Constantine the Great
Constantine I[g] (27 February c. 272 – 22 May 337), also known as Constantine the Great, was a Roman emperor from AD 306 to 337 and the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity.[h] He played a pivotal role in elevating the status of Christianity in Rome, decriminalizing Christian practice and ceasing Christian persecution in a period referred to as the Constantinian shift.[4] This initiated the cessation of the established ancient Roman religion. Constantine is also the originator of the religiopolitical ideology known as Constantinianism, which epitomizes the unity of church and state, as opposed to separation of church and state.[5] He founded the city of Constantinople and made it the capital of the Empire, which remained so for over a millenium.
"Constantine I" redirects here. For the third king of the modern Greek state, see Constantine I of Greece. For other uses, see Constantine I (disambiguation).Constantine the Great
25 July 306 – 22 May 337 (alone from 19 September 324)
Constantius I (in the West)
22 May 337 (aged 65)
Achyron, Nicomedia, Bithynia, Roman Empire
Κωνσταντῖνος
- Roman polytheism (until 312)
- Christianity (from 312)
Born in Naissus, Dacia Mediterranea (now Niš, Serbia), he was the son of Flavius Constantius, a Roman army officer of Illyrian origin who had been one of the four rulers of the Tetrarchy. His mother, Helena, was a Greek woman of low birth, probably from Asia Minor in modern Turkey. Later canonised as a saint, she is traditionally credited for the conversion of her son. Constantine served with distinction under the Roman emperors Diocletian and Galerius. He began his career by campaigning in the eastern provinces (against the Persians) before being recalled in the west (in AD 305) to fight alongside his father in the province of Britannia. After his father's death in 306, Constantine was acclaimed as augustus (emperor) by his army at Eboracum (York, England). He eventually emerged victorious in the civil wars against emperors Maxentius and Licinius to become the sole ruler of the Roman Empire by 324.
Upon his ascension, Constantine enacted numerous reforms to strengthen the empire. He restructured the government, separating civil and military authorities. To combat inflation, he introduced the solidus, a new gold coin that became the standard for Byzantine and European currencies for more than a thousand years. The Roman army was reorganised to consist of mobile units (comitatenses), often around the Emperor, to serve on campaigns against external enemies or Roman rebels, and frontier-garrison troops (limitanei) which were capable of countering barbarian raids, but less and less capable, over time, of countering full-scale barbarian invasions. Constantine pursued successful campaigns against the tribes on the Roman frontiers—such as the Franks, the Alemanni, the Goths, and the Sarmatians—and resettled territories abandoned by his predecessors during the Crisis of the Third Century with citizens of Roman culture.
Although Constantine lived much of his life as a pagan and later as a catechumen, he began to favour Christianity beginning in 312, finally becoming a Christian and being baptised by Eusebius of Nicomedia, an Arian bishop, although the Catholic Church and the Coptic Orthodox Church maintain that he was baptised by Pope Sylvester I. He played an influential role in the proclamation of the Edict of Milan in 313, which declared tolerance for Christianity in the Roman Empire. He convoked the First Council of Nicaea in 325 which produced the statement of Christian belief known as the Nicene Creed. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was built on his orders at the purported site of Jesus' tomb in Jerusalem and was deemed the holiest place in all of Christendom. The papal claim to temporal power in the High Middle Ages was based on the fabricated Donation of Constantine. He has historically been referred to as the "First Christian Emperor", but while he did favour the Christian Church, some modern scholars debate his beliefs and even his comprehension of Christianity.[i] Nevertheless, he is venerated as a saint in Eastern Christianity, and he did much to push Christianity towards the mainstream of Roman culture.
The age of Constantine marked a distinct epoch in the history of the Roman Empire and a pivotal moment in the transition from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages. He built a new imperial residence in the city of Byzantium and renamed it New Rome, later adopting the name Constantinople after himself, where it was located in modern Istanbul. It subsequently became the capital of the empire for more than a thousand years, the later Eastern Roman Empire often being referred to in English as the Byzantine Empire, a term never used by the Empire, invented by German historian Hieronymus Wolf. His more immediate political legacy was that he replaced Diocletian's Tetrarchy with the de facto principle of dynastic succession by leaving the empire to his sons and other members of the Constantinian dynasty. His reputation flourished during the lifetime of his children and for centuries after his reign. The medieval church held him up as a paragon of virtue, while secular rulers invoked him as a prototype, a point of reference, and the symbol of imperial legitimacy and identity. At the beginning of the Renaissance, there were more critical appraisals of his reign with the rediscovery of anti-Constantinian sources. Trends in modern and recent scholarship have attempted to balance the extremes of previous scholarship.
Sources[edit]
Constantine was a ruler of major importance and has always been a controversial figure.[8] The fluctuations in his reputation reflect the nature of the ancient sources for his reign. These are abundant and detailed,[9] but they have been strongly influenced by the official propaganda of the period[10] and are often one-sided;[11] no contemporaneous histories or biographies dealing with his life and rule have survived.[12] The nearest replacement is Eusebius's Vita Constantini—a mixture of eulogy and hagiography[13] written between 335 and circa 339[14]—that extols Constantine's moral and religious virtues.[15] The Vita creates a contentiously positive image of Constantine,[16] and modern historians have frequently challenged its reliability.[17] The fullest secular life of Constantine is the anonymous Origo Constantini,[18] a work of uncertain date[19] which focuses on military and political events to the neglect of cultural and religious matters.[20]
Lactantius' De mortibus persecutorum, a political Christian pamphlet on the reigns of Diocletian and the Tetrarchy, provides valuable but tendentious detail on Constantine's predecessors and early life.[21] The ecclesiastical histories of Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret describe the ecclesiastic disputes of Constantine's later reign.[22] Written during the reign of Theodosius II (r. 402–450), a century after Constantine's reign, these ecclesiastical historians obscure the events and theologies of the Constantinian period through misdirection, misrepresentation, and deliberate obscurity.[23] The contemporary writings of the orthodox Christian Athanasius and the ecclesiastical history of the Arian Philostorgius also survive, though their biases are no less firm.[24]
The epitomes of Aurelius Victor (De Caesaribus), Eutropius (Breviarium), Festus (Breviarium), and the anonymous author of the Epitome de Caesaribus offer compressed secular political and military histories of the period. Although not Christian, the epitomes paint a favourable image of Constantine but omit reference to Constantine's religious policies.[25] The Panegyrici Latini, a collection of panegyrics from the late 3rd and early 4th centuries, provides valuable information on the politics and ideology of the tetrarchic period and the early life of Constantine.[26] Contemporary architecture—such as the Arch of Constantine in Rome and palaces in Gamzigrad and Córdoba[27]—epigraphic remains, and the coinage of the era complement the literary sources.[28]