The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01

by John Julius Norwich

  the most influential man in all history; and with him our story begins.

  It is all too typical of our fragmentary knowledge of the later Roman Empire that although we can say with confidence that Constantine was born at Naissus in the Roman Province of Dacia - the present Yugoslav town of Nis - on 27 February, we cannot be certain of the year. Traditionally it is given as AD 274, but it could equally well have been a year or two on either side. His father Constantius - nicknamed 'Chlorus', the Pale - was, already at the time of his son's birth, one of the most brilliant and successful generals in the Empire; his mother Helena was not, as the twelfth-century historian Geoffrey of Monmouth would have us believe, the daughter of Coel, mythical founder of Colchester and the Old King Cole of the nursery rhyme, but a humble innkeeper's daughter from Bithynia. Some historians have questioned whether she and Constantius were ever actually married; others, pagan and therefore

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  hostile to the family, have gone further still and suggested that as a girl she had been one of the supplementary amenities of her father's establishment, regularly available to his clients at a small extra charge. Only later in her life, when her son had acceded to the supreme power, did she become the most venerated woman in the Empire; only in 327, when she was already over seventy, did this passionately enthusiastic Christian convert make her celebrated pilgrimage to the Holy Land, there miraculously to unearth the True Cross and so gain an honoured place in the Calendar of Saints.

  Whatever the year of his birth, Constantine can still have been little more than a child when his father became one of the four rulers of the Roman Empire. As early as 286 the Emperor Diocletian, having reached the conclusion that the Empire had grown too unwieldy, its enemies too widespread and its lines of communication too long to be properly governable by any single monarch, had raised an old comrade-in-arms named Maximian to share his throne. He himself, who had always taken more interest in his eastern dominions, had based himself at Nicomedia (the modern Izmit) on the Sea of Marmara, roughly equidistant from the Danube and the Euphrates; under his patronage it had grown in size and magnificence until it bore comparison with Antioch, Alexandria - even with Rome itself. But Rome, by Diocletian's day, had little to sustain it but the memory of past glories; its geographical position alone disqualified it from serving as an effective capital for the third-century Empire. When Maximian assumed the throne of the West, it was understood from the outset that he would be ruling principally from Mediolanum, more familiar to us as Milan.

  Two Emperors were better than one; before long, however, Diocletian decided to split the imperial power still further by appointing two 'Caesars' - generals who, while remaining junior to himself and Maximian (to whom he had given the title of 'Augusti'), would also exercise supreme authority in their allotted territories and would ultimately inherit the supreme positions in their turn. One of these first Caesars, a rough, brutal professional soldier from Thrace named Galerius, was given charge of the Balkans; the other, to be based in Gaul but with special responsibility for the reimposition of Roman rule in rebellious Britain, was Constantius Chlorus.

  The drawbacks of such an arrangement must have been obvious, even at the time. However much Diocletian might emphasize that the Empire still remained single and undivided, with a single law and structure of command, it was inevitable that he or his successors would sooner or later find themselves with four Empires instead of one, each of them at loggerheads with the rest. And this, as things turned out, is exactly what happened. For some years all went smoothly enough - years which the young Constantine spent at Diocletian's court, possibly in some degree a hostage to ensure his father's proper behaviour (for none of the four tetrarchs entirely trusted his colleagues) but also as a prominent member of the imperial entourage.

  It was in this capacity that he accompanied the Emperor on his campaign to Egypt in 295-6, passing on his return journey through Caesarea in Palestine - where, we read, he made a lasting impression on a young Christian scholar named Eusebius. In later years this man was to become the local bishop and Constantine's first biographer: at this time, however, he was still a layman of about thirty, a friend and disciple of Pamphilus, the leading proponent of the Origenist theological school for which Caesarea was famous. As he later reported in his Life of Constantine, his hero

  . . . commanded the admiration of all who beheld him by the indications he gave, even then, of imperial greatness. For no one could be compared with him in grace and beauty of form, nor in stature; while in physical strength he so far surpassed his contemporaries as to fill them with terror.1

