IN WRITING OF THE deaths of Crispus and Fausta, the British historian Edward Gibbon observed that certainty about what had happened increased with the passage of time. That might be said of virtually everything connected with Constantine as he moved from the realm of mortality to that of memory. Of all Roman emperors he has kept the longest and most persistent presence in the consciousness of later generations; though, except for the Nicene Creed, very little of what he is remembered for has much to do with what he set out to do, while his authority has at times been invoked to support the most improbable assertions.
Given the complexity of Constantine’s legacy, it is no wonder that confusion surrounds even the most basic detail connected with his passing: the location of his body. According to Eusebius, he was laid to rest in a building surrounded by twelve containers that would ideally hold relics of the twelve apostles, which in practice proved hard to locate: only the bones of Saints Timothy and Luke, neither an actual member of the original group, seem to have been procured before his death. It appears to have been Constantine’s intent to lie in the company of the apostles in a building constructed in the style of a standard imperial tomb—uniting for all time his Christian and imperial aspects. His body was placed in a porphyry sarcophagus. About twenty years later, a bishop of Constantinople moved the sarcophagus to a church; however, on the orders of an infuriated Constantius, it was removed to be placed, probably, in the Church of the Twelve Apostles, which Constantius was even then completing (it appears that the containers for the apostles’ relics were shifted to this church as well). In 370, probably, the sarcophagus was moved again, this time back to the east end of the mausoleum facing the entrance, where it remained for the better part of the next millennium if not longer, until the Turkish sack of Constantinople, which finally ended the direct line of succession from Augustus Caesar and Constantine in 1453. Certainly the mausoleum was leveled at that point, as was the Church of the Twelve Apostles. The porphyry sarcophagus has not been seen since the sack of the city. A late tradition held that the bodies of Helena and Fausta were placed in the sarcophagus. Were husband and wife reunited in death? It is not impossible that Constantine would have wished it to be so.1
Even as Constantine’s body was first laid to rest, the process of reconstructing his legacy was beginning. The first stage is reflected in what is probably the most egregious of Eusebius’ assertions—that Constantine intended to leave the empire to his three sons. Those three sons did end up running the empire, at least in name, but that came about because in September 337 there was a coup d’état in which Dalmatius, Hannibalianus, and Julius Constantius, the last surviving son of Constantius I, were either executed through rigged judicial processes—in the case of Dalmatius, charged with poisoning Constantine—or murdered on the orders of Constantius II. We cannot now know how the events were orchestrated or who was the mastermind, since Constantine II and Constantius II, aged twenty-one and twenty, respectively, are unlikely to have been the prime movers (Constantine II seems to have been told what was happening after the event and to have subsequently had rather frosty relations with his brother). Just as significant, however, as the elimination of the imperial kin was the radical shift in the upper echelons of the eastern administration. By the end of 337, Evagrius and Maximus appear to have retired (possibly “were retired” would be more appropriate), and Ablabius was cashiered, then murdered by agents of Constantius at the Bithynian farm where he lived.2
The delay of some six months in carrying out these changes may be attributed to Constantine’s most distressing legacy to his heirs—the war with Persia. Sapor attacked the empire shortly after Constantine died and the war would continue, with no clear advantage to either side until 363, when Constantine’s nephew, Julian the Apostate, invaded Iraq. Julian botched his campaign and died in battle well inside Persian territory; his successor avoided the fate of Valerian only by signing a treaty with Sapor that gave up the provinces Diocletian had gained and surrendered the powerful border fortress city of Nisibis (modern Nusaybin in eastern Turkey) in addition.
The picture of Constantine that emerged in the reign of Constantius, who spent much of his time fighting Sapor, showed a much less complex figure than the one who had died in 337, one far less tolerant. That Constantine was, of course, the subject of The Life of Constantine by Eusebius of Caesarea, a figure whose influence would be inescapable for later generations of church historians. The mid-fourth century saw the beginnings of the actively hostile tradition associated with Julian the Apostate and his associates, painting a picture of a man given to luxury who disparaged the efforts of his most noble predecessors. This Constantine was the bastard child of the low-born Helena. He seized the throne as a usurper and only became a Christian to assuage the guilt he felt for having murdered Fausta and Crispus—the final acts in a career spent slaying his own family. He destroyed tradition, bankrupted the state, and started the war with Persia because he was a greedy fool.3 It did not help that the Persian war really was a failure.
The hostile versions of Constantine’s life have the advantage of some grounding in the political discourse of the day. Around AD 500 these versions were joined by an astonishing new story, which would give rise to one of the most important forgeries in European history, “The Donation of Constantine.”
This addition to the canon concerned Constantine’s conversion and his relationship with Sylvester, who succeeded Miltiades as bishop of Rome in 314. According to this story, allegedly written by a Greek at Rome named Eusebius, Constantine was much preoccupied with persecuting the Christians of Rome when he was smitten with leprosy. The emperor summoned whoever he could think of who might know of a cure and was told—by the priests of Jupiter on the Capitoline in some versions, by Magi and Jews in others—that he could be cured only if he bathed in the blood of freshly slaughtered infants. On his way to do just that, Constantine felt a surge of remorse for what he was about to do and ordered the children to be returned to their parents.
