by Baker, Simon
The stage was set for one of the last epic confrontations in Roman history. Both sides were quick to mobilize their forces, an extraordinary military feat in its own right. Each side was said to number more than 100,000 infantry and 10,000 cavalry. Even given the propensity of ancient sources to exaggerate, significant numbers of troops had clearly been amassed. Egyptians, Phoenicians, Carians, Greeks from Asia Minor, Bithynians and Africans filled out the ranks of Licinius’s forces, while Constantine, in control of a larger part of the Roman empire, relied less on auxiliaries than on standing units of regular Roman legionaries. Eusebius, in contrasting the two armies, had a literary field day. Constantine’s troops were, of course, Christian soldiers of God. Licinius’s, on the other hand, were motley followers of the traditional gods and eastern mystery cults: wizards, diviners, druggists, seers and meddlers in the malignant arts of sorcery.44
Some time before the forces came face to face, Licinius asked his priests to read the omens. The augurers observed the flights of birds and inspected the arrangement of entrails for signs. Their verdict? The omens promised that Licinius would be victorious. The ceremonies continued when Licinius led his closest commanders to a thickly wooded, sacred grove. Pagan statues peeped through the boughs of trees and from behind mossy, rocky springs. The usual sacrifices were made, then Licinius addressed his men. His rhetorical flourish is typical of the way the pro-Christian sources liked to present the conflict.
Friends and comrades, these are our ancestral gods, whom we honour because we have received them for worship from our earliest forefathers. The commander of those arrayed against us has broken faith with the ancestral code and adopted godless belief, mistakenly acknowledging some foreign god from somewhere or other; he even shames his own army with this god’s disgraceful emblem. Trusting in him, he advances, taking up arms not against us, but first and foremost against the very gods he has offended. Now is the moment that will prove which one is mistaken in his belief: it will decide between the gods honoured by us and the gods honoured by the other party.45
On 3 July 324, at the first engagement at Hadrianopolis in Thrace (modern-day Edirne in Greece), Licinius’s hopes for that moment to weigh in his favour were royally dashed.
The two armies had taken up positions on opposite sides of the river Hebrus. For days they eyed each other sullenly. Whenever Licinius’s men caught sight of Constantine’s standard brightly bearing the sign of Christ, they broke the stillness with jeers and insults. During this strange hiatus, however, Constantine seized the initiative. He fooled his enemy into thinking that he was trying to build a bridge across the river that separated them. He even went through the charade of asking his soldiers to climb a mountain and bring down timber. Secretly, however, Constantine had worked out an alternative, shorter crossing. When his cavalry charged across it, they caught Licinius’s army completely unawares. Thrown into confusion, huge numbers of the surprised troops were brutally pursued and cut down. Some gave themselves up in surrender, while others were soundly routed. Licinius was among the latter.46
He and his surviving forces quick-marched to the coast, rushed to their ships and tried to flee to safety across the Bosporus. Constantine, however, had prepared for this moment. He ordered his eldest son Crispus to give chase; at just seventeen years old and now in charge of a two-hundred-strong naval fleet, Crispus seized on his father’s instruction. Meanwhile, Licinius’s admiral was instructed to stop the pursuit. The two fleets met in the narrow straits of the Hellespont. With a roll of the dice, Crispus chose to leave behind the bulk of his fleet and attack with his eight fastest ships. It proved to be a stroke of genius. His attack was orderly and clinical. Licinius’s larger fleet, by contrast, simply crowded out the confined waters and had no room to manoeuvre. The forest of sails and the chaos of chopping, clattering oars brought only confusion. With several of Licinius’s ships scuppered, nightfall drew the sea battle to a close. The next day a strong south wind finished off Crispus’s work: Licinius’s fleet was smashed against the rocks and thus subjected to another crushing defeat. Nonetheless, within a matter of weeks, the eastern emperor regrouped his forces. He had recruited another army from Asia. He faced his enemy once more at Chrysopolis. He was not beaten yet.
