by Baker, Simon
From his imperial palace at Trier Constantine had kept a close eye on these events. To maintain his position in a rapidly shifting balance of power, he had even made an alliance with Maxentius and his father. It was sealed by Constantine’s marriage to Fausta, Maxentius’s sister. All too soon, though, the alliance between the three men broke down in the most spectacular way. First, Maxentius was declared a tyrant and a usurper (with Constantine, Daia, Galerius and a new appointee, Licinius, agreed as the legitimate holders of power). Maximian broke away from his son, but soon, in one last throw of the dice, turned against his son-in-law too and sought to win imperial power in the west for himself. This rebellion now forced Constantine to enter the civil war for the first time. At Arles in Gaul he defeated Maximian, who promptly hanged himself. The response of Maxentius to the news of his father’s death was unequivocal. First he ordered the deification of Maximian, then he smashed down the statues and images of Constantine, the icons by which he was recognized as a legitimate emperor, and thus declared war on his former ally. He wanted, he said, revenge for the death of his father.11
In 311 Galerius died, and with him the last vestiges of the tetrarchy. The end met by this famous persecutor of the Christians was gruesomely celebrated by the historian Eusebius. Suppurating inflammations and ulcers infested the genitals of the obese emperor. His sick, lumpen body stank. The doctors who were unable to cure him were summarily executed.12 Was he being punished for his sins against the Christians? This was perhaps the conclusion drawn by Galerius himself: in his last edict, made in his final few days, he renounced the policy of Christian persecution. The tide was turning. But little did he know quite how spectacularly that reversal would soon be transformed into one of the most important revolutions in all history.
Galerius’s death left Daia and Licinius disputing control of the east. In the west, two key protagonists also walked the stage: the usurper Maxentius and his brother-in-law Constantine. Constantine was determined that the job of ruling the western half of the Roman empire fell to him alone. However, he wanted to fight on the side of legitimacy and right. His publicly stated aim was to ‘avenge the state against the tyrant and all his faction’. Indeed, his biographer and Christian panegyrist, Eusebius, described Constantine’s war as a ‘task of liberation’.13
In reality, Constantine simply wanted to eliminate his rivals. Out of the shambles of the tetrarchy, he would make his bid for sole power. From the seed of that self-interest and ambition, however, would grow one of the most significant moments in European history. The outcome of the war for the west would not only decide the fate of the Roman empire – it would alter the fate of the world.
MILVIAN BRIDGE
Rumours were leaking out of the city of Rome, and they were playing right into the hands of Constantine. The tyrant and usurper Maxentius was the epitome of pure evil, they said, a practiser of witchcraft, a sacrificer of humans. He liked to abduct and rape married women. On one occasion, the city prefect was bullied into allowing Praetorian officers to seize his own wife so that she might become another of Maxentius’s victims. But by the time the guardsmen broke down her door, they found she had stabbed herself to death rather than give up her chastity to the self-proclaimed emperor. Maxentius was just as brutal with the citizens of Rome as a whole: when they rioted, he did not flinch in response, but sent in the Praetorians to massacre them. This at least is the portrait of Maxentius given by Eusebius.14 His Christian-biased work, written more than twenty-five years after the events described, and designed to exalt Constantine by comparison with his enemies, should be taken with a large pinch of salt. The fact remains that in the prelude to war in 312 Maxentius had successfully held on to power in Rome for six years. He must have been doing something right.
Maxentius knew how to make Romans feel good about themselves again. In 306 Rome was in decline, a shadow of its former glorious self. The four emperors barely set foot in the city. As they travelled between the new imperial cities closer to the frontiers of the empire, Rome was ignored because it was off the beaten track. In fact, the people of Rome and Italy could complain that they were being treated like just another province. The year before Maxentius came to power, Italians had lost the privileged tax-free status they had enjoyed for nearly five hundred years. The senators of Rome too had had to make a considerable mental adjustment to the times they lived in: the Senate and the emperor had drifted apart; the senators were eclipsed by the army. Indeed, it was from the military hierarchy on the battlefields of provincial frontiers rather than in the Senate House of Rome that emperors were now made. Romans felt increasingly as though they were living not in the great imperial capital of a brilliant empire, but in a backwater, a heritage town for tourists, and one decidedly lacking vibrancy.15 That is until Maxentius began his campaign. His was an unashamedly pro-Roman ticket.