Saints Peter and Paul then appeared to him in a vision, telling him that if he summoned the bishop Sylvester he could be cured. Sylvester, who was in hiding with his clergy on Mt. Soracte (about twenty miles from Rome), duly appeared before the emperor who asked whether Peter and Paul were his gods. They were the servants of his God, Sylvester replied, and informed Constantine that he should prepare for baptism. Constantine did as he was told, and emerging some time later (on an Easter Sunday) from the baths of the Lateran palace, baptism accomplished, he found that he had indeed been cured. Thereafter he became a devout Christian, promoting the faith with vigor.4
This new account of Constantine’s conversion spread with disturbing rapidity—disturbing, at least, to anyone thinking that people should be able to recognize nonsense when they hear it. It was known in Greek and Syriac versions by the mid-fifth century and rapidly became the most popular conversion story. By the ninth century it had taken on fresh significance as the inspiration for an “official document” that conferred great authority on the pope. “The Constitution of Constantine” as we now have it appears to have been produced in France, possibly in the Abbey of St. Denis near Paris or that at Corbie in the vicinity of Amiens, during the early ninth century.5 The text is in the form of an edict of Constantine, reciting his experiences with Sylvester and then announcing that since Sylvester was the “vicar of the Son of God on earth,” he and all popes after him (the bishop of Rome began to be routinely called “the pope” in the course of the fifth century) should have “primacy over the four distinguished sees of Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople, and Jerusalem as well as over all churches of God” throughout the world since he is the leader of all priests and generally in charge of everything to do with the stability of the Christian faith.6
The “Constitution” was included in the Decretum Gratiani, a collection of texts for the study of canon law produced in the twelfth century by Gratian, an authority on the subject hailing from the great legal center of Bologna.
Despite its seemingly helpful content “The Donation” proved to be something of a double-edged sword, tending to remain in the background of disputes between the papacy and representatives of royal or imperial authority. It was all well and good for the pope to be given authority over Western Europe, but unfortunately it was an emperor who granted that authority, and what one emperor could give surely his descendant as the Holy Roman Emperor could take away. The Holy Roman Emperor Karl IV (1316–1378), for instance, appears to have carried the notion that he was Constantine’s heir to the point of equipping himself as a “new” Constantine. This view of an emperor’s role was not dissimilar to one that had evolved much farther east in the emergent Kievan state of Russia, where contact with Constantinople had introduced its rulers to images of Constantine and Helena, who now came to prefigure important figures in the history of the royal house.
Back in the west, the problem of imperial control meant suggestions that the donation was a fraud were not squelched as thoroughly as they might have been by papal authorities, and Pope Eugenius, not otherwise a supporter, seems not to have minded the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla’s demolition of the document’s authenticity in 1440.7
By the mid-sixteenth century, with the rediscovery of antiquity (a popular scholarly pursuit) well under way, there was more than enough ancient information about Constantine to satisfy the curious. At this time the quaint image deployed on Roman mosaics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in which Constantine kneels before Sylvester handing him the papal crown or serves him as a scout gave way to images of the visionary emperor channeling the power of God in battle—the ideal anti-Reformation emperor for the wars of religion. In Rome, for instance, Pope Leo X, in the midst of his conflict with Martin Luther, commissioned Raphael to produce frescoes combining the Eusebian Constantine with the medieval one, showing the vision of the cross, the battle of the Milvian Bridge, Constantine’s baptism, and the Donation. A spectacular “Constantine cabinet” now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum at Vienna, dating to the 1660s, contains twelve images of the ruler based on different paintings. Depictions of the donation and Constantine’s baptism by Sylvester are included, while others stress his role as a warrior and Eusebius’ story of the cross in the sky.8
With the coming of the Enlightenment came new Constantines. Gibbon seems frankly puzzled by him and largely accepted Zosimus’ picture of a great man who went bad after the events of 326, while one of the most influential works of the nineteenth century, Jacob Burckhardt’s The Age of Constantine the Great, sees his spiritual life as of nugatory importance. In Burckhardt’s formulation,
attempts have often been made to penetrate into the religious consciousness of Constantine and to reconstruct a hypothetical picture of changes in his religious conviction. Such efforts are futile. In a genius driven without surcease by ambition and love for power there can be no question of Christianity and paganism, of conscious religiosity or irreligiosity; such a man is essentially unreligious, even if he pictures himself standing in the midst of a churchly community.9
In the twentieth century, however, in the popular imagination Constantine has tended to remain in the public eye precisely because of his Christianity, and to be presented in the context of a specific author’s understanding of the history of the Church. John Carroll’s study of the history of anti-Semitism in the Church, for example, sees it beginning with Constantine, in obvious contradiction to the evidence of Constantine’s own actions. On an even grander scale (amplified in the movie version) is the notion that Constantine hijacked Christianity, burying the human nature of Christ and the feminine side of the faith for political reasons. The high priest of this Constantine is Dan Brown, who, in a memorable passage of his Da Vinci Code, has his villain explain:
In Constantine’s day, Rome’s official religion was sun worship—the cult of Sol Invictus, or the Invincible Sun—and Constantine was its head priest. Unfortunately for him, a growing religious turmoil was gripping Rome. Three centuries after the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, Christ’s followers had multiplied exponentially. Christians and pagans began warring, and the conflict grew to such proportions that it threatened to rend Rome in two. In 325 AD, he decided to unify Rome under a single religion. Christianity.… Historians still marvel at the brilliance with which Constantine converted the sun-worshipping pagans to Christianity. By fusing pagan symbols, dates, and rituals into the growing Christian tradition, he created a kind of hybrid religion that was acceptable to both parties.10
As with every modern version of Constantine, the urge to draw reductive conclusions is a strong one, and the religious question in a world where religious affiliation is still for so many a crucial aspect of their identity makes this both a reasonable and perhaps inevitable choice. Constantine may have been the most influential Christian after Paul of Tarsus, but a teleological view does scant justice to the complexity of the role that he played and to the complexity of the man himself.
