Titans of History

CONSTANTINE THE GREAT

c. 285–337

In hoc signo vinces—“In this sign shalt thou conquer”

The words accompanying the divinely inspired vision that appeared to Constantine before the Battle of Milvian Bridge, AD 312

Constantine was a bundle of contradictions—he was no saint but a brutal, bull-necked, flamboyant soldier who murdered his friends and allies and even his closest family. He owed his supremacy to the sword. Nonetheless, his embrace of Christianity was a decisive act in Western history.

When Constantine was born in the middle or late 280s, the Roman empire had recently been divided by the emperor Diocletian into eastern and western halves. Constantine was the son of Constantius, a general who later, in 305, was to be proclaimed emperor of the western empire. As a child, Constantine was sent to Nicomedia (modern Izmit in Turkey) to be raised at the court of Diocletian, who had taken for himself the eastern portion of the empire. Under Diocletian’s rule, Constantine witnessed fierce persecution of Christians, which intensified after 303.

In 305 a complex power struggle for control of both the eastern and the western parts of the empire began. Constantius died at York, in Britain, in 306, whereupon Constantine was proclaimed emperor by his troops. A capable soldier, Constantine set about consolidating his power, which was initially centered on Gaul. In 312 he crossed the Alps with an army, attacking and defeating the western emperor Maxentius at the Battle of Milvian Bridge, and becoming the sole western emperor himself. Following a dream in which God appeared to him, he made his soldiers paint a Christian monogram on their shields. “By this sign you will conquer,” said the dream. His vision of Christ coincided in his belief in the one divinity of the Unconquered Sun. His victory made Jesus his god of victory—he believed he owed his power to Christianity. But his embrace of Christianity was also political: the idea of a single empire under one emperor, one god.

In 313 Constantine met the eastern emperor Licinius, and the two men agreed the Edict of Milan, a historic proclamation that extended to all people the freedom to worship whatever deity they chose. For Christians, this meant that they were granted legal rights for the first time and were able to organize their forms of worship as they chose. The edict also restored all property that had been confiscated under the recent persecutions.

After the Edict of Milan, relations between Constantine and Licinius deteriorated, and in 320 the latter once again began to persecute Christians in his portion of the empire. By 324 the rivalry had spilled over into civil war.

Emerging victorious, Constantine reunited the whole of the Roman empire under the banner of Christianity. At this high point in his fortunes he wrote that he had come as God’s chosen instrument for the suppression of impiety, calling himself “The Equal of the Apostles,” and he told the Persian king that through God’s divine power he had come to bring peace and prosperity to all lands. Crucifixion, sexual immorality, prostitution, pagan sacrifice and gladiatorial shows were all abolished; Sunday—the day of Constantine’s favored pagan deity—became the Sabbath. This was no age of tolerance: on the contrary, the persecution of the Jews, the “Christ killers,” started immediately and intensified.

Constantine rededicated the town of Byzantium, which from 330 was known as Constantinople, the eastern Rome (today’s Istanbul).

The church of the Holy Apostles in Byzantium was built on the site of a temple to Aphrodite. In Jerusalem Constantine ordered the church of the Holy Sepulcher to be built; in Rome, the church of St. Peter was handsomely endowed with plate and property. The intellectual credentials of the Church were reinforced when Constantine summoned the Council of Nicaea in 325 to deal with the violent debates on the nature of Christ, as man or god.

Constantine used Christianity to unify the state, but he was as ruthless as he was practical. In 326 he executed his son Crispus and his own wife Fausta for treason and possibly adultery together, thereby joining Herod the Great of Judaea, Emperor Claudius, Ivan the Terrible, Suleiman the Magnificent, the Iranian Shah, Abbas the Great and Peter the Great of Russia, and England’s Henry VIII as royal killers of their own wives or sons—though only Herod and Constantine managed to kill both categories.

Constantine himself was baptized on his deathbed—perhaps prompted by the realization that his position had often necessitated unchristian acts.