The final showdown between Licinius and Constantine took place on 18 September 324. The two emperors drew up their massive armies on a plain midway between Chrysopolis (now a suburb of Istanbul) and the town of Chalcedon. Constantine’s army was distinguished once again by its magnificent Christian standard. On the rich tapestry hanging from the crossbar, the sign of Christ (the chi-rho) gleamed with precious stones and glittering streaks of gold. The emperor knew it was vital not to underestimate the importance of this emblem. He ensured that a specially dedicated guard was responsible for it, a group of men who had been selected for their courage and physical strength. Now it was raised proudly above the massed ranks as they waited to launch their attack. Constantine took his time. He was perhaps in his tent, as was his custom, praying quietly to God, waiting and searching for a revelation. When he believed God’s will was expressed to him, so it was said, he would rush out of his tent, rouse his troops and order them to draw their swords.47
Licinius’s army charged first. Perhaps this time, when they spied their enemy’s Christian standard held aloft, they viewed it ominously and were silenced. According to Eusebius, Licinius ordered his men not to get close to it, nor even to lay eyes upon it. Indeed, when Constantine’s ranks advanced on the enemy and came under a streaming volley of javelins many of them were cut down. Miraculously, so Eusebius claimed, the standard-bearers were saved.48 Perhaps the heart and power this moment gave the men was contagious, for the confidence to win now spread like an epidemic through Constantine’s ranks. As the armies clashed on an incredible scale, the wind, the momentum and the impetus for battle were all with the legionaries of Constantine.
In the face of forceful assault, the fighting spirit had simply left Licinius’s men. The battle of Chrysopolis had turned into a massacre on an enormous scale. Over 100,000 of Licinius’s army were said to have been killed. The victory of Constantine, of Christianity, was decisive. However, there was one man who had escaped the bloodbath. Licinius slipped away from the battlefield on horseback in the company of some cavalry; as Constantine surveyed the site of the catastrophic defeat his exhausted, destroyed enemy was heading east to the imperial palace at Nicomedia, to his loyal wife and his nine-year-old child. Constantine now followed in pursuit and laid siege to the town.
If Licinius’s thoughts had drifted to saving his honour in the traditional way, by turning his sword on himself, perhaps it was the sight of his family as he collapsed at his palace that convinced him otherwise. One ancient source reveals how, during the night of his return home, Constantia persuaded her husband that instead of death it would be better to surrender to Constantine. Once she had gained Licinius’s willingness to live on, Constantia slipped out of the palace and entered her brother’s military headquarters.
For the first time in nearly ten years Constantine laid eyes on his sister again. This was the woman whom he had wed to his enemy at eighteen years old; this was the wife of the man whom, over the intervening years, Constantine had tried time and again to eliminate so that he could become sole emperor and reunite the Roman empire. Now here she stood amid dirty, exhausted soldiers and bloodied prisoners of war who were being punished ‘according to the law of war’. Licinius’s commander-in-chief was being held before execution; the captive soldiers were being forced to repent and then acknowledge Constantine’s God as the ‘true and only God’.49 In such grim circumstances it must have been hard for brother and sister to look each other in the eye. Nonetheless, Constantia steeled herself and fell on her brother’s mercy. Appealing to his Christian values of forgiveness, she begged him to spare Licinius’s life. Constantine agreed.
The imperial pageantry of the arraignments contrasted sharply with the miserable ceremony that took place the next day. Constant
ine, dressed in magnificent robes and now sole ruler of the entire Roman world, sat on a dais in his camp outside the city. He was surrounded by bishops and court officials. Perhaps Lactantius and Ossius were present too, exalting in the victory of their God. Slowly Licinius walked towards Constantine, his former enemies lining the long, humiliating path from the palace to the victor’s camp. It is possible that Constantia and her son had to face the ignominy of accompanying the defeated leader. When he reached Constantine, Licinius knelt before the emperor in abject supplication. He had brought with him the purple robes befitting his former office, and with bowed head he offered them up to Constantine. Perhaps Constantine added salt to the wound and asked the former emperor to convert to the Christian faith. What is more certain is Licinius’s final indignity: he hailed Constantine ‘Lord and Master, begging forgiveness for the events of the past’.50 Licinius and his family were then officially sent to live out their days in Thessaloniki and in peace.
