How Constantine Changed History

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Political, Economic, and Social Background

(00:03) Our topic this evening is how Constantine changed history—how Constantine changed everything, we might say. We'll look at the figure of Constantine I, Constantine the Great, and his impact on both the history of the Roman Empire and Western civilization in general. When we think about the Roman Empire, we often have a static image, a snapshot in time. We can't help but think of things in a caricatured way, so we might picture a map like this one, showing the area around the Mediterranean, probably including Iraq and stretching all the way to Britain, colored in to indicate the Roman Empire. Here's another example of that same map in a different color, sometimes divided into the major Roman provinces, often dated to the year 117. For map purposes, this is often called the Roman Empire at its greatest extent, when it had conquered Mesopotamia and Armenia from the Persians, with Armenia being a buffer state, and some of the provinces on the other side of the Danube River, like Dacia, and so forth. That's the Roman Empire at its greatest extent, and this is where our map comes from. This is one of the maps where the provinces are especially familiar. It's a map I can actually draw on a chalkboard from memory, with the different territories like Lugdunensis, Aquitania, Belgica, and so forth, Narbonensis and Gallia, and so forth. Anyway, this one is especially familiar. I feel it's a little bit easier to see when blown up here.

(02:12) We also picture the Roman Empire with legions that look like this. These are reenactors, and these are legions, though as we think about it, Roman soldiers evolved over the course of centuries, as did their equipment and how they operated. Usually, the reenactors depict the early Empire or perhaps the late Republican period. In the early Empire, that same time period around 117, we also think of guys wearing togas. This is a frame capture from the HBO miniseries "Rome," which is actually a pretty great miniseries. I really like it. Anyway, Cicero in the Roman Senate, and we think of toga-clad senators and Romans running around dressed like this. Again, it's a long period of time, and they weren't always wearing this exact costume. The Roman Republic itself, from 509 (traditional date, though we don't really know) until 27, was a major Mediterranean power, especially in the last centuries of its existence, with an empire even though it's not called the Empire prior to the victory of Octavian, who changes his name to Caesar Augustus, ending the Republic de facto, although he pretends to be the great restorer of the Republic and founds what historians sometimes call the Principate, which is to say the rulership of the prince, the person who is princeps, which in Latin means first, first among equals in the Senate. Augustus's fiction was that the Senate had continued and he was merely the first among equals, when in fact, as princeps, or first, we get our word "prince," which initially means the leader or ruler of a nation. In other words, the truth is that he's the prince and also the other title, the imperial title, emperor, which originally just meant general but now has this idea of an august monarch. Indeed, the family name Caesar becomes a title for emperor, so we might think of the tsars of Russia or the Kaiser of the German Empire. These are both derived from the initial family name of the Caesars, and even Augustus becomes another title for emperor. The empire in the West, after it's founded, continues for five centuries until around 476 A.D., but then the emperor in the East, centered on the city of Constantinople, lived on another thousand years, falling in 1453. If we think about that, 1453 in the whole scope of history is much closer to our own present day than it was to the foundation of the Roman Republic or even the Roman Empire. In other words, the Roman Empire lasted a lot longer than the time that has existed since the fall of its last vestige in 1453.

