In his legislation and in the letters and other writings preserved from the period between his entry into Constantinople on 11 December 361 and his death in Mesopotania in June 363, the emperor Julian frequently professed a profound and wholesale detestation of Christianity as a religion and of Christians in general. In 1988, however, Hans-Christof Brennecke demonstrated that in practice the Apostate directed his persecution of Christians mainly, indeed almost exclusively, against one specific group within the Christian Church, namely, the adherents of the homoean Reichskirche which the Council of Constantinople in January 360 created with the encouragement and at the instigation of the emperor Constantius. Federico Fatti gives greater precision to Brennecke's interpretation of Julian's policies towards the Christian Church by analysing in detail the emperor's actions in regard to Caesarea in Cappadocia. He begins from an important fact, which Ammianus Marcellinus omitted, and which was consequently missed by Otto Seeck in his classic reconstruction of Julian's journeys and the chronology of his legislation and hence by most others who have written about Julian after Seeck (whom Fatti consistently calls ‘Seek’). When Julian travelled by road across Asia Minor from Constantinople to Antioch in the early summer of 362, he did not take the main and direct route from Ancyra to Tyana by way of Archelais, but diverted in order to pass through Caesarea in Cappadocia, where he was present during a contested episcopal election. The episode was described in some detail by Gregory of Nazianzus in his panegyric of his dead father (Oratio 18.33–4, PG xxxv.1027–32). Fatti analyses the emperor's actions, which included a threat to degrade the city of Caesarea to the legal status of a village, and integrates them into the historical perspective opened up by Brennecke. Future writers will need to take this case study of Caesarea into account when assessing Julian's dealings with the Christian Church in general.