Constantius attacked the Franks and other German tribes first, then invaded Britannia, liquidating Carausius. His twenty-year-old son Constantine accompanied Emperor Diocletian as far as Egypt and Babylon. Craggy Constantine impressed Diocletian, who married him to his niece; she delivered his first son, Crispus.
Why was Rome in crisis? Diocletian believed that the gods were displeased by the neglect of the old religion and the spread of new superstitions. In Antioch he and Caesar Galerius ordered the haruspices (observers of entrails) to sacrifice animals and read the auguries. But something was wrong, and Diocletian believed there were too many Christians. He ordered everyone to sacrifice to the gods and emperors. When Christians refused, the killing started. Christians and Manichaeans were flayed, burned and decapitated. When Diocletian’s palace in Nicomedia caught fire, the terror intensified. Constantius, with his Christian wife Helena, and his own leaning towards Sol Invictus, kept quiet while in Diocletian’s retinue their son Constantine silently regretted the ‘bloody edicts’ against the ‘worshippers of God’. He was about to experience a momentous conversion.
* Little soul, little wanderer, little charmer,
Body’s guest and companion,
To what places will you set out for now?
To darkling, cold and gloomy ones –
And you won’t make your usual jokes.
* At the front he wrote his
* It was now that the Chinese court had the first recorded contact with Japan: the islands were not yet united, no concept of Japan existed, but the Chinese called the people ‘dwarves’. Little is known of its politics but in 190, a female shaman-queen named Himiko, aged twenty, succeeded to the throne of the small realm of Yamatai that controlled a federation of rice-farming chieftainships. Later she sent slaves as a gift to the Chinese emperor.
* Julia Domna’s father, descended from kings appointed by Pompey, was high priest of the Arab sun deity Allah-Gabal – God of Mankind, Elagab in Latin – worshipped in the form of a black meteorite, probably just one of many across the Arab world. There was no evidence that Mecca existed at this point, but a similar black meteorite – the Kaaba – would be worshipped there. Julia’s name Domna – black in Arabic – referred to the divine stone of Emesa.
* Shapur’s successor Bahram II backed the fanatical Zoroastrian priest Kirder, who restored the Persian religion, turning on the prophet Mani, who was arrested, beheaded, flayed and stuffed. His death, a martyrdom like that of Jesus, encouraged the spread of his religion: the Uighurs in central Asia converted en masse to Manichaeanism.
* Palmyra was sacked, with thousands of Palmyrenes enslaved, and Zenobia was paraded in Aurelian’s Roman triumph. She was not executed but married to a Roman senator, living out her life in suburban obscurity after founding the first Arab empire in one of the most extraordinary female careers before modern times.
* The coasts of Gaul and Menapia (Netherlands) were cursed by the depredations of Frankish and Saxon pirates, so Maximian appointed one of his officers, Mausaeus Carausius, to build a fleet and destroy them. Instead Carausius first colluded with the pirates, then declared himself emperor of northern Gaul and Britannia, backed by Roman, British and Frankish troops. He even cast his own coins emblazoned with the world-beating slogans
ACT FOUR
200 MILLION
Houses of Constantine, Sasan and Spearthrower Owl
CHRISTIAN FAMILY VALUES: WIFE KILLER AND THIRTEENTH APOSTLE
