The palace was also an ideological statement in stone. The four parts of the palace represent the four tetrarchs, who were practically gods walking the earth. The most important of them was Diocletian, the son of Jupiter.
Maximian did not share Diocletian’s eagerness for retirement. He wanted to stay in power, and he also wanted to provide for his son, Maxentius, to succeed him. But Diocletian refused. He forced Maximian to retire and to leave out Maxentius. The two new Augusti would be Galerius in the East and Constantius in the West. The two new Caesars would be Flavius Valerius Severus and Maximinus Daia, both soldiers from the Balkans and both associated with Galerius. Daia was his nephew.
In carefully coordinated and formal ceremonies, Diocletian and Maximian each stepped down from power on the same day, May 1, 305, Diocletian in Nicomedia and Maximian in Mediolanum. They turned over their purple robes and put on the clothes of private citizens.
Each man had a new title: Senior Augustus. It was an attempt to maintain authority even from retirement, but it didn’t work.
Band of Brothers quickly turned into Game of Thrones as the four men fought. It took twenty years for a result to finally shake out, but when it did, it led to one of the biggest and most dramatic changes in the history of Western civilization.
On July 25, 306, a little more than a year after Diocletian stepped down, the western Augustus, Constantius, died. Coincidentally, he met his end in Eboracum, Britain, like Septimius Severus. Constantius’s troops immediately launched a coup d’état, one surely long in the making. Instead of accepting Diocletian’s choice of Caesar as the new ruler, they acclaimed Constantius’s son, Constantine, as Augustus. Constantine treated the acclamation as a bargaining chip. After a deal with Galerius, he accepted the lesser title of Caesar instead of Augustus, but it was still a big step up for him.
The next problem for Diocletian’s succession plans came a few months later. On October 28 the city of Rome effectively rose in revolt, fueled in large part by anger over an attempt to tax ordinary people. The Praetorian Guard, in a move reminiscent of bygone days, roared again and chose an emperor. They declared Maxentius, son of the retired Augustus Maximian, as new emperor. They gave him the now-antiquated title of Princeps (First Citizen). Maxentius called his father out of retirement and declared him Augustus once more.
To widen his son’s circle of supporters, Maximian arranged a strategic marriage. He gave the hand of his daughter to Constantine and recognized him as Augustus. In return, Constantine recognized Maximian as Augustus and also recognized Maxentius as Caesar.
What followed would confuse even the most dedicated observer. Maxentius was married to Galerius’s daughter, but Galerius violently opposed the young man’s power play. From his base in the East, Galerius sent Severus to Italy to fight Maxentius, but Severus lost and was captured, imprisoned, and eventually executed. Galerius attacked next and also failed, but at least he escaped. Meanwhile, Maximian fell out with Maxentius. This ugly quarrel led to a failed attempt by the father to remove his son from office in 308.
At this point, Maximian made the appeal to Diocletian with which this chapter began. In November 308 they both attended a conference at Carnuntum. There Maximian tried to convince Diocletian to return to power. The former emperor wisely declined. He referred to his vegetables as a reason for returning to safety in the walls of his fortified palace, where he could influence events from behind the scenes. Maximian had to abdicate as Augustus for a second time, but he still itched for power. Now he quarreled with his son-in-law Constantine and even tried to assassinate him. That was enough for Constantine, and in 310 he forced Maximian to take his own life.
Meanwhile, Galerius wasn’t idle. He tried to improve his position both through propaganda and dynastic maneuvering. Although Diocletian never gave his wife, Aurelia Prisca, the title of Augusta, Galerius now bestowed it on his wife, Valeria, Diocletian’s daughter. He also named a province after her. Galerius wanted to flaunt his superiority over his fellow rulers, but they, of course, didn’t agree.