Coins from his illegitimate reign show how he wanted to restore Rome to glory. His political slogan was Romanitas (Roman-ness). As a pagan, he appealed to Rome’s religious past. It was, after all, the home of all the gods that Romans had collected from all corners of the empire. Everywhere people walked within the city were rich layers of this extraordinary heritage: in addition to the centuries-old temples, statues, altars and imperial mausolea, there were shrines devoted to particular local deities on street corners in every neighbourhood. Maxentius not only rejuvenated pride in Rome’s old history, but also encouraged it by giving the city a new look. He was a prolific builder, authorizing a new palace complex near the Appian Way, an enormous hippodrome capable of seating 15,000 spectators, and, his greatest architectural feat, the Basilica Nova. Decorated with marble and detailed stucco mouldings, this government hall could boast of being the city’s largest vaulted building. By leaving his stamp on Rome in this way, Maxentius tried to secure his legitimacy as emperor in the west. By 312, however, his appeal was wearing thin.
The buildings he erected cost a fortune. In addition, he had to find the money to maintain the armies with which he had fended off attempts by the legitimate emperors to unseat him. But it was money that Rome did not have. The city, ruled by a usurper, was effectively cut off from the resources of the rest of the empire. As a result, Romans were forced to live on their own means; revenues from the provinces dried up. To make ends meet Maxentius taxed the whole population and forced senators and landowners to contribute gifts of money to the treasury. Making matters worse, another usurper, Domitius Alexander, had taken control of North Africa, thus eliminating Rome’s primary source of grain. Food shortages provoked riots, and the full force of the protesters’ anger was directed at Maxentius. To maintain control of the city, Maxentius was repressive, and the city of Rome came to resemble more a police state than a glorious reincarnation of the Eternal City. To one man, however, the growing chaos in Rome was wonderful news. This was the man whom Maxentius called the ‘son of a whore’; the man whose effigies he jealously destroyed; the man he hated for causing his father’s death. This was the man who was now crossing the Alps with an army to ‘liberate’ and ‘rescue’ suffering Rome.
Constantine’s advisers had not set the best of moods for their general’s campaign. Under the influence of pagan priests, they were fearful and hesitant, warning Constantine that the invasion of Italy did not bode well. They had their reasons: they could point to the fact that Constantine had left three-quarters of his army to protect the Rhine frontier from invasion by the Franks, and that he was intending to face the 100,000-strong army of Maxentius (inflated with auxiliaries from Sicily and Africa) with, according to our earliest source, just 40,000 men.16
Constantine, in response, disagreed. His soldiers might be outnumbered but, after the wars in Gaul and Britain, they had the advantage of being battle-hardened and fit for war. It was an advantage that would prove to be highly effective. After negotiating the Mount Cenis pass, Constantine and his army entered Italy and promptly defeated the three armies that Maxentius had sent to resist him. By October, Constantine had followed the route of
the Flaminian Way and drawn up his troops 15 kilometres (9 miles) north of Rome at Saxa Rubra (Red Rocks). However, the composition of the army that pitched camp there was a little unusual.
In addition to officers and military advisers, Constantine’s close entourage also included Christians. Although Maxentius, despite his depiction by Eusebius in the Life of Constantine, was not a vehement persecutor of them, Christians had their reasons for hating him. He had banished three bishops from Rome and had failed to restore property that had been confiscated during Diocletian’s persecution of the Christians in 303–5. By contrast, Constantine was superficially a much more sympathetic ruler. He was not a Christian, but in Britain and Gaul in 306 he had rescinded Diocletian’s edict for the destruction of churches, and had restored Christians’ right to worship.17 This attitude of tolerance made Constantine a candidate for the attention of high-ranking Christians. They had come to his imperial seat at Trier to read aloud their works, and now they formed a small group travelling with him on campaign. One of them was thought to be Ossius, the bishop of Córdoba. It is possible that another was an influential man in his seventies called Lactantius.