(05:53) It was hardly a static thing over the course of that time period. If we're going to go to that period that we picture in the early Empire and say, let's say, to the last kind of end of that time period, we think of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, who's pictured in the Hollywood movie "Gladiator." He's emperor from 161 to 180 A.D., and he's the very last one of what's known as the Five Good Emperors, these emperors who presided over the last great era of the early classical Empire. People like Hadrian, who is very famous for having built the Pantheon and also for having built a wall to defend Roman Britain from the Picts, who were north of that wall. That's sort of the inspiration for the "Game of Thrones" scenario of building that wall to keep the people on the other side out of the empire. If you go from that period to the period when we have Constantine, who we're going to be talking about tonight, who is emperor from 306 to 337, there is something very different. The empire seized by Constantine in the 4th century actually looked very different and was very different from the empire that Marcus Aurelius had left behind in the 2nd century. There's actually a pretty huge divide that separates them. What happened in between is what historians call the Crisis of the Third Century. This is a 50-year period when the Roman Empire was in very serious danger of collapsing outright. This is a period of time, this kind of crisis, a transitional moment when what went before much of it ends, and there are lots of new things that emerge out of it. Periodization: there is, in fact, no one moment when ancient times end and the Middle Ages begin, or the Middle Ages end and modern times begin. These are sort of arbitrary moments that historians identify, and they say, well, this period of time, there's something very different here in the modern era than what was happening in the Middle Ages. What was happening in the Middle Ages is very different from classical history, but precisely when the breakdown happens or when the change happens is a little bit arbitrary. Historians have to sort of outline it, but in general, the accepted periodization here is classical history is coming to an end, although it could sometimes seem to extend through the 4th century. Classical history is kind of coming to an end with the Crisis of the Third Century, and late antiquity is now beginning. We're now getting to the period where the ancient world, the antiquity, and all of its forms are ending and unraveling, and we're going to enter into, after the late antiquity, the Middle Ages, as it's called. So this is essentially the Crisis of the Third Century, which is such an important thing, these 50 years that sort of caused that unraveling. So what happened to precipitate it? Legions on the frontier with the Germans opposed Emperor Severus Alexander's attempts to essentially bribe off the tribes. The military would rather have the money be used to pay them so that they can go fight Germans. Instead, Severus Alexander decides it'd be better in the long run to simply pay some tribute here and get the Germans to go away and not risk a battle. That leads to a mutiny, which leads to his assassination. There are all kinds of mutinies and assassinations and coups in the early Roman Empire. The Roman Empire actually never established clear rules for succession to the Principate, so who is going to be emperor after the current emperor is always sort of an open question. There's nothing like the very well-established system now in the British monarchy, where it goes by absolute primogeniture. So we definitely knew when Queen Elizabeth II died that Charles III was going to become king, and when he dies, if he's still alive, his son William is going to become the next king, and so on. The papacy, one of the other great long-lasting Western monarchies, has now established very clear rules of succession, where essentially the College of Cardinals votes and decides who the next pope is going to be when the current pope dies or retires. So there are very clear succession rules that nowadays do not allow for much in the way of a succession crisis in Britain or in the Roman Catholic Church, although that wasn't the case in the past, and there were civil wars that resulted. The Roman Empire never established clear rules like this, so sometimes the son of an emperor would be seen as born in the purple and therefore a person who has a lot of the training and maybe divine right, even the idea that he has the nobility or the correct birth in order to be the next leader. So a son of the emperor, or just as common, if a person is a very successful general, the way Julius Caesar had been, the way Octavian had been, then their legions might declare, you know, proclaim them the new Caesar, and so now they are the new emperors. So there was a way to claim the throne that way, although you would then have to lead your army back to Rome or to wherever the rivals are in order to secure the throne for yourself. There's a final, there's several other ways, but anyway, the final way is the Roman Senate continues to exist, and sometimes, although in less and less capacity because it has less and less power, sometimes the Senate will try to declare somebody the emperor, and the person will try to rule that way, although they often don't have enough authority against the, or enough power to put down the rival generals who will come and attack them and execute them and so forth. So in the course of the next half-century after this particular mutiny against Severus Alexander, there are 26 rivals. They're mostly generals, although some senatorial candidates