That same year, 308, Galerius appointed yet another Balkan soldier as Augustus in the West, in the hope that he could finally pry power from Maxentius in Rome. A longtime army comrade of Galerius and one of his generals in the war against Persia, his name was Valerius Licinianus Licinius. He was, as usual, a poor boy from the Balkans who had climbed the military ranks. But not even an experienced commander could breach Rome’s mighty walls, and he did not succeed in removing Maxentius.
Galerius, however, would die of cancer by the end of 311. Before he died, he canceled his measures against Christians, though others would continue them. Why Galerius yielded is unclear, but some said that his illness made him rethink his certainty that the Christian god lacked power.
Four men now claimed to rule part of the Roman Empire: Constantine, Maxentius, Licinius, and Daia. Their struggles will be resolved in the next chapter. In the meantime, consider the fate of Diocletian and his family.
How and when Diocletian died is unclear. His life ended sometime between 311 and 313, either by illness or suicide. Following his death, both his widow and his daughter—the widow of Galerius—were murdered. Diocletian was unable to ensure his family’s safety, but he had saved the empire and reorganized the government.
Not since Augustus had anyone changed the Roman government so dramatically. Diocletian laid down a precedent for dividing the government of the empire. True, the tetrarchy, or rule by four, did not long survive his retirement. By the same token, for most of the fourth century, two men at a time ruled the empire rather than one, which concedes Diocletian’s point that Rome’s problems were too big for one man to handle.
Diocletian also ended the power of the city of Rome. Never again would it serve as the empire’s capital. Like Diocletian, most emperors would now come from the Balkans and from the military, further weakening ties to the Eternal City.
Thanks to Diocletian, Rome’s army was better funded and more thoroughly deployed on the borders, with a new network of roads and forts. He also bought two generations of peace with Persia in the East. Also thanks to Diocletian, imperial administration was bigger and more intrusive than ever. To finance all of this, Diocletian increased the burden of taxation. He strengthened and codified a process that tied peasants to the land.
So much for his successes; there were failures, too. Despite his violent efforts, Diocletian did not stop the growth of Christianity. Nor did he succeeded in putting the empire in the hands of his son-in-law and his family. Enemies were on the rise, and not even the solid walls of his palace would save his family from them.
The man who would ultimately triumph as Diocletian’s successor, Constantine, marked less of a break than it might seem. As the first Christian emperor, it is true, Constantine represents a stark change. But he behaved much like Diocletian with respect to government, the military, and the economy. Constantine founded a dynasty that was descended from two of Diocletian’s closest comrades: Constantius and Maximian. In retrospect, the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine amounted to one common enterprise to reform and thus save the Roman Empire.
Bust of Constantine.
10
CONSTANTINE
THE CHRISTIAN
In the courtyard of Rome’s Capitoline Museums, located, ironically, almost precisely on the site of the city’s holiest pagan site, there stands a colossal marble bust of Constantine, Rome’s first Christian emperor. We can’t overestimate the significance of Constantine’s conversion. In ways big and small, it changed the world. It gave us Christ as the Lord of Rome, Sunday as the day of rest, and Istanbul as Europe’s most populous city—a city that would put Rome in the shadow. In fact, the conversion is such an important moment in the next 1,700 years of European history that it is almost easier to think of Constantine as a man of the Middle Ages—the Age of Faith—than as a Roman emperor, the successor of Caesar and Augustus. But the bust reminds you that he was.
It is an impressive monument, fit for a
ruler and well known to all students of ancient history. The bust once belonged to a larger-than-life-size statue. The head alone is ten feet tall. A few other parts survive, including a veined and muscular right arm, a right hand with pointed finger, and a foot. But it is the bust that grabs our attention. Constantine looks as radically different from his predecessors as the first bearded emperor, Hadrian, once did from his.
Constantine is beardless with a dimpled chin, handsome and young, but also massive and strong. He has a full head of hair. His neck is thickly muscled. His eyes gaze upward, in search of divine inspiration. Yet, novel as these features are, they hearken back to models centuries earlier.
