After Nero, significantly, instituted the persecution of the Christians and after Domitian's rule, during which some notable cases of anti-Christian persecutions occurred in Rome as well as in proconsular Asia, Trajan's rule produced some scattered persecutions in the Greek East of the empire, of which the best known are the case of Ignatius of Antioch and the one in which Pliny the Younger was regretfully involved in Bithynia. The persecutions quite obviously got out of hand in Asia at about the time when Hadrian's administration replaced Trajan's, as is well illustrated by the correspondence of Serenius Granianus (Q. Licinius Silvanus Granianus), a governor of Asia, the emperor Hadrian, and Minucius (Minicius) Fundanus, Granianus's successor.

Princes and popes had often fought among themselves for power over peoples. So it should not seem odd that to reduce the competition they combined in mutual support, when overmighty magnates rose to wreck the ancient peace between the princes and peoples of the English realm. Thus it was that the kings of England, when confronted by baronial force, called upon the popes to use their influence and to support the royal cause.

Universalism, the belief that all men will eventually be saved, is a suspect doctrine in the history of Christian theology. Although there are undoubtedly a number of passages in the New Testament which seem to present this as the final goal of the Divine intention in creation, and as having been brought about at great cost through the redemption effected by Christ, the Church as a whole has always been suspicious of a belief which seems subversive of morality and appears to undercut all evangelistic motives. Nevertheless, the vision of all things returning into unity with God, the ⋯ποκατ⋯στασις τ⋯ν παντ⋯ν, has contnually haunted Christian theologians, and has been espoused by some of the greatest names in the history of Christianity. The Greek Fathers, in particular Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, were, despite some discordant voices, advocates of it, and they have numerous successors. In the West the concern with the boundaries and limits of the Church, which marked the theologies of Cyprian and Augustine, meant that the universalist vision was regarded with greater suspicion, and in the Middle Ages it became the preserve of sectarian groups, opposed to the official Church, and hoping for a new and juster social order, initiated by God, in which all men would share.