A North African by birth, Lucius Caelius Firmianus Lactantius had personally felt the brunt of the Christian persecutions. He had travelled earlier in life to Nicomedia, where he converted to Christianity, and was summoned to Diocletian’s court by the emperor as a teacher of Latin rhetoric. During the violence of 303–5, however, he lost his position, and in order to save his life he eventually fled to Constantine’s western court at Trier. He met the emperor, composed the Christian work called the Divine Institutes between 308 and 309 (dedicating it to Constantine) and would later become tutor to Constantine’s son Flavius Julius Crispus, whom the emperor fathered with a mistress before his marriage to Fausta. If he was indeed now in Constantine’s camp, Lactantius was probably biding his time. The Christians in the emperor’s entourage would certainly have been happy to be on his side, but they would also have been looking to improve on the footholds of influence they had established over the years. All they needed was an opportunity. Whenever and however it came, they were at last in a position to pounce.
South of Constantine’s camp, Maxentius was also surrounded by priests. But unlike those in his enemy’s camp, they were pagan priests, and, unlike the Christians, they certainly had the emperor’s full attention. On 27 October 312, the day before the two sides would join battle, Maxentius was in a panic. He was so anxious about whether he had sufficient support from the Roman people to be assured of victory that he turned to his priests and asked them to read the omens. He desperately needed his confidence to be shored up; only a sign from Rome’s traditional gods could do that. The priests cut open the belly of a young animal, delved their hands into its carcass and fingered the intestines. The news was not good.
The augury, so the story goes, indicated that the enemy of Rome would be defeated.18 The atmosphere in the temple was strained. It is reasonable to imagine that a senator or courtier in the assembled group, desperate to avert a complete collapse in the emperor’s morale, tactfully broke the ice. Surely Constantine was the enemy of Rome. Surely he would be the one to fall. That, at least, was the way Maxentius chose to interpret the priests’ announcement. The imperial court breathed a sigh of relief. Indeed, they had reason to feel confident about their prospects. In addition to their superior number of soldiers, they had devised a cunning plan to scupper Constantine’s attack on the city.
To take Rome from the north, Constantine and his army would have to cross the Tiber at Milvian Bridge. (A reconstructed version of this bridge, called the Ponto Milvia, today marks the spot where the original once stood.) Maxentius and his military advisers now made this the central plank of their defence of the city. Maxentius ordered part of the bridge to be destroyed so that the enemy could not cross easily. Alongside it, however, he ordered a temporary floating bridge to be constructed. Crucially, it was made of two parts fastened in the middle by removable iron pins. Maxentius’s forces would come out along this bridge and face Constantine. However, should Constantine’s army force Maxentius back into the city, the defenders of Rome would be able to cross back over the river and then rely on a devastating counter-attack: they would quickly unfasten the pins, watch the makeshift bridge slide apart and thus prevent Constantine from pursuing them. From the Rome-side banks of the Tiber, Maxentius and his advisers believed, they would watch the enemies of Rome fall like lemmings into the river.19
As potentially brilliant as this secret weapon was, Constantine and his army were about to gain their very own psychological advantage. That advantage would spectacularly transform the chances of the outnumbered, anxious Constantine. It would go down in history as one of the most pivotal moments in history, but also one of the most controversial.
