Only a shadow of the true Constantine has emerged in these pages, a shifting shade cast by the refulgent images created of and for him through three decades in power. He was a devout son of pious parents, who rushed across the empire to his father’s deathbed. He was the one true heir of Constantius Chlorus and of Claudius Gothicus, recognized by the armies of the north and vindicated by victory in the east. He was a Herculian Caesar, kinsman of Maximian and Maxentius, who witnessed Apollo and venerated Sol Invictus. He was the new Alexander, gazing to the heavens, sharing a virile head of hair and other attributes with his divinized forebear. But he was also the new Moses, leader of the elect, who forged a new ark, the labarum. He was, in death, a second Christ surrounded by his apostles, but later only equal to the apostles. He was Victor Constantine, the greatest emperor, conqueror of the empire’s barbarian foes, a singular sovereign in an age of Tetrarchs and Dyarchs, founder of the second Rome. The later reputation of Constantine the Great attests to the potency of these various images and to the success of his efforts to damn the memories and appropriate the achievements of his rivals.
In contrast to his many public images, of Constantine’s private life and views we have only rare hints, and to seek more in the sources is to submit them to a critical scrutiny they cannot bear. His letters and speeches were drafted by a changing staff over his long reign, his coins designed and struck by mint workers not always abreast of current motifs and propaganda imperatives. The major monuments and luxury objects produced in his honour were designed and crafted by a range of patrons and artists whose agendas did not always, if ever, match the emperor’s own. Still, we have used them all where we can and with suitable caution to advance key themes. Constantine assigned great value to army and family. He rewarded loyalty handsomely, but would sacrifice anyone to defend his position and reputation. Honour was paramount to him, and he legislated his own preferred morality. He was short-tempered and stubborn, vain and narcissistic, as one might expect from a channel for divine grace. Rumours suggest that he was sensitive to balding and that he brought people close by handing out nicknames at court. He was a lofty sovereign on a high throne, decked out in silk and gold, the heir to Diocletian’s style and methods of governance, but like his mentor, he was also a man of the camps and fellow soldier who loved and was loved by his men.
There can be no doubt that Constantine was a charismatic and effective commander, who first demonstrated his ability in war in Galerius’ Persian campaigns of the 290s. As a general he was generous, minting and distributing coins in vast numbers to reward and magnify his glorious army. He was also deplorably brave and foolhardy, as he demonstrated by his willingness to march on Rome in 312 and to fight personally before the walls of Turin and in the bloody Battle of Verona. He continued to defy odds, and those who fought in his armies trusted in him and the demonstrated fact that to follow him limited one’s chance of death, defeat and dishonour. There seems no better way to explain this than in Constantine’s own terms: that his valour and manly aggressiveness, his impulsive virtus, was rewarded with spectacular good fortune, felicitas. We need not take the further step of suggesting that his successes in war demonstrated divine favour for his undertakings, but it is no surprise that Roman authors, not least Christian Roman authors, saw the imperial theology of victory in action. The god of the Christians was the new greatest god, the divine companion and patron of Constantine.
We have no coherent account of Constantine as commander on which to draw. The only full consideration of Constantine by one who knew him personally is given by Eusebius of Caesarea, who met the emperor on rare occasions and received formal letters from him more frequently. Eusebius wanted the emperor’s sons to remember their father as a devout Christian leader. The heirs would determine the fate of their father’s experiment with imperial Christianity even as they fought over his victorious legacy. Eusebius’ Constantine was, therefore, far from rounded. He shares only his biographer’s concerns and views, appearing to spend all his time and energy promoting Christianity. Certainly Constantine did devote much time and many resources to promoting the faith he came to embrace as his own over long years. Constantine’s conversion was a process that took him from a vision in 310, through divine visitations in a number of dreams, to his acceptance in 324 that he fought in the name of the singular god worshipped by his instructors and companions, Ossius of Cordoba and Lactantius. Once the truth of his new faith was clear to him, as emperor he demanded that all Christians understand and worship God in the same manner. While toleration was legislated for those who had not yet followed Constantine’s path to enlightenment, Christian schismatics and heretics, those who recognized different authority or defended distinct dogmatic principles, were to be persuaded or, if necessary, forced into unity. And yet through his life, Constantine’s own understanding of the faith changed with his advisers and spiritual guides, as Lactantius and Ossius departed and Eusebius of Nicomedia rose to prominence. The universal persecution of Christians was ended, but it was no longer a safe time to be a questioning Christian. Now the diversity of early opinion could no longer stand, and to argue was to challenge imperial authority. Synods were called to end discussion, not to facilitate it.