  Two years later, we find Constantine as his master's right-hand man in another campaign against the Persians; and since during those years he seems seldom to have left Diocletian's side, we must assume that he witnessed, in 303, the deliberate burning of the newly completed cathedral at Nicomedia - the dramatic inauguration of those famous Persecutions that were to rage, scarcely controlled, for the next eight years. But then, in 305, there occurred an event unparalleled in the history of the Roman Empire: the voluntary abdication of the Emperor. After twenty years on the imperial throne, Diocletian had had enough of power; he now withdrew from the world to live in relative obscurity in the vast palace that he had built for himself at Salona (the modern Split) on the Dalmatian coast - forcing an intensely unwilling Maximian to abdicate with him.2

  The full - and diabolically complicated - sequence of events that

  Euscbius, De Vita Constantini, 1, 19.

  Soon after his retirement, Diocletian received a message from the ever-restless Maximian, encouraging him to resume the purple. Gibbon tells us that 'he rejected the temptation with a smile of pity, calmly observing that, if he could show Maximian the cabbages which he had planted with his own hands at Salona, he should no longer be urged to relinquish the enjoyment of happiness for the pursuit of power'.

  followed this unprecedented step need fortunately not detain us here; suffice it to say that Galerius and Constantius Chlorus - who had by now abandoned Helena to marry Maximian's adopted stepdaughter Theodora - were proclaimed Augusti as arranged, but that the appointment of their successors, the two new Caesars, was hotly disputed; and that Constantine, finding himself passed over and fearing for his life, fled at night from Galerius's court at Nicomedia - to avoid pursuit, hamstringing the post-horses behind him as he went - and joined his father at Boulogne. There he found that a Roman army under Constantius's command was preparing a new expedition to Britain, with the objective of driving the marauding Picts back across Hadrian's Wall. Father and son crossed the Channel together, and within a few weeks their operation had proved successful. Shortly afterwards, however, on 25 July 306, Constantius Chlorus died at York; and the breath had scarcely left his body before his friend and ally, the charmingly named King Crocus of the Alemanni who was commanding the auxiliary Frankish cavalry, acclaimed Constantine as Augustus in his father's stead. During the short summer campaign, the young man seems to have earned the genuine admiration and respect of the local legions, who immediately took up the cry. There and then they clasped the imperial purple toga around his shoulders, raised him on their shields and cheered him to the echo.

  It was a notable triumph, and one which became greater still as the word spread through Gaul, province after province pledging the young general its loyalty and support. But Constantine still needed official recognition. One of his first actions, therefore, after his proclamation was to send to Galerius at Nicomedia, together with the official notification of his father's death, a portrait of himself with the attributes of Augustus of the West, and wearing the imperial wreath of bay. Lactantius tells us that Galerius's instinctive reaction when he received this portrait was to hurl it into the fire; only with difficulty were his advisers able to persuade him of the danger of setting himself up against an infinitely more popular rival. On one point, however, the Emperor remained firm: he refused point-blank to recognize the young rebel -for such, in fact, Constantine unquesti
onably was - as an Augustus. He was prepared, reluctantly, to acknowledge him as Caesar; but that was all.

  For Constantine, it was enough - for the present. Perhaps he did not yet feel ready for the supreme power; at any rate he remained in Gaul and Britain for the next six years, governing those provinces on the whole wisely and well - though he could be capable, when roused, of cruelty and even brutality. (After a rebellion by certain Frankish tribes in 306, thousands were thrown to the wild beasts in the circus - to the point, wrote one contemporary, that the animals themselves became exhausted with so much slaughter.) On the other hand, he vastly improved the condition of slaves and the otherwise oppressed, while his reputation for sobriety and sexual rectitude stood out in dramatic contrast to that of most of his predecessors.

