The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 (4 page)

The truth is probably rather more complicated: that while Constantine felt a genuine sympathy towards Christianity and genuinely believed the God of the Christians to have been responsible for his mystical experience (whatever that may have been) on the way to the Milvian Bridge, he was not yet ready to embrace the Christian religion
in toto.
While by now almost certainly accepting the concept of the
Summus
Dens,
the Supreme God, he was perfectly ready to believe that this God might manifest himself in several different forms: as Apollo, or
Sol Invictus,
or Mithras (whose cult was still popular, especially in the army), or indeed the God of the Christians. Of all these manifestations he may have preferred the last, but as a universal ruler, feeling himself to be above all sects and hierarchies, he saw no reason not to keep his options open.

And the Roman Senate agreed with him. To celebrate his victory over Maxentius and his re-establishment of law, order and the imperial administration in the city, they erected in his honour the great triumphal arch that still stands a little to the south-west of the Colosseum. Much of its relief decoration is in fact reused, having previously served as part of various earlier monuments dedicated to Domitian, Trajan, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius; Gibbon describes the whole structure as 'a melancholy proof of the decline of the arts, and a singular testimony of the meanest vanity'. The inscription, however, dates explicitly from the time of Constantine. In translation, it reads:

to the emperor caesar flaviu
s constantine who being instinct with divinity and by the greatness of his spirit avenged the state in a just war on the tyrant and all his party.

Instinctu divinitatis:
the phrase is a curious one, and must have been deliberately chosen for its ambiguity. There is no mention of Christ, nor of the Cross; no indication, even, of the precise divinity referred to. Yet Constantine must certainly have approved the text before it was passed to the stone-carvers. It is only natural that he should have been treading warily, as doubtless were the senators who drafted the inscription in the first place; one suspects, none the less, that his approval was not unwillingly given, since he himself had as yet made no final commitment to any one god.
Instinctu divinitatis:
he could not have put it better himself.

Apart from the triumphal arch - and the colossal statue of the seated Emperor, seven times life-size, which was placed in the remodelled (and hastily renamed) Basilica of Maxentius and of which the terrifying, staring, nine-ton head survives in the Capitoline Museum - the Roman Senate showed to Constantine, during the last two months of
312,
one further mark of favour. They proclaimed him Supreme Augustus. It was in this capacity that he left the city in early January
313
for Milan, where he had arranged to meet Licinius.

The Augusti had three principal issues to discuss. The first was the future of Italy. Theoretically it formed part of that area of the Empire which was subject to Licinius, but the latter had not raised a finger to assist Constantine in its recapture and cannot seriously have expected that his colleague would now freely hand it back to him. Next was the question of religious toleration and, in particular, the future status of the Christians. It was obvious that a single policy should prevail throughout the Empire; at the same time the elderly Licinius was unlikely to feel as well disposed towards Christianity as his fellow-Emperor, and some sort of understanding would have to be reached between them. Finally there came the problem created by the third living Augustus, Maximin Daia.

This odious young man - the exact date of his birth is unknown, but he seems still to have been in his early thirties - had started making trouble in
310
when, after five years as a Caesar, he had demanded the rank of Augustus. His uncle Galerius, sadly aware that with Constantine, Maximian and Maxentius all having claimed the title in the recent past it was in danger of becoming seriously devalued, had refused point-blank, offering him instead that of
Filius Augusti;
but Maximin Daia had angrily rejected this belittling alternative and had assumed the Augustan attributes of his own accord. On Galerius's death he had seized the Eastern Empire as far as the Hellespont, from which point of vantage he had made continual trouble for Licinius in Thrace until, in the winter of 3
11—12
on a barge in the middle of the Bosphorus, the two had patched up an uneasy truce. Moreover, he loathed Christianity. He had blatandy ignored his uncle's Edict of Toleration in
311
and was still wallowing in Christian blood - even on occasion sending his soldiers in pursuit of Christian refugees over the imperial borders into Armenia, whose King was consequently on the point of declaring war against him.