Constantine required unity of faith to guarantee the continued favour of his god, the god of victory. This god was recognized by a wider range of believers than had hitherto been conceivable. Constantine’s conversion promoted the further spread of Christianity in the Roman world, but it did not begin that process. Christianity had been spreading long before his intervention. Indeed, in the decades before Constantine came to power, Christianity was already a dominant faith in many of the eastern provinces, notably in North Africa, Syria and what had now come to be known as the Holy Places; it had also attracted a significant minority of adherents throughout Asia Minor and Anatolia. Imperial patronage for those communities considered orthodox certainly encouraged further conversions, and the formal introductions of Christianity in Armenia and Georgia can be dated to Constantine’s reign. But it was also in the eastern lands and North Africa, where Christianity had its deepest roots, that the problem of sectarian strife arose.
The context for the emperor’s contribution, the interface between faith and power in the third-century Roman world, allows us properly to delimit his contribution. It was to allow Christianity to spread into areas it might otherwise not easily have reached: into the less urbanized provinces of the north-west and into the army camps. The emperor’s conversion was emulated by commanders in his army and those who coveted promotion. The rank and file, whose personal faith had always run parallel to their obligations to the imperial cult and formal religio, now also embraced Christianity. They enjoyed for the first time a day of rest each week, a Sabbath, distinct from those days prescribed in the feriale. In battle, they recognized the power of the Christian god, the greatest god, to protect and save, and when they were discharged, these soldiers took their new faith home. Christianity spread into areas to the north and west, to fix new roots in the provinces of Gaul, Britannia and Hispania, and beyond into the lands of the Alemans and Sarmatians and Goths, barbarian lands whence the Roman army increasingly drew its recruits. As a consequence of Constantine’s successes, and more certainly of the extraordinary efforts made to spread news of their miraculous inspiration, Christianity was considered the religion of victory. Over time, also, chapels were added to camps, portable lead tanks allowed for baptism, chaplains accompanied the legions into battle. None of this would have been possible without Constantine. But Constantine was no holy warrior, still less a crusader. He was a Roman emperor whose fate was determined within the strictures of the imperial theology of victory.
Three centuries after Constantine’s death, Islam would rise in the deserts of the Arabian peninsula and sweep into the lands where Christianity had emerged. Muslims conceived of paradise as an oasis, the anti-desert, a fertile garden where they might retire from the heat of the mundane. Christians articulated their heaven as the city of God, free of poverty, disease and time. The contrast between these conceptions is telling, and it would not have been so striking had Christianity emerged not in the densely populated cities of the Roman east, but in the sparsely settled and wooded lands of the north, where Constantine’s conversion allowed it to flourish as a religion of victory. Meanwhile, in the east, an ideological reorientation took place within early Byzantium. Emphasis shifted from the emperor as divinely inspired, to individual soldiers, whose spiritual purity became essential to the empire’s success or, increasingly, its failure. As late Rome lost confidence in its traditional symbols of power, new motifs emerged, including the tears and chastity of soldiers. The pure, penitent and chaste were prepared to receive spiritual rewards for their sacrifice. This idea was borrowed into Islam, forming the kernel of jihad.