In 304, Diocletian fainted in public and decided to retire, the first emperor ever to do so; he withdrew to grow cabbages at his palace in Split (Croatia).* Forcing Maximian to do the same, Diocletian promoted Constantius and Galerius to be Augustus of west and east. Sensing danger from Galerius, Constantine galloped westwards. After he had met up with his father in Gaul, they crossed to Britannia to fight the Picts, but in 306, in York, Constantius died. A German king acclaimed Constantine as Augustus. Taking control of Britannia, Hispania and Gaul, Constantine, thirty-four years old, repelled a Frankish raid and captured their kings, whom he fed to the lions in the amphitheatre of his capital Triers. Muscular and hefty with a thrusting jaw, blunt nose and cleft chin, Constantine led his troops from the front and killed anyone who stood in his way, but he was also a thoughtful and cautious man.
Maximian backed his son Maxentius to become emperor and offered his pretty teenaged daughter Fausta to Constantine, whose first wife had died. The couple went on to have three sons, but the alliance with Fausta’s family had become fraught. After his father-in-law had tried to have him assassinated, Constantine outmanoeuvred the old emperor, forcing his suicide. Fausta was now stuck with a husband who had effectively killed her father – while her brother Maxentius still ruled Italy.
Constantine issued edicts of religious tolerance, suggesting sympathy for the Christianity embraced by his mother Helena. In 312, while he was close to a temple of Sol Invictus, Constantine saw a ring around the sun. Christians insisted that Jesus Christ was the ‘light of the world’ – the sun – and Constantine concluded he had received a sign from Christ. As he marched into Italy, he ordered his troops to inscribe the
As Constantine advanced on Rome, Maxentius lacked confidence, hiding his regalia, including an exquisite sceptre with a blue orb for the world, on the Palatine Hill. At Milvian Bridge, Constantine routed Maxentius, who fell off his horse into the Tiber; his head was later paraded round Rome atop a lance.
Now Constantine revealed himself as a Christian sympathizer. Even though the sect’s absolute moral certainties ruled out compromise with the Roman pantheon, Constantine moved slowly, building new churches on the site of the tomb of St Peter and a splendid, still-standing basilica at the Lateran. Yet his triumphal arch featured Sol Invictus, Companion of Unconquered Constantine. But victory is always the most persuasive religious argument: Constantine believed Christ had won his battles for him.
Constantine ruled only the western empire; his colleague as Augustus, Licinius, ruled the east. In 313, the two Augusti met and Constantine married his half-sister Constantia to Licinius. But the empire was too small for two Augusti. When the showdown came in 324, Constantine, lightly wounded, smashed Licinius near the old Greek town of Byzantion. His sister Constantia, mother of his nephew, negotiated Licinius’ surrender – but Constantine quietly killed husband and child. He was no saint.
Constantine now emerged as a Christian emperor, promoting the hierarchy of the Church in parallel with that of the state, and enforcing a new morality: he abolished crucifixion in honour of Jesus, banned murderous games, fortified marriage, discouraged adultery, made Sun-day the Christian sabbath, fixed the dates of Christmas (already celebrated as the winter solstice) and Easter and persecuted the Jews, whom he called ‘murderers of the Lord’.*
Accustomed to being a divine ruler, Constantine ranked himself high on the hierarchy between God and man, seeing himself as the thirteenth apostle. But now he had to deal with the fissiparous debates about the relationship between God, Christ and the Holy Spirit that were already leading to murderous feuds. How divine was Jesus? Many Christians regarded all three as divine, but Arius, an Alexandrian priest, believed Jesus was a divine-touched human subordinate to God. Salvation was a matter of life and death; factions fought the Christological debates in the streets of Alexandria. Constantine ordered the burning of Arius’ writings, and at Nicaea he dictated a compromise formula that became the orthodoxy. A religion that believed in one absolute truth and one unwavering route to salvation could not compromise.
Constantine discovered that the Christians were more difficult to regulate than anything else.* Except his family.