The talks between the two Emperors passed off amicably enough. Licinius seems to have accepted with a good grace that Constantine should keep the territories that he had conquered, and was duly married - according to what rite is unfortunately not recorded - to Constantia.

313

Where the Christians were concerned, the new brothers-in-law agreed the final text of a further edict, confirming that of Galerius and granting Christianity full legal recognition throughout the Empire. Before this could be promulgated, however, news reached Milan that brought the meeting to an abrupt and premature end: Maximin Daia had broken the truce of the previous winter, crossed the straits with an army - estimated by Lactantius at
70,000
- and seized the little town of Byzantium on the European shore. Licinius moved fast. Taking the small force that he had with him at Milan, summoning reinforcements to join him in Illyria and Thrace and picking up what further units he could along his route, he left immediately for the East. By late April we find him a few miles from Heraclea Propontis, another small settlement on the Marmara to which Maximin was laying siege; and on the last day of the month the two armies met at a spot known as the Serene Fields, some eighteen miles outside the town.

Outnumbered though he was, well past his own youth and with his men exhausted from the length and speed of their march, Licinius proved by far the more brilliant general of the two. Maximin's army was ignominiously routed, he himself fleeing from the field disguised as a slave. He finally made his way to Cilicia, where he died the following year - as disagreeably, Lactantius is happy to inform us, as his fellow-persecutors:

He swallowed poison
...
which began to burn up everything within him, so that he was driven to distraction by the intolerable pain; and during a fit of frenzy, which lasted four days, he gathered handfuls of earth, and greedily devoured it. After various excruciating torments he dashed his forehead against the wall, and his eyes started out of their sockets
...
In the end he acknowledged his own guilt and implored Christ to have mercy on him. Then, amidst groans like those of one burnt alive, did he breathe out his guilty soul in the most horrible kind of death.
1

Licinius, meanwhile, had made his triumphal entry into the eastern capital, Nicomedia - where, somewhat belatedly on
13
June, he promulgated the edict on which he and Constantine had agreed at Milan:

When I, Constantine Augustus, and I, Licinius Augustus, had come under happy auspices to Milan, and conferred together on all matters that concerned the public advantage and welfare
...
we resolved to make such decrees as should secure respect and reverence for the Deity; namely to grant both to the

1 Lactantius,
De Mortibus Perse
cutorum,
Chap. xlix.

Christians and to all others the right freely to follow whatever form of worship might please them, to the intent that whatsoever Divinity dwells in heaven might be favourable to us and to all those living under our authority.
1

Here, once again, is a text that bears all the signs of cautious drafting. Still we find no mention of Jesus Christ, only of 'the Christians' as a sect; and - although they are the only group specifically named - it is made abundantly clear that 'all others' (the Manicheans, for example) are also included in what is, in effect, a general edict of toleration. As to the reference to 'whatsoever Divinity dwells in heaven'
(
quo quicquid est divinitatis),
this phrase may have been insisted on by the pagan Licinius; but a comparison with the inscription on the triumphal arch suggests that it probably corresponded fairly closely with Constantine's own thinking. In one respect only does the ordinance discriminate in favour of the Christians: they alone are to have restored to them all their property - land, churches and chattels - confiscated during the Persecutions. But, it should be remembered, no other sect had suffered comparable losses.

The removal of Maximin Daia had the effect of polarizing the Empire. Once again there were only two Augusti, Constantine in the West and Licinius in the East - where he immediately instituted a reign of terror. Not only were all his predecessor's chief ministers executed; so too were numerous members of Maximin's family - which, in view of the various marriage alliances concluded among past Augusti and their Caesars, included the families of Diocletian and Galerius. Even the latter's widow Valeria, even his mother-in-law Prisca, Diocletian's widow whom Galerius had entrusted on his deathbed to Licinius's care, were shown no mercy; both were arrested in their homes at Thessalonica and put to the sword.

