The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (9 page)

Then, in 305, there occurred an event unparalleled in the history of the Roman Empire: the voluntary abdication of an Emperor. Diocletian decided that he had had enough. He retired to the enormous palace he had built for himself at Salona (the modern Split) on the Dalmatian coast, and forced an intensely unwilling Maximian to abdicate with him. Overnight, Constantius Chlorus found himself the senior Augustus, but he was not to enjoy his inheritance for long. A few months later, on 25 July 306, he died at York, his son Constantine at his bedside. Scarcely had the breath left his body than his friend and ally, the delightfully named King Crocus of the Alemanni, acclaimed young Constantine as Augustus in his father’s stead. The local legions instantly took up the cry, clasped the imperial purple toga round his shoulders, raised him on their shields and cheered him to the echo.

At this time Constantine was in his early thirties. On his father’s side his lineage could scarcely have been more distinguished; his mother, Helena, on the other hand, far from being–as the twelfth-century Geoffrey of Monmouth (and, more recently, Evelyn Waugh) would have us believe–the daughter of Coel, mythical founder of Colchester and the Old King Cole of the nursery rhyme, was almost certainly the offspring of a humble innkeeper in Bithynia.
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(Other, less reputable historians have gone so far as to suggest 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; in 327, when she was already over seventy, this passionate Christian convert made her celebrated pilgrimage to the Holy Land, there miraculously to unearth the True Cross and thus to gain an honoured place in the calendar of saints.

But let us return to Constantine. The first thing to be said is that no ruler in all history–not Alexander nor Alfred, not Charles nor Catherine, not Frederick nor even Gregory–has ever more fully merited his title of ‘the Great’; for within the short space of some fifteen years he took two decisions, either of which, alone, would have changed the future of the civilised world. The first was to adopt Christianity–the object, only a generation previously, of persecutions under Diocletian more brutal than any that it has suffered before or since–as the official religion of the Roman Empire. The second was to transfer the capital of that empire from Rome to the new city which he was building on the site of the old Greek settlement of Byzantium and which was to be known, for the next sixteen centuries, by his own name: the city of Constantine, Constantinople. Together, these two decisions and their consequences have given him a serious claim to be considered–excepting only Jesus Christ, the Prophet Mohammed and the Buddha–the most influential man who ever lived.

Immediately after his acclamation, Constantine had naturally sent word to his co-Augustus Galerius, now ruling from Nicomedia (the modern Izmit) across the Bosphorus; but Galerius, while very reluctantly agreeing to acknowledge him as a Caesar, refused point-blank to recognise him as an Augustus, having already appointed a certain Valerius Licinianus, called Licinius, one of his old drinking companions. Constantine did not seem particularly worried. Perhaps he did not yet feel ready for the supreme power; at all events, he remained in Gaul and Britain for another six years, governing the two provinces on the whole wisely and well. Only after the death of Galerius in 311 did he begin preparations to assert his claim, and not until the summer of 312 did he move across the Alps against the first and most immediately dangerous of his rivals, his brother-in-law Maxentius, son of Diocletian’s old colleague the Emperor Maximian.
³⁴

The two armies met on 28 October 312 on the Via Flaminia, some seven or eight miles northeast of Rome where the Tiber is crossed by the old Ponte Milvio.
³⁵
This Battle of the Milvian Bridge is principally remembered now for the legend related by Constantine’s contemporary, Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea–who claims to have heard it from the Emperor himself–according to which

at about midday, just as 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.
³⁶

Inspired, it is said, by this vision, Constantine soundly defeated the army of his brother-in-law and put it to flight, driving it southward towards the old bridge. This was extremely narrow, and Maxentius had somewhat pessimistically constructed next to it another, broader one on pontoons, on which he could if necessary make an orderly retreat and which could then be broken in the middle to prevent pursuit. Over this the remains of his shattered army stampeded, and all might yet have been well had not the engineers in charge of the bridge lost their heads and drawn the bolts too soon. Suddenly the whole structure collapsed, hurling hundreds of men into the fast-flowing water. Those who had not yet crossed made wildly for the old stone bridge, but this too proved fatal. Such was its narrowness that many were crushed to death, others were trampled underfoot, still others flung down by their own comrades into the river below. Among the last was Maxentius himself, whose body was later found washed up on the bank. His severed head, impaled on a lance, was carried aloft before Constantine as he entered Rome the following day.

His victory at the Milvian Bridge made Constantine absolute master of the western world from the Atlantic to the Adriatic, from Hadrian’s Wall to the Atlas Mountains. Whether it also achieved his conversion to Christianity is unclear; it certainly marked the point at which he set himself up as protector and active patron of his Christian subjects. On his return to Rome he immediately subsidised from his private purse twenty-five already existing churches and several new ones; he presented the newly elected Pope Melchiades with the old house of the Laterani family on the Coelian hill, which was to remain a papal palace for another thousand years; and next to it he ordered the building, once again at his own expense, of the first of Rome’s great Constantinian basilicas, St John Lateran, still today the cathedral church of the city. It is all the more surprising to find his coins for another twelve years associating him not with Christianity but with the then popular cult of
Sol Invictus
, the Unconquered Sun, and refusing to accept Christian baptism, which he was to continue to postpone until he was on his deathbed a quarter of a century later.

This same note of caution is evident in the Edict of Milan, which Constantine promulgated jointly with his fellow Augustus (and by now another brother-in-law)
³⁷
Licinius in 313, describing its purpose as that of

securing respect and reverence for the Deity; namely by the grant, both to the Christians and to all others, of the right freely to follow whatever form of worship might please them, to the intent that
whatsoever Divinity
dwells in heaven
[my italics] might be favourable to us and to all those living under our authority.

