About 200 A.D., under the reign of Roman emperor Septimius Severus, persecution broke out against the Christians. It was particularly severe in North Africa. In Carthage, a Christian woman of noble birth, Perpetua, was arrested. She was about 22 years old and was nursing an infant son. In what may be the earliest extant Christian document from a woman's pen, she wrote her own story. The account of her death was, of course, added later.
Constantine's mother, Helena, traveled to Palestine, touring biblical sites and, with her imperial wealth, establishing churches and shrines. Thereafter, it was quite fashionable for Christians to visit the Holy Land. Late in the 4th century, a nun named Egeria made the trek from western Europe and kept a diary of her travels. Not far from Tarsus, she visited the shrine of Thecla, then considered a historical figure.
From the bitter persecution of Diocletian (303–305), a heroine emerged. Agnes embodied the two ultimate devotions of Christianity: virginity and martyrdom. Since church fathers often spoke in glowing, almost worshipful, terms of both virgins and martyrs, it was natural that they would hail this young girl, martyred in about 304 A.D. The early-5th-century poet Prudentius takes up the story:
The voluntarist Anabaptists attacked the form of the 'Christian' social order which had dominated Europe ever since Constantine had legalized Christianity.
This story of the Michael Sattler family, the Paul Glock family, and the Klaus von Grafeneck family has never been told before. On the surface, it is not a story at all but two rather isolated Anabaptist events, one in the 1520s involving Michael Sattler and one in the 1550s–70s involving Paul Glock. The courage and spirit displayed in these events, however, touched the lives of the van Grafenecks and make one historical vignette about the witness of dying and living in the spirit of Christ.
