As Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire, the tattooing of slaves and criminals was gradually abandoned. The Roman Emperor Constantine, who declared Christianity the official religion of the Empire in 325 AD, decreed that a man who had been condemned to fight as a gladiator or to work in the mines should be tattooed on the legs or hands, but not on the face, "so that the face, which has been formed in the image of the divine beauty, should be defiled as little as possible."In 787 AD Pope Hadrian I forbade tattooing of any kind, and the popes who followed him continued this tradition. It is for this reason that tattooing was virtually unknown in the Christian world until the 19th century.
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