Caracalla's Edict of Citizenship
Caracalla granted Roman citizenship to almost every free inhabitant of the empire in 212, in a single edict. Citizenship had until then been something acquired: by birth to citizens, by military service, by the enfranchisement of a whole community, or by manumission. Whole provinces had lived for generations under Roman rule as peregrines, subject to local law and excluded from the protections that come with the status — the right to a proper trial, exemption from certain punishments, standing in a Roman court. The Constitutio Antoniniana ended that distinction at a stroke, and it is one of the largest single extensions of legal status in history. Cassius Dio, who was a senator at the time and disliked Caracalla, says the motive was revenue: citizens paid inheritance tax and manumission tax, which Caracalla had just doubled, and non-citizens did not. The edict's own preamble, preserved on a damaged papyrus from Egypt, gives a religious reason — that the gods who preserved him should be thanked by all his people in their temples. The two explanations are not incompatible. The consequences ran deeper than either. Local legal systems did not disappear but were now theoretically subordinate to Roman law; the empire acquired a uniform legal population; and the distinction that came to matter was no longer citizen and foreigner but honestiores and humiliores, the respectable and the low, who were punished differently for the same crime. Caracalla was murdered five years later. His edict outlived him entirely. Justinian's jurists three centuries later worked in a world where every free subject was a citizen, and the codification of Roman law that Europe inherited assumes exactly that.
- Year: 212 CE
- Category: Political