The reason for this blood-bath was not simply vengeance, nor yet vindictiveness; it was the conviction on the part of Licinius that there was room in the Empire for one ruling family only - the family of Constantine, of which he himself, since his marriage to Constantia, was a member. This conviction did not, however, bind him closer to his co-Augustus; indeed, the honeymoon inaugurated at Milan was to prove all too short. Within six months of the two Emperors' departure from the city, Licinius had entered into a conspiracy against Constantine - though

i Lactantius,
De Mortibus Persecutorum,
Chap, xlviii.

32O

fortunately it was brought to light before any harm was done. Soon afterwards, in the early summer of
314,
he ordered the removal of all his colleague's statues and portraits from the town of Aemona - now Ljubljana - on the border of the Italian Province.

It was, in effect, a declaration of war. Constantine, who had returned to Gaul, immediately marched south-east with some
30,000
men into the Pannonian plain, to meet his adversary near Cibalae - the present Vinkovci - in the Sava Valley. The battle was joined before dawn on the morning of
8
October: Licinius fought with determination and courage but was finally obliged to yield, his retreating army being pursued by Constantine right across the Balkan peninsula to Byzantium. There at last the two Emperors came to an understanding: Licinius agreed to give up all his dominions in eastern Europe - they included Pannonia and the whole of what we now know as the Balkans - with the single exception of Thrace; in return, Constantine undertook to recognize his authority throughout Asia, Libya and Egypt.

The two Emperors were friends again; but they did not remain so for long. Indeed, the story of the next decade is one of a steady deterioration in the relations between them. In
317
Constantine named his two young sons - Crispus, the fourteen-year-old child of his marriage to his first wife Minervina, and another Constantine, the infant son of the Empress Fausta, who was hardly out of his cradle - as joint Caesars of the West; simultaneously, Licinius at Nicomedia conferred the same rank on his own natural son, Licinianus; but these moves were doubtless concerted in advance and do not necessarily reflect any particular rivalry. By the following year, however, Constantine had moved his court from Sirmium to Serdica, the modern Sofia - a curious choice of capital for a ruler whose domains extended to the Straits of Gibraltar and beyond, and one which was logically justifiable only on the assumption that it was from the Eastern Empire, rather than from the Gauls or the Franks or the Donatists in North Africa, that trouble was to be expected.

In fact, that trouble was to be largely of Constantine's making. His apologists do their best to lay the blame on Licinius for his duplicity and faithlessness as well as for his undeniably growing hostility to the Christian religion: from
320
or thereabouts he imposed a ban on all episcopal synods, expelled a large number of bishops and priests (though by no means all of them) and dismissed from his household staff all who would not sacrifice to the pagan gods. By now, however, it was becoming clear that Constantine was determined to put an end to Diocletian's disastrous division of the Empire and to rule it alone. From
320,
in defiance of recent tradition, he did not even include an easterner as one of the two annually elected Consuls, naming instead himself and his younger son; in
321
both his sons were named.
1
That same year he began to gather together a huge war fleet, and to enlarge and deepen the harbour at Thessalonica in readiness for its reception.

Licinius also began to prepare for war, and for some time the two Augusti watched each other, waiting. In the autumn of
322,
however, while repelling an attack by the Sarmatians - a nomadic barbarian tribe normally inhabiting the regions north of the lower Danube - Constantine, inadvertently or otherwise, led his army into Thrace. Licinius made a violent protest, claiming that this was a deliberate infringement of his territory for purposes of reconnaissance, and an obvious prelude to a full-scale invasion; he then advanced, with a force estimated at some
170,000,
up to Adrianople - the modern Edirne. When Constantine marched, he would be ready to receive him.

It was in the last week of June
323
that the army of the West crossed the Thracian border; and on
3
July, on a broad, sloping plain just outside Adrianople, it found itself confronted by that of the East. Constantine's force was slightly the smaller of the two; but it was largely composed of hardened veterans, who had little difficulty in wearing down their comparatively inexperienced opponents. Once again Licinius fought with conspicuous courage, ordering a retreat only when some
34,000
of his men lay dead on the field. Then he withdrew to Byzantium, just as he had done nine years before. This time, however, he sought no terms; instead, he declared Constantine deposed, named his chief minister, one Marcus Martianus, as Augustus in his place, and settled down to withstand a siege.