  This rectitude did not, however, prevent him from putting aside his first wife, a certain Minervina, in 307 in order to make an infinitely more distinguished alliance - with Fausta, the daughter of the old Emperor Maximian. The latter had by now revoked his involuntary abdication of two years before, had resumed the purple in defiance of Galerius and had made common cause with his son Maxentius; together the two had won over not only the whole of Italy to their cause but, as far as could be ascertained, Spain and North Africa as well. Their position, however, was not yet secure. A concerted attack by Galerius - flinging in his armies from the Danube, quite possibly reinforced by the eastern legions - could still be dangerous for them; and if Constantine were simultaneously to march down against them from Gaul their future would be bleaker still. The marriage was therefore diplomatically advantageous to both sides: for Maximian and Maxentius it meant that they could probably count on Constantine's alliance if and when they needed it, while the latter for his part could now claim family links with two Emperors instead of one.

  How long Constantine would have been content to rule only a relatively remote corner of an Empire that he was determined to make entirely his own, we cannot tell; for, in April 311, a few days after issuing an edict of toleration in favour of the Christians - and so putting an end, in theory at any rate, to the Great Persecution - Galerius, the senior Augustus, died at Sirmium (now Sremska Mitrovica) on the river Sava. Both Eusebius and his fellow-chronicler Lactantius dwell, with a morbid and most un-Christian delight, on the manner of his death:

  Suddenly an abscess appeared in his privy parts, then a deep-seated fistular ulcer; these could not be cured and ate their way into the very midst of his entrails. Hence there sprang an innumerable multitude of worms, and a deadly stench was given off, since the entire bulk of his members had, through gluttony, even before the disease, been changed into an excessive quantity of soft fat, which then became putrid and presented an intolerable and most fearful sight to those that came near it. As for the physicians, some of them were wholly unable to endure the exceeding and unearthly stench, and were butchered; others, who could not be of any assistance, since the whole mass had swollen and reached a point where there was no hope of recovery, were put to death without mercy.1

  The death of Galerius left three men sharing the supreme power: Valerius Licinianus, called Licinius, one of the late Emperor's old drinking companions whom he had elevated to be his fellow-Augustus three years before and who was now ruling in Illyria, Thrace and the Danube provinces; his nephew Maximin Daia, whom he had named Caesar in 305 and who now took over the eastern part of the Empire; and Constantine himself. But there was a fourth who, though not technically of imperial rank, had long felt himself to be unjustly deprived of his rightful throne: this was Galerius's son-in-law Maxentius. As the son of the old Emperor Maximian - who had met his end the previous year, by execution or enforced suicide, after an ill-judged attempt in Constantine's absence to raise the legions against him in southern Gaul -Maxentius had long hated his brilliant young brother-in-law, and, as we have seen, had spent the years since Constantine's accession steadily strengthening his own power-base around the Mediterranean. As early as 306, before he and his father had even established themselves in Italy, he had adopted the title of 'Prince of the Romans' and had had himself proclaimed by the Praetorian Guard in Rome; now, five years later, he was as powerful as any of his three rivals - powerful enough, indeed, to take his father's death as a pretext for openly declaring his hostility to Constantine, branding him a murderer and a rebel, and ordering his name to be removed from all inscriptions and commemorations throughout Italy.

  War, clearly, was unavoidable; and immediately on receiving the news of Galerius's death Constantine began to make his preparations. Before marching against his adversary, however, he had to come to an agreement with Licinius, to whom the territories seized by Maxentius properly belonged. Fortunately for Constantine, Licinius could not lead an army himself to reclaim them, being already fully occupied in maintaining his position against Maximin Daia in the East; he therefore seems to have been only too happy for Constantine to undertake the reconquest of Italy on his behalf. The agreement was sealed by another betrothal - this time of Licinius himself to Constantine's half-sister Constantia.

  His diplomatic ground prepared, Constantine set off in the autumn of 311 for Colmar, where he spent the winter making his plans and

  i Euscbius, Historia Exclesiastica, VIII, 16.

  preparing supplies for his army. Zosimus tells us that it consisted of 8,000 cavalry and some 90,000 infantry. It was probably only about a third of the total manpower available to him, but Gaul could not be left ungarrisoned. Anyway, he had a fair idea of Maxentius's strength and he believed that these numbers would suffice. To make doubly sure, he himself assumed the supreme command; and, in the early summer of 312, he marched.