The two Augusti might have spoken with one voice on religious toleration, but they agreed on little else, and another ten years of civil war were necessary before Constantine could finally eliminate his last rival. Not until 323 was he able to establish peace throughout the Empire, under his rule alone.

Constantine by now seems to have been a Christian in all but name, but at this point the Christian Church was split by the first great schism in its history. This was the work of a certain Arius, presbyter of Alexandria, who held that Jesus Christ was not co-eternal and of one substance with God the Father, but had been created by Him at a certain time as His instrument for the salvation of the world. Thus, although a perfect man, the Son must always be subordinate to the Father, his nature being human rather than divine. The ensuing dispute quickly became a
cause célèbre
, which Constantine resolved to settle. He did so by summoning the first universal Council of the Church, which was held between 20 May and 19 June 325 at Nicaea (the modern Iznik), with some 300 bishops taking part. The proceedings were opened by the Emperor himself, and it was he who proposed the insertion, into the draft statement of belief, of the key word
homoousios
–meaning consubstantial, ‘of one substance’–to describe the relation of the Son to the Father. Its inclusion was almost tantamount to a condemnation of Arianism, and such were the Emperor’s powers of persuasion that by the close of the conference only seventeen of the assembled bishops maintained their opposition–a number that the threat of exile and possible excommunication subsequently reduced to two.

But Arius fought on. It was not until 336, during a final investigation of his beliefs, that

made bold by the protection of his followers, engaged in a light-hearted and foolish conversation, he was suddenly compelled by a call of nature to retire; and immediately, as it is written, ‘falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out’.
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This story, it must be admitted, comes from the pen of Arius’s leading opponent, Archbishop Athanasius of Alexandria, but the unattractive circumstances of his demise are too well attested by contemporary writers to be open to serious question. Inevitably, they were attributed to divine retribution: the archbishop’s biblical reference is to the somewhat similar fate which befell Judas Iscariot.

Constantine’s dream of spiritual harmony throughout Christendom was not to be achieved in his lifetime; indeed, we are still awaiting it today.

When Constantine first set eyes on Byzantium, the city was already nearly a thousand years old. According to tradition, it was founded in 658
BC
by a certain Byzas as a colony of Megara; there can, at any rate, be little doubt that a small Greek settlement was flourishing on the site by the beginning of the sixth century
BC
, and none at all that the Emperor was right to choose it for his new capital. Rome had long been a backwater; none of Diocletian’s four tetrarchs had dreamed of living there. The principal dangers to imperial security were now concentrated on the eastern frontier: the Sarmatians around the lower Danube, the Ostrogoths to the north of the Black Sea and–most menacing of all–the Persians, whose great Sassanian Empire now extended from the former Roman provinces of Armenia and Mesopotamia as far as the Hindu Kush. But the reasons for the move were not only strategic. The whole focus of civilisation had shifted irrevocably eastward. Intellectually and culturally, Rome was growing more and more out of touch with the new and progressive thinking of the Hellenistic world; the Roman academies and libraries were no longer any match for those of Alexandria, Pergamum or Antioch. Economically, too, the agricultural and mineral wealth of what was known as the
pars orientalis
was a far greater attraction than the Italian peninsula, where malaria was spreading fast and populations were dwindling. Finally, the old Roman republican and pagan traditions had no place in Constantine’s new Christian empire. It was time to start afresh.

The advantages of Byzantium as a strategic site over any of its oriental neighbours were also self-evident. Standing as it did on the very threshold of Asia and occupying the easternmost tip of a broad, roughly triangular promontory, its south side washed by the Propontis (which we call the Sea of Marmara) and its northeast by that broad, deep and navigable inlet, some five miles long, known since remotest antiquity as the Golden Horn, it had been moulded by nature at once into a magnificent harbour and a well-nigh impregnable stronghold, needing major fortification only on its western side. Even an attack from the sea would be difficult enough, the Marmara itself being protected by two long and narrow straits: the Bosphorus to the east and the Hellespont (or Dardanelles) to the west. No wonder that the people of Chalcedon, who only seventeen years earlier had founded their city on the flat and featureless shore opposite, became proverbial for their blindness.

Constantine spared no pains to make his new capital worthy of its name. Tens of thousands of artisans and labourers worked day and night. On a site on the old acropolis–formerly occupied by a shrine of Aphrodite–rose the first great church of the city, St Irene, dedicated not to any saint or martyr but to the Holy Peace of God. A few years later it was to be joined–and overshadowed–by its larger and still more splendid neighbour St Sophia, the Church of the Holy Wisdom. A quarter of a mile away towards the Marmara stood the immense Hippodrome, the Emperor’s box having direct access to the imperial palace behind it. All the leading cities of Europe and Asia, including Rome itself, were plundered of their finest statues, trophies and works of art for the embellishment and enrichment of Constantinople. At last all was ready, and on Monday, 11 May 330, the Emperor attended a mass in St Irene, at which he formally dedicated the city to the Virgin. On that day the Byzantine Empire was born.

And yet in fact there had been no real change. To its subjects it was still the Roman Empire, that of Augustus and Trajan and Hadrian. And they were still Romans. Their capital had been moved, that was all; nothing else was affected. Over the centuries, surrounded as they were by the Greek world, it was inevitable that they should gradually abandon the Latin language in favour of the Greek, but that made no difference either. It was as Romans that they proudly described themselves for as long as the empire lasted, and when, 1,123 years after its foundation, that empire finally fell, it was as Romans that they died.