The Constantine who emerges in the preceding pages shares characteristics with many of the Constantines who have gone before, with Burkhardt’s Constantine, certainly, and even with the Constantine imagined in “The Donation of Constantine”, for the author of the “Donation” understood religious conviction. Constantine was bold, willing to take great risk—and risks whose potential costs or benefits he understood full well.
To seize the throne was one of those great risks, but he knew that the consequence of inaction was to be death. And he understood that the acclamations of the army at York were inadequate to guarantee success as he raced against time to secure Trier and the Alpine passes ahead of Severus. The invasion of Italy, he knew, was a task at which many had failed. He approached the adventure with trepidation, drafting a plan of campaign that would take advantage of a foe’s predictable reactions, while drawing on all his mental and physical resources in a mighty attempt to achieve the seemingly impossible. Against Licinius he again took great risks, but when Licinius took advantage of Constantine’s tendency to recklessness, he knew to cut his losses and withdraw. Next time, he attacked in overwhelming force.
The qualities that Constantine esteemed were loyalty, efficiency, and hard work. He valued what he understood to be justice, he feared the power of the rich to oppress the weak, and he saw it as his role to provide his subjects with an ordered society. He was not a man to venture beyond the conventional morality of his time—he did not question the right of the rich to be rich, or suggest that the slave should be free, or that there might be anything wrong with the coercive power of the state. He shared these traits with those closest to him. He knew how to deal with people who were very different from himself, be they German generals or the descendants of Italian aristocrats with genealogies far longer than his own. The value of loyalty he may have learned from his father, who had not tossed him out of the palace in search of his own advancement; and it was a quality he shared with his mother Helena, who seems to have been an active presence during all the years of his ascent and into the years of victory.
Constantine was a man of great passion. His relationship with Helena was a potent force that informed his life, as was his early relationship with Minervina, whose son he cherished. He loved Fausta, whose well-being he protected in their early years together and from whom he seems to have been well nigh inseparable in their last decade as a couple. Passionate too was his relationship with the God he discovered as he searched for answers before the invasion of Italy. This God loved him, he firmly believed, and looked after him, and Constantine thanked and worshipped him for the guidance that he gave. But he also believed that to honor this God was not to dishonor other gods, or the traditions of the imperial office that he had imbibed in his youth and that guided him into old age.
Passion was also Constantine’s undoing. We will never know why he ordered Crispus’ death, or why he and Fausta parted ways—we can’t even be sure that he didn’t bear the responsibility for her death. We may sense his powerful, overwhelming temper. We may also sense his great remorse. There would not be another empress, and if the behavior of his son Constantius, a man of noted chastity, was modeled on his own, there was no bevy of concubines to fill the palace in his later years. He seems to have spent that time alone, perhaps in atonement for what he had done.
Even as he gave vent to his passions, he could understand that he was wrong to do so. In his youth he had seen another emperor act like this, an emperor with whom he would feel himself contending all his life. Diocletian too had been a man of great passion and energy, but when he ordered the great persecution he had acted like a sick fool. But he had not always been so. It was Diocletian’s empire that influenced Constantine’s conception of his own in later years. And he drew strength from the wisdom of his subjects even as he would devise ever more elaborate rituals to keep them at arm’s length. For it was only from an Olympian height that the emperor could see all and reach out like a god to right the wrongs that he perceived.
Constantine changed the world not because he sought to, but because in seeking the power that was once Diocletian’s he understood the limits of that power. And the impact of this most influential figure in the history of Christianity was profound precisely because he did not try to force his religious beliefs on others. He would welcome fellow worshippers with open arms, help others see things his way, but he would not compel them. That too he had learned from Diocletian’s example—for it had become only too clear during that emperor’s reign that bigotry and persecution made for bad government and betrayed the standards to which the ruler must aspire. The Roman people knew what was fair and what was not, and this emperor knew that he must always respect the values of the ruled and act accordingly. To the best of his ability, not always wisely, not always successfully, but with consistency, this is what Constantine did. It was that consistency, and the amazing energy that enabled him to carry out his vision of uniting the empire, that made Constantine not only one of the most successful emperors of Rome, but one of history’s most influential leaders.