Some time before battle was joined, Constantine had a vision. According to Eusebius, at midday, under a bright blue sky, the general saw a shining cross, and inscribed upon it, an instruction: ‘By this sign, you will conquer!’ Another account elaborates: Christ himself appeared with the cross and the order to be victorious was sung by angels.20
Modern historians, suspicious of the fact that Eusebius described the extraordinary moment in great detail in his Life of Constantine, but failed even to mention it in his Church History, have suggested more rational explanations. Perhaps the vision was a natural astronomical event that produced a ‘halo phenomenon’; perhaps Constantine saw a meteor (there is evidence that one landed in this region of Italy at this time). Exactly what he saw, however, is perhaps less important than how he interpreted it. Desperately seeking an explanation, Constantine turned to the Christian priests in his entourage. Whoever was present, be it Bishop Ossius or Lactantius, they now saw an opportunity and seized it with both hands. This, they said, was a sign from God. It was a sign that He was divinely choosing Constantine to defeat the tyrant Maxentius.21
According to Eusebius, Constantine now became convinced that they were speaking the truth. Perhaps he was simply ready and willing to convert. For all his military achievements of the past, he knew he was now facing the most daunting battle of his life. He was leading his soldiers against a vastly superior force and bidding to take the one city that no foreign invader, not even Hannibal, had yet conquered. He needed to put his trust in somebody or something. He needed to know that in return for his devotion there was a god protecting him and his army. Apollo and the monotheistic cult of the Unconquerable Sun had once performed that role: two years earlier Constantine had had another vision in a sanctuary of Apollo in Gaul or Britain.22 Accordingly, after 310 Constantine had his coins stamped with Sol Invictus. But now that pagan deity was being replaced in his thinking by God. For after his spiritual experience before the battle, when he turned to his advisers, he found that this experience was most plausibly explained by the Christians. Constantine was won over.
The Christian priests must not have been able to believe their extraordinary luck. By being in the company of someone who was leaning towards a religious conversion, they had been in the right place at the right time. At last they were not only being listened to by an emperor of Rome, but also obeyed by him.
Constantine wasted no time. Just before battle he made a radical, last-minute change of plan. He ordered all the soldiers to mark their shields in white paint with a sign made up of two Greek letters, chi-rho (XP), the cipher of Jesus Christ. (According to Lactantius, writing four years after the event, Constantine had been given this instruction in a dream before the battle.) Although some of the men would have been Christians, it is likely that the majority were not, so there must have been shock that their commander was asking them to follow him in abandoning the traditional gods. Indeed, at the critical moment before war, when their fears were at their greatest and their superstitions most pronounced, their leader’s command must have induced even more terror. It is possible that Constantine went as far as ordering the metalsmiths in his army to adjust the old Roman standards. Even
the defining, talismanic symbol of the pagan Roman army was perhaps adapted to signify the cross.23 The general was determined to take the greatest gamble of his life: to fight the battle under the sign and protection of God.
On 28 October 312 the forces of Constantine and Maxentius collided on a broad plain in front of Milvian Bridge. Maxentius had originally decided to remain in the city, but, buoyed up by his priests’ good augury, he too crossed the Tiber over the provisional wooden bridge along with his men. His fragile morale was immediately challenged, however, when he noticed numerous owls landing on the walls of the city.24 That omen was a fitting symbol of the events that followed. The broad, spacious plain favoured Constantine’s cavalry. Sweeping up along the flanks of the enemy, they threw Maxentius’s army into utter confusion. The fact was that its commitment to fighting for Maxentius had never been resolute. Those soldiers who did put up a fight were trampled underfoot by horses or routed by the following infantry. Slowly but surely, the army of Constantine forced the defenders of Rome back against the Tiber.
With a sudden, collective failure of heart, Maxentius’s troops turned and fled, their general running away faster than any of them. At least, the men perhaps consoled themselves, they could reach their makeshift bridge and make the city their bolt-hole. But Maxentius and his generals had wildly misjudged the effectiveness of their plan B. The temporary bridge could not take the weight of the stampeding survivors from his massive army, and the engineers in charge of unfastening the bolts panicked. Whether spurred by fear or sheer incompetence, they released the metal fastenings too early.
