was the area around the city of Edessa, in what is now southeastern Turkey. Shapur’s inscription claims that Valerian led an army of about seventy thousand men, though ancient numbers are often exaggerated and should be treated with caution.
Here the plague returned to the story. Many Roman soldiers fell ill, and the army that arrived was weaker than it should have been. Edessa came under pressure, and the Roman position grew more difficult.
Capture
What exactly happened next is not entirely clear, because the sources disagree. There are two main versions.
In the first, Valerian was defeated in battle. Shapur’s own inscription tells it this way, boasting that he captured the emperor with his own hands, along with many senior officers and officials.
In the second, found in some Roman writers, Valerian agreed to meet Shapur to discuss peace terms. It was a trap, or at least the meeting turned into an arrest. The Christian writer Lactantius suggested that Valerian was tricked, and another ancient historian, Zosimus, describes a negotiation that ended with the emperor being seized.
Both stories end the same way. The emperor of Rome was in the hands of the Persian king.
Why it was such a shock
It is hard to overstate how stunning this was. Roman emperors had died in battle before, and many had been murdered by their own soldiers. But no emperor had ever been taken alive by a foreign power and kept as a prisoner. For Romans, it was a deep humiliation. For Persians, it was the greatest triumph of Shapur’s life.
Captivity and Fate: Fact, Legend, and Everything in Between
What happened to Valerian after his capture is the most famous part of his story, and also the most uncertain. It is worth slowing down here, because the popular version is much more dramatic than the evidence supports.
What the Persian monuments show
Shapur celebrated his victory in stone. At sites such as Naqsh-e Rustam and Bishapur in Iran, rock carvings show the Persian king on horseback, with a Roman figure standing before him in a pose of submission. In several scenes, a kneeling Roman figure and another standing figure appear near him. Scholars generally connect these images with Valerian’s defeat, although they debate exactly which Roman is shown in which scene. What is clear is that Shapur wanted everyone to remember what he had done.
The famous stories
The most gruesome account comes from Lactantius, a Christian writer who lived in the decades after the events. He claimed that Shapur used Valerian as a living footstool, stepping on his back to mount his horse. He then said that when Valerian died, his skin was stripped, stuffed, dyed red, and displayed in a Persian temple as a trophy.
This tale spread widely and has been repeated for centuries. But historians are very cautious about it, for several reasons:
- Lactantius was writing from a Christian point of view. He wanted to show that a persecuting emperor met a terrible punishment, which is a moral lesson as much as a report.
- Persian sources do not mention any such treatment.
- Shapur’s own inscription does not describe it, even though he was eager to boast about his victory.
- Stories about humiliated enemies were common in the ancient world, and details often grew with each retelling.
So while it is possible that Valerian was treated harshly, the footstool and the stuffed skin are generally regarded as legend rather than established fact.
What we can say with reasonable confidence
A few things seem fairly safe. Valerian never returned to Rome. He lived the rest of his life in Persian hands, and he died in captivity, probably within a few years of 260, although the exact date and circumstances are unknown. Some of his officers and soldiers were also taken prisoner, and Shapur resettled many captives in Persian territory, where they were put to work. Tradition connects some Roman prisoners with building projects such as a large dam and bridge near the city of Shushtar.
Legacy: What Valerian’s Reign Left Behind
Valerian’s capture did not end the empire, but it deepened the crisis. Around the same time, Gallienus faced rebellions in the west, and in the east a Roman official named Macrianus tried to put his own sons on the throne. Gallienus held on for years, defeating several challengers, until he was assassinated in 268. Later emperors, beginning with Aurelian in the 270s, finally reunited the empire and brought the Crisis of the Third Century to a close.
Historians today remember Valerian for three main reasons:
- He was the first Roman emperor captured alive by a foreign enemy.
- He launched one of the empire’s most severe early persecutions of Christians, which ended almost immediately after his capture.
- He shared power with his son Gallienus in a way that kept the empire from collapsing in its most fragile years.
Final Thoughts
Valerian was neither a villain out of a storybook nor a simple victim. He was a capable, respected senator who rose to power in an age of chaos, made some wise decisions and some harsh ones, and paid an enormous price for a failed gamble in the east. His story reminds us that history is rarely tidy, and that the most dramatic tales, like the footstool legend, deserve a careful second look.
If this article sparked your curiosity, you now have a good foundation for exploring the wider Crisis of the Third Century, the Sasanian Persians, or the early history of Christianity in Rome. There is plenty more to discover, and Valerian’s story is a great place to begin.