Constantine was every inch a Roman. He was a soldier, a statesman, and a builder. He was ruthless and single-minded, but so were most successful emperors. He was ambitious, power hungry, brilliant, subtle, spiritual, and violent. He was a warrior, an administrator, a public relations genius, and a visionary. If he had a healthy ego, that, too, was nothing new.
He compared himself to Augustus, but Augustus compared himself to Romulus, and both emperors thought of Alexander the Great as their forerunner. Like Augustus, Constantine embraced change while trying to preserve the best of the old. Like Augustus, Constantine began by employing violence and then switched mainly to peaceful and gradual methods. He paid the soldiers, but he also paid attention to women, and he followed a familiar imperial pattern in having a close relationship with his mother. He aspired to starting a dynasty, and in this, he succeeded more than most.
Constantine was both Roman and Christian. We see this in his description of his achievements in a way that combined the one Christian God and the promise of salvation with the traditional imperialism of a Roman pagan: “With the power of this God as ally, beginning from the shores of Ocean I have raised up the whole world step by step with sure hopes of salvation.”
Constantine was a man of blood and a man of God. In making it a priority to readjust Rome’s relationship with the gods there too, Constantine followed precedent. But the consequences of his policy proved revolutionary.
Constantine was one of history’s great success stories. That might have been the most Roman thing of all.
RISE TO POWER
Constantine was born at Naissus (today’s NiŠ, Serbia) on February 27, 273. Nobody could guess at Constantine’s birth that the child of this provincial capital would one day found what would become the most important city in the world, as Constantinople long was, about 450 miles southeast of his birthplace. Nor could they guess that he would begin an epochal change in the religion and culture of the empire.
At the time of his birth, Constantine’s father, Constantius, who came from what is now Bulgaria, was a junior officer in the Roman army. Constantine’s mother, Helena, was the respectable but humble daughter of the owner of a small hotel on the main military highway in northwestern Turkey. Constantius met her there in 272 when he was on a military campaign with the emperor Aurelian. They fell in love and married. Nine months later, Constantine was born.
Constantius rose quickly in the military ranks, and by the time Constantine was ten, Constantius was already a provincial governor. Constantius now had the resources to give the boy a superb education, especially in Latin literature, but it included Greek too, as well as philosophy. Constantine was also trained to be a soldier like his father.
Constantine was probably in his early teens when his father divorced Helena to marry a princess, the daughter of the ruler of the western empire, the Augustus Maximian. Constantius remained close to Constantine and groomed him for an illustrious great future. Still, the divorce was surely a blow. We can only imagine how great an effort Helena made to protect and nourish her son.
She was one of the most important figures in his life and remained so for the next three decades. Like many a previous Roman mother, such as Livia, Agrippina, and Julia Domna, for example, Helena play a big role in the adult life of an emperor.
Around the time Constantius was appointed Caesar in 293, Constantine was sent east. Now twenty years old, he served in the armies that invaded Persia and put down revolt in Egypt. Then Constantine joined Diocletian’s court in Nicomedia. As the oldest son of the Caesar Constantius, he was expected to succeed his father one day.
Naturally, he made a good marriage. Not long before 300, Constantine married a woman named Minervina. She has been plausibly identified as Diocletian’s niece. They had a son named Crispus.
When the Great Persecution began in 303, Constantine was still at the imperial court in Nicomedia. Like his father, he opposed intolerance toward Christians, but he kept quiet, no doubt in order to keep his career on track.
The court of Diocletian was a school of power politics. Among the other lessons it offered was that anything was possible for a man who was ambitious and talented enough. After all, Diocletian himself rose from obscurity to supreme power. Constantine had much greater advantages of birth and education. Still, there was one major caveat: anything was possible if a man had the favor of heaven. That needed to be taken into consideration. Some historians think he had the help of his mother, who might have moved nearby to be with her talented son and might have shaped his view of the gods.
