The long reign of the Emperor Constantine I saw the incorporation of some Visigoths as a minor part of the Eastern army. It also brought into play the dormant force of religion. The emperor as Pontifex Maximus was the head of the Roman cult, himself divinized after his death with a promise of immortality. He was the subject and ally of Jupiter, and his armies fought under the sign of Jupiter, the Best, the Greatest, Iupiter Optimus Maximus. Emperors had risen and fallen so often that the belief wore thin. The senate, educated in all the complexity of mythology, burnt incense to the statue of Victory. The other divinities of the pantheon had dwindled into shadows of themselves. Laws, walls, regalia and other trappings remained sacred. So long as they did not trespass, other cults and psychopomps were permitted, subject to local conditions.
All this was called into question by the spread of Christianity. It had begun three centuries earlier, when its Founder was crucified at the behest of his supposed peers with the consent of a Roman governor of no exalted standing. His teaching had been oral but the message was carried in person or by letter far and wide by a small band of enthusiasts, many of whom had fared as cruelly as he. His promise was of a kingdom not of this world, and many previous emperors had opposed it, some violently. Despite its alien origin its cosmogony corresponded to that described by Vergil in Book VI of the Aeneid. It accepted the secular terrestrial divisions established by the Roman empire, both present and future.
Constantine I accepted it and attributed military success to it. He united the empire while retaining the two Parts, and founded a new capital for the Eastern Part at Byzantium, renamed Constantinople, which was Christian, officially at least, from the start. The Eastern Part had its own senate, but was more mercantile and variegated, following the modes of Greek philosophy, while the west was poorer in worldly wealth, less inclined to speculate and more intent on the use of force to assert discipline. The East, as the first apostles knew, was more concerned with speculation about the divine nature. Christianity had reached the Spains from merchants or soldiers serving in the imperial armies. It was an urban religion, and traders established it in the cities, where also the Roman grip was strongest. Many Hispanic cities came to have their own martyrs who became patrons of churches and basilicas. The Spains had not produced tyrants or usurpers and did not now produce heretics. Constantine’s toleration and conversion was accompanied by the celebration of the first council of the Spanish church at Iliberri, Granada, at which nineteen bishops and twenty-four priests, drawn also from other provinces, adopted canons or rules by which Christians must abide and distinguish themselves from others. By contrast, the East was more concerned to find terms to define what was divine, reaching a consensus at Nicaea in 325. Its creed did not satisfy everyone or put an end to controversy: dissentients were branded heretics or ‘choosers’. Within the bosom of the church, many sought to renounce the world and seek the good life as hermits or monks: there came to be hundreds of monastic communities scattered from Asia Minor to Egypt, who obeyed each their own abbot, or abba, which those in the West might see as a defiance of the authority of the bishop, who obeyed their own leader, the bishop of Rome, later called pope.
The debate about the Founder had shifted from his message to his credentials. He was a man, but also the only son of God and therefore different from men. Among those who sought a simple and logical solution was Arius, a priest of Alexandria, whose arguments many churchmen found convincing. In the east there was much discussion of Arius’s ideas: not all bishops were willing to condemn him as a heretic. Constantine’s first concern was the restored unity of his empire: a strong Spanish bishop Hosius of Cordova, advised Constantine that strict orthodoxy was preferable to a broad church. Most of his subjects were still not Christians of either sort. The death of Arius did not diminish the influence of his teaching: rather the contrary, since he could no longer be questioned. But that of the emperor was the prelude to a new round of disorders. The empire was divided between his three sons, of whom the third, Constantius, favoured Arianism. He was also the longest-lived and came near to restoring the unity of the empire with the consequent acceptance of Arianism, itself professed by various groups. It was under this dispensation that some of the Visigoths who continued to serve in the Eastern army began to accept Christianity in its Arian variant. For barbarians this came to have a significant advantage in that it rendered them independent from the bishop of Rome and allowed them to appoint their own episcopacy who imposed their beliefs on the rest of the clergy. But as yet very few Goths were touched. They remained illiterate, though they remembered their own heroes: it is therefore not possible to say if they remembered that their ancestors had been the first barbarians to slay a Roman emperor in battle: this was Decius in August 250.
Constantius attempted to assert himself by violence. This was exercised against members of the imperial family descended from the first Christian emperor including those related by marriage. Constantius had elevated Gallus as his Caesar, but Gallus did not last long and was survived by his younger brother Julian, who was educated in Athens and took to the study of religion and philosophy. He also proved a successful soldier and having paved the way to the empire for himself, declared himself in favour of the traditional religion of the Romans of old. His erratic course earned for him the epithet of ‘the apostate’. Emperors who were also philosophers had become almost unknown since the days of Marcus Aurelius. But Julian imposed himself as a military commander, and on his early death on campaign, the choice of emperors reverted to the clique of generals, who formed the high command and especially the imperial guard. Military power came first, and dynasticism and religious conviction were subordinate to it.
Helmet of a Gothic leader, 4th-5th c., from Ciumesti, Romania.