  The factual story of Constantine's Italian campaign and his overthrow of Maxentius can be quickly told. Crossing the Alps over the Mont-Cenis pass, he took Susa - the first town of any importance that lay on his route - by storm, refusing however to allow his soldiers their normal rights of plunder and pillage. They were, he told them, not conquerors but liberators. Outside Turin, the going was a good deal harder: Maxentius's army here included a number of units of clibinarii, horsemen who, together with their mounts, were heavily armed and armoured in a manner which was probably derived from the Persians and which, a thousand years later, was to be imitated and developed in medieval chivalry. But even they were obliged to yield as groups of Constantine's strongest men advanced upon them, swinging huge iron-bound clubs at shoulder height; and when they retreated in disorder to the city walls the citizens refused to open the gates to let them in. So Turin fell; then Milan; then - though only after heavy fighting - Brescia and Verona. Constantine continued his eastward drive as far as Aquileia, not far short of Trieste; only there did he turn, swinging back through Ravenna and Modena and southward towards Rome.

  Throughout the long advance, Maxentius had remained in his capital - where, according to most of the Christian and even one or two of the pagan historians, he spent his time in ever more revolting occult practices: casting spells, calling up devils, even sacrificing unborn babies in his efforts to avoid his approaching fate. Such stories can be largely discounted; for all his faults, Maxentius had never lacked courage. Given his trusted Praetorian Prefect Ruricus Pompeianus and several excellent provincial generals (although, sadly for him, none of them proved as good as Constantine) his decision to stay in Rome had been, strategically, a perfectly sound one. But now, with Constantine's army approaching and Pompeianus killed in battle, he took personal command and marched out of the city with the last, and best, of his reserves.

  The two armies met on 28 October 312 - the seventh anniversary of Maxentius's seizure of power - at Saxa Rubra, the 'red rocks' on the Via Flaminia some seven or eight miles north-east of Rome, where the little river Cremera flows into the Tiber;1 and it was here, as later legend has it, just before or perhaps even during the battle, that Constantine experienced his famous vision. As Eusebius describes it:

  ... a most marvellous sign appeared to him from heaven, the account of which it might have been
difficult to receive with credit, had it been related by any other person. But since the victorious Emperor himself long afterwards declared it to the writer of this history when he was honoured with his acquaintance and society, and confirmed his statement by an oath, who could hesitate to accredit the relation, especially since the testimony of after-time has established its truth? He said that at about midday, when the sun was beginning to decline, he saw with his own eyes the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing the inscription Conquer by This (Hoc Vince). At this sight he himself was struck with amazement, and his whole army also.2

  Inspired, it is said, by so unmistakable an indication of divine favour, Constantine routed the army of Maxentius, driving it southward to where the Tiber takes a sharp turn to the west and is crossed by the old Milvian Bridge.3 Next to this bridge - which was extremely narrow - Maxentius had constructed another on pontoons, over which he could if necessary make an orderly retreat and which could then be broken in the middle to prevent pursuit. Over this his shattered army stampeded, the soldiers now fleeing for their lives, Constantine's men hard on their heels. They might still have escaped, had not the engineers in charge of the bridge lost their heads and drawn the bolts too early. Suddenly the whole structure collapsed, throwing hundreds of men into the fast-flowing water. Those who had not yet crossed made blindly for the old stone bridge, now their only chance of safety; but, as Maxentius had known, it was too narrow. Many were crushed to death, others fell and were trampled underfoot, still others were flung down by their own comrades into the river below. Among the last was the usurper himself, whose body was later found washed up on the bank. His severed head, stuck on a lance, was carried aloft before Constantine as he entered Rome in triumph the following day. Later it was sent on to North Africa as a warning. Meanwhile the name of Maxentius was erased from all public monuments, just as his conqueror's had been in the previous year.