THE MAN OF DESTINY
In 305 Galerius upended young Constantine’s calculations by convincing Diocletian to change his plans. When Diocletian and Maximian stepped down from office as Augusti, Galerius took over in the East and Constantius in the West, just as was long planned. But instead of appointing Constantine (Constantius’s son) and Maxentius (Maximian’s son) as Caesars, Diocletian appointed Maximinus Daia (Galerius’s nephew) and Severus (Galerius’s army crony). This was a complete change of plan, done at Galerius’s behest. Neither of the rejected men took it lying down; each being too ambitious.
Constantine left Nicomedia and headed west to join his father in Britain. As mentioned in the previous chapter, when Constantius died there the next year, Constantine accepted the acclamation of the troops as his father’s replacement as the new Augustus and ruler of the West. Soldiers tended to approve of the hereditary principle, so Constantine was the natural choice, and, besides, before he died, Constantius had given his support to his son. On top of that, Constantine earned the men’s respect by campaigning with them in northern Britain beyond Hadrian’s Wall in the last year of his father’s life. No doubt Constantine displayed his combat experience already gained in Eastern Europe and the Near East. He also had one other advantage: the support of a German king who served as Constantius’s loyal military lieutenant in Britain.
A few months later, Maxentius in Rome declared himself to be the successor of his father. Galerius tried to stop them, but after two failed military campaigns in Italy, he was forced to accept both Constantine and Maxentius, although as Caesars, not Augusti. He appointed another army friend, Licinius, as Augustus and ruler of the West.
Constantine, meanwhile, consolidated his power. Like his father, he made his capital at Augusta Treverorum (modern Trier), in what is today southwestern Germany. A prosperous city in the early empire, Trier had been destroyed by Germanic tribes in 275, but Constantius and Constantine raised the city to new heights. Constantine built a palace there whose audience hall still stands because it was later used as a church. The building is a long, large, lofty hall with an apse at the far end, where the emperor’s throne once stood. Light pours in through a double row of large, rounded windows. Originally decorated with colored marbles, the building’s interior was not as austere as it now appears. Yet it was simpler than earlier imperial audience halls because it lacked columns. In its stark dignity, it set a precedent for early church architecture.
From Augusta Treverorum, Constantine governed his father’s provinces of Britain, Gaul, and Hispania while also winning a series of campaigns against German invaders on the Rhine frontier. Although the empire remained on the strategic defensive throughout Constantine’s lifetime, emperors often crossed into foreign territory to raid, plunder, and show the loc
als who was boss. As emperor, Constantine led his armies in person, like any successful Roman ruler. He was proud of his titles won on campaign such as Germanicus Maximus IIII, indicating that he’d defeated the Germans four times.
Meanwhile, back inside the empire, Constantine advanced his position by making a deal with his rivals. A widower after the death of Minervina, Constantine now arranged to marry Fausta (Flavia Maxima Fausta), sister of Maxentius. Fausta was more than twenty years younger than Constantine, and, to judge by coins, pretty enough that she could be considered a trophy wife, but she served the interests of dynasty by bearing children.
Maximian and Maxentius now recognized Constantine as Augustus, while Constantine acknowledged his new brother-in-law as Caesar and his father-in-law as a senior Augustus. Both Constantine and Maxentius proclaimed religious tolerance in the lands they controlled, stretching from Britain to North Africa, as well as the restoration of Christian property confiscated during the Great Persecution.
But Maximian quarreled with Constantine and tried to assassinate him. In 310 a frustrated Constantine forced Maximian to take his own life. We can only imagine how uncomfortable this made Fausta feel.
Meanwhile, another imperial death the next year further shifted the play of power: Galerius died from cancer. Four men now shared the rule of the empire, but there was little trust among them. In the East, Licinius and Daia were locked in a power struggle, while in the West, Constantine and Maxentius eyed each other warily. In 312 a new set of alliances emerged: Constantine joined Licinius against Maxentius and Daia, and then made his move, invading Italy. Constatine was a warrior in command of veteran troops, while the much weaker Maxentius prepared to withstand a siege behind the strong walls of Rome. All that remained was the ultimate prize: Rome.
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