fought to secure the throne, which means that the throne continues to be unstable. There are rival emperors in the field fighting each other and so forth, and this causes a general breakdown in the apparatus of the state, as you don't always know who the emperor is going to be, and in a lot of cases, people are fighting a civil war around your own lands and territories and cities, which will get destroyed often. If they aren't getting destroyed, you may also decide, well, this would be a great time for me to not pay taxes to anybody because they'll say, well, I don't really know who the emperor is anyway. So in other words, there are all kinds of ways where imperial power atrophies when no one is clearly in charge. In addition to that dynastic instability, the empire faced a whole bunch of other challenges, both natural and also external. Plagues decimated the population, which also caused the economy to contract and limited manpower for the army. The empire frequently needed to pay tribute to avoid invasions, and that policy of Severus Alexander continued. So the empire would have to tax its own people very heavily in order to get a big tribute to pay off the Persian emperor and get him to not invade, or one of the German chiefs, and so forth. In general, having a civil war cripples internal trade because it breaks down that Roman peace that is actually the engine for wealth in the Roman Empire, essentially a large space which is all under one authority and therefore allows merchants and other people engaging in the economy to kind of freely operate. I mean, they're still taxed and so forth, but at least it's a lot different. It's a lot more able to operate than when it's a whole bunch of different little countries that are fighting each other and so forth. Because internal trade collapses, the emperors have less tax overall, both from fewer farmers, fewer estates, fewer merchants, and so forth, and so they had to rely often on debasing their currency for revenue, and that was a problem. The empire also experienced external military defeats. The emperor Valerian led an army against the Persian emperor Shapur I, was defeated, and he became actually the very first Roman emperor or reigning emperor to be captured in battle. He was taken and conquered, executed by the Persians, and there's the Sassanid monument here showing the Roman emperor kneeling to the Persian emperor in the aftermath of this battle in the year 260. So, a big great dishonor for the Romans. Just as a chart that's just kind of showing the debasement of the silver currency, from coins that are much more pure silver at the beginning of this timeline here in the year 150 BC, we go ahead to 250, so you can see kind of at the end of this chart is the third century, and in the middle of the third century, this really collapses down. The percentage of silver content in these coins decreases. This is a moment back when, to some degree or other, currency in the ancient world, as today, is based on people's belief that the money is worth something, but in the past, there was also a belief, I'm sorry, well, it's also a belief value in what the metal is, and so silver and gold have sort of an intrinsic value as well. The problem with the silver coin is, as you make it more and more out of base metals and less and less out of silver, it ceases to have that value of what the silver is worth, and it's only based on what people think it's worth, and in the middle of a crisis, a breakdown of the Roman state, this seemed to be having, well, less and less value. While this is all happening, there's even kind of a breakdown of central authority altogether. After the emperor is defeated by the Persian emperor, after the Roman emperor is captured, the person who takes over back in Rome isn't able to maintain control of the whole empire, and so from the year 260 onward, a separate breakaway Roman Empire exists as a separate de facto state in Gaul. It also controls Roman Britain, and so it continues to be a Roman state, but it has no contact with or doesn't pay any attention to the edicts coming from the central authority, from the emperor. Likewise, a kingdom in the desert of Syria, a queendom in Palmyra, created a breakaway empire that is effectively a breakaway state that is effectively also a little Roman Empire of the East that controlled a lot of Asia Minor, all of Syria, and Egypt. Ultimately, it's good for the Roman Empire. There is a military end of the crisis. A man named Aurelian, a popular general who was stationed along that Danube frontier, the northern frontier in Pannonia, an area that's kind of now Serbia, secured the throne in the year 270 in the same way that a lot of these emperors during this crisis became emperor, which is to say his troops proclaimed him emperor. But unlike so many other emperors before him during this time period, he follows that up with a stunning series of military victories. He conquers and reincorporates both the Gallic Roman Empire and the Palmyrene breakaway states, so he brings those back. He also attacks and defeats the various Germanic and other confederations that are across the Danube, so the Goths, the Vandals, the Juthungi, the Sarmatians, and the Carpi. Lots and lots of military victories that bring a new kind of renewed hope and stability for the empire. Aurelian is sort of famous and is known for the building of the Aurelian Walls around the city of Rome, and so there's a picture of one of the gates here that has continued to the present day in Rome, and lots of remains of the Aurelian Walls are still there. If you look at the left, this is a map of the two sets of Roman walls. The original blue ones, this