Constantine fox his part dug himself in - reflecting yet again, one is tempted to think, on the strategic position and superb natural defences of the little town - and waited patiently for his fleet. He had entrusted its command to his son Crispus, now a man of twenty, married and a father, with five years' campaigning experience already behind him; it consisted of some
200
thirty-oared war galleys backed up, we are told, by
2,000
transports. To defend the Hellespont, Licinius could boast a yet more

1 This dual consulate was one of the oldest and most venerable institutions of the Roman Republic, in which the Consuls were, during their year of office, the supreme civil and military magistrates of the State. By late imperial days the title had become purely honorary, with the two chosen Consuls at liberty, in Gibbon's memorable phrase, 'to enjoy the undisturbed contemplation of their own greatness'; each year, however, was known by the names of the Consuls appointed for it, and the office itself remained so elevated as to be held by only the very highest dignitaries not infrequently the
Emperors themselves: Constantine
's own consulate in 320 was in fact his sixth.

323

numerous armada of some
350
vessels under his admiral, Abantus; inexplicably, however, this man had decided to take his stand, not at the Aegean end of the strait where his superior numbers could be put to proper advantage, but at its north-eastern extremity where it widens into the Sea of Marmara. When the invasion fleet arrived, it attacked at once. The ensuing engagement lasted two full days, but at last Crispus's lighter, faster and more manoeuvrable ships, having sunk
150
of the defenders, smashed their way through and sailed on to Byzantium.

The moment he heard of their advance, Licinius slipped out of the town and crossed the Bosphorus into Asia; but Constantine was ready. Swiftly embarking his army in the newly arrived transports, he set off immediately in pursuit, and on
18
September scored another major v
ictory at Chrysopolis (now Usku
dar or, more familiarly, Scutari). Licinius hastened back to his capital at Nicomedia; great as his losses had been, his spirit was not yet broken and he had every intention of making a last stand. It was his wife who dissuaded him. If he surrendered now, she pointed out, he might yet escape with his life. The next day she herself went off to see her half-brother in his camp to plead with him on her husband's behalf.

And Constantine granted her request. He summoned Licinius, greeted him with every sign of cordiality and even invited him to dinner. Then he sent him into exile at Thessalonica, under close surveillance but in a degree of comfort appropriate to his rank. He showed similar magnanimity to his own self-styled successor Martianus, whom he simply banished to Cappadocia. Particularly in view of Licinius's conduct when he himself had taken over the Eastern Empire, such clemency was remarkable indeed; alas, it did not last. A few months later, both men were summarily put to death.

The reasons for the Emperor's sudden change of heart are unknown. It is possible, as the Christian historian Socrates asserts - though he was writing a century later - that Licinius had been up to his old tricks again and was conspiring with the barbarian tribes (presumably the Sarmatians) for Constantine's murder and his own return to power; possible, but hardly likely. A far more probable solution to the problem can be found in the words of a prayer which Constantine wrote himself at about this time and circulated throughout the Empire in the form of an encyclical letter. After a long opening section in which he describes and deplores the previous Persecutions, 'my own desire is,' he continues, 'for the general advantage of the world and all mankind, that Thy people should enjoy a life of peace and undisturbed concord.'

It was true; after the war against Licinius and for the rest of his life we find him repeating these sentiments again and again and striving continually, at whatever cost, to avoid war or anything that might lead to it. By now, however, he can have had no doubts left in his mind that, if the Roman Empire were to remain at peace, it must continue to be united under a single head; and he must strongly have suspected that Licinius would never be content to remain for long in obscurity. The Empire, in short, was not - for all its vastness - big enough for both of them; and if the promise of peace required the elimination of the only two other claimants to the title of Augustus, it was surely cheap at the price.