However, it is easy to imagine that, for all the pomp and ceremony and for all the polite applause, both men knew that nothing had really changed. Within a year of Licinius’s surrender and abdication, a detachment of imperial soldiers found him with his family in Greece. When Licinius saw the guards approach perhaps he knew instantly that Constantine had gone back on his word, that the emperor could never allow potential rivals and their heirs to live, could never forgive. The soldiers took him and his son aside and garrotted them.51
EPILOGUE
Constantia survived the death of her husband and child. The emperor gave her the title ‘Most Noble Lady’ and she remained an important figure at her brother’s court. Her presence there must have been strained and full of stony recrimination. She died in 330, perhaps no more than thirty-five years old. Constantia, however, was not the only relative to fall foul of her brother’s imperial authority.
In 326 Constantine ordered the deaths of both his first son Crispus (whom he had appointed to the rank of Caesar) and his wife Fausta, the woman who had borne him three sons. The cause is shrouded in mystery. There were suspicions at court that Crispus was having an affair with his stepmother; another rumour suggested that it was Fausta who had fallen in love with Crispus, but had been rejected by him. Either way, such immoral behaviour could never be seen to taint the core of the Christian imperial family – the emperor’s absolutist legislation on sexual matters forbade it. The short, brilliant career of Crispus ended in execution. The cause of Fausta’s death is recorded as suffocation in an overheated steam bath.
Constantine’s unsentimental singularity of purpose also showed itself in the religious policy of his later years. In the aftermath of his victory over Licinius, the emperor published several edicts in the east. The persecuted Christians were to be released from prison, they were to have their property restored and they would receive the same privileges as Christians in the west. Bishops were encouraged to repair churches and build new ones. But the preaching tone of these edicts went much further than the Edict of Milan. In the letters accompanying them, Constantine did not force his subjects to abandon paganism and take up Christianity, but he urged them to do so. The Christian God, he wrote, was morally supreme. It was God who had brought an end to persecutors, God who had established the correct observance of religion. Constantine had simply been his instrument.52 The message rang out: Christianity was now the officially favoured religion of the Roman world. But what about paganism?
Ostensibly the edicts suggest that Constantine was actively campaigning against paganism: some traditional temples were closed, and sacrifices and the consulting of oracles were forbidden, especially by Roman provincial governors and prefects.53 However, the picture Eusebius describes is misleading. Certainly Constantine wanted to stamp out magic and superstition: he outlawed the private use of diviners, and magic designed to sexually arouse or make an attempt on someone’s life. Devotion to the traditional gods, however, was another matter. That form of paganism would be very slow to die out; there was as yet no mass conversion to Christianity.
The imperial ban on pagan sacrifices could never be enforced. They continued in Italy, and in Greece the emperor even lifted the ban so that a cult known as the Eleusinian Mysteries might not be affected. Constantine also allowed a new pagan temple to be built in Italy and dedicated to the imperial family late in his reign. Temples in Rome were granted protection from the emperor, and it remained the job of the prefect of the city to restore and maintain the buildings, statues and centres of the ancient Roman cults in the fourth and fifth centuries. Nonetheless, later emperors would be much harsher in their clampdown on pagan practices. The process of fossilizing Rome’s pagan past had begun.
The Church may have become the unifying institution of Constantine’s Christian empire. An issue of doctrine, however, was spoiling the picture. When Constantine ‘liberated’ the east from Licinius, he discovered that the Church there was even more divided than that in Africa. The greatest dispute, however, was not a mere debate over the legitimacy of a bishop, but a philosophical dispute over the relationship between God and Jesus Christ: was God the Father the same as God the Son, or was he inferior? A priest called Arius argued that while God the Father was eternal and indivisible, God the Son had to be created after the Father as His instrument for the salvation of man. Although he was perfect, God the Son was therefore not eternal and could not be called God. Arius’s argument sparked an absolute furore and threatened an upheaval in Church unity once again. Constantine stepped in.
In 325 he called together and personally attended the first universal meeting of the Church, known as the Council of Nicaea. The occasion must have been an extraordinary sight. For the first time, over three hundred bishops from all corners of the Roman world came together in an attempt to thrash out the doctrine being disputed by Arius. On the morning of the first day, dressed in the splendour of his bright purple robe embroidered with gold and inlaid with stones, Constantine entered the large, silent hall of the palace at Nicaea. He walked with an elegant, modest gait. A small golden chair was set front and centre before the rows of bishops. Their excitement at the occasion reached a new pitch when the emperor showed deference by waiting for them to sit down before he did. Only when they gave him the signal did he sit first, and then the whole gathering followed suit.54 From his seat, however, Constantine did much more than invigilate proceedings. He took an active, forceful part.
He was credited, for example, with finding the form of words that resolved the dispute. This stated that God the Son was ‘of one substance’ in relation to God the Father. The formulation implied that Arius was wrong. Despite this intervention, however, Constantine, the great soldier, the commander who had won the civil war, was less concerned with the intricacies of doctrinal debate. The emperor wanted simply to put out the fire of the controversy and end the dispute. Cajoling, bullying, and slipping between Latin and Greek in his efforts to persuade recalcitrant bishops, Constantine strong-armed the majority into putting their names to the proposed form of words designed to heal the rift. Most complied, but Arius and two of his followers refused and all three men were exiled. Unity, admittedly with the exception of a few dissenters, had prevailed. The grand occasion had been a triumph. Or so it seemed.
Certainly there were striking successes. For the first time the emperor of Rome, the most powerful man in the world, had used his power to establish Christian orthodoxy. On many issues he had won agreement from the vast majority of attendants coming together for the first time. Although Constantine made a show of deferring to the bishops, they had assembled under his authority and the decisions they had reached were universally binding. Indeed, in exiling Arius and his followers the treatment of ‘heretics’ had been taken out of the hands of bishops and become subject to the criminal law pronounced by the emperor.55 Religious and imperial power had become one.
In reality dissension had not gone away. Eusebius’s account of the Council of Nicaea papered over the very real differences of opinion expressed there.
Later on, Arius returned from exile and continued to deliver sermons in his influential city of Nicomedia. Before Constantine died, even the emperor himself would backtrack on the doctrine he had forced the bishops into agreeing. Only with time would the unity that Constantine desired at Nicaea be realized. Indeed, the council produced the ‘Nicene Creed’. This is the official summary of the Christian faith, which begins, ‘I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. . .’ To this day it is recited by Christians every Sunday. To this day, Constantine’s formulation is still the unifying creed of the Church.
Constantine’s Christian theme inspired him to breathe new life into his empire in other ways. He helped found Jerusalem as a holy city for Christians as well as Jews, but was ambitious to achieve much more. When, on 8 November 324, with spear in hand, he plotted the site of a new city around the old town of Byzantium (now Istanbul), he founded what he called a ‘New Rome’. If Constantine’s intention was to rebrand a new Christian empire, what better way to do that than by founding a new imperial capital on the site of his victory against Licinius? And what better place to locate that city than at the strategic point where Europe and Asia meet? With his usual sharp eye for self-promotion, he named the new city after himself. Constantinople was officially dedicated on 11 May 330.
Whereas Rome was defined by its ancient past, former emperors and traditional gods, Constantinople marked the start of a new era. A massive building programme took place: new walls, new forums, a new hippodrome and a new imperial palace all sprang up in the space of just six years. There was also a new Senate House for the newly appointed Christian senators. As for Christian buildings, the city could boast Constantine’s mausoleum, and it is possible that the famous church of St Sophia began its incarnation under the emperor. However, contrary to Eusebius’s description, the city that bore Constantine’s name was not exclusively Christian. The emperor filled his new city with art treasures from the classical world, making it the showroom of his new empire. Crucially, he did not move the capital city of the empire to Constantinople and thus downgrade Rome. The Eternal City continued to supply senators to help administer the empire. Constantinople was, rather, just another imperial centre, alongside the likes of Trier and Milan, albeit one to which the emperor was highly attached. The better part of his last seven years was spent there.56