is the original Servian Walls from the Roman Republican time period, and those are the walls that enclose the famous Seven Hills of Rome: the Capitoline, the Palatine, Aventine, Quirinal, Viminal, Esquiline, and Caelian Hills. Those were the original part, but by the time the Empire had come around, Rome had massively expanded beyond those walls, especially into the area actually on this map that says Servian Wall, so that kind of northwest quadrant, the Campus Martius. Lots of new expansion had been there, and so Aurelian builds walls in that red wall all the way around the city, and these are enormous defenses, and they continue to essentially defend the city of Rome throughout the Middle Ages, very powerful defensive fortifications. One of Aurelian's successors inherited a bunch of the same problems and was kind of more of an administrative genius who helped to solve some of these. Much of the Empire's older interior structure also collapsed during the Crisis of the Third Century. It had been collapsing ahead of time, but it especially collapsed there. Originally, the Empire had relied on local civic nobility in provincial towns, what's sometimes called the decurion class, to run and fund civilian services. We see that big picture of the Roman Empire, and we think of the modern-day state where, for example, if you look at a map of France, the French government has police that are part of the government that are in all the little towns. There are offices of the government in all of its different bureaucracies and so forth. Education has control over so many other things. The Roman Empire really didn't have that. It had a road network, it had a government in terms of the imperial court, and it had the military along the frontiers, and it had field armies near the emperors. All the rest of the services, local police force or civic services, and all those kinds of things, those were held by the towns and cities that were all around, spread all around the Empire, which were sort of operating kind of on their own the way they always had, even before they were part of the Empire. During the third century, this class of local elite, the local noble who wants to be part of a town senate and so forth, collapsed because they were required to pay out of their own wealth such draconian taxes, and so becoming an administrator in a Roman city became a vast way to go bankrupt during this kind of time period. Diocletian, part of his response, is he creates kind of an unprecedented imperial bureaucracy, so he really adds to the number of bureaucrats, especially those responsible for the different functions of the state that hadn't existed. Diocletian, who's reigning here from 284 to 305, and so if we go back to that map that I was showing at the beginning of the Roman Empire at its greatest extent, 117 A.D., and like I was saying, kind of all of these provinces that we know, and I know anyway, are somewhat well known. You can see like a third or half of Spain in this is like this big province called Tarraconensis, and you can see like all of Italy is just listed here as Italia because it's not really, I mean, it's not divided as a province. It kind of emerged out of, you know, it was the center, and the rest were the provinces, right? So you can see kind of these were bigger regions and provinces when they were first happening. So under Diocletian, these are all divided up into smaller units, including Italy, which is now divided into different smaller provinces, each with their own administrations, and so there's a massive increase in the amount of administrative oversight as a result of having so many more little provinces than they had before. In addition to having additional provinces and additional provincial governments, Diocletian determined that the Empire had become too much for one man to rule, and so he decided to make additional imperial courts. Like I said, the presence of the Empire had been existing at the frontiers and then also at the imperial court, and to a lesser extent at the provincial levels, at the provincial governments. Now there's double the number of provincial governments, and he initially doubles the imperial courts. He raises a general named Maximian to the rank of Caesar initially, and so that means he is a co-emperor with Diocletian, but Diocletian's rank is Augustus, and so Augustus is the higher rank and Caesar is the lesser rank, and he does that as of 285. Later, Diocletian elevates Maximian to the rank of Augustus, and so he becomes the junior Augustus, and Diocletian remains the senior Augustus, and they name two additional guys to the title Caesar, and so now there are four emperors, and so that's called by historians anyway the Tetrarchy, and it just means, in Greek, the rule by four men, the Tetrarchy. The division then, there's the littler provinces in this, but this is then divided into the dioceses of the Empire, and so essentially Maximian, as the junior Augustus in the West, rules over this yellow area, and so he will hold his court in Mediolanum or Aquileia or sometimes Rome, but probably not because it's a military, the emperor is a military leader, and so you want to be close to the frontier, so Mediolanum, that's Milan, that becomes one of the more important later imperial capitals. Constantius is his junior emperor under the junior Augustus of the West, the Western Caesar, and so he will probably have his court at Augusta Treverorum, which is the town of Trier in Germany along the Rhine frontier. Diocletian continues to be the senior Augustus, he rules over the East, and he has his court at the city of Nicomedia in Asia Minor in the diocese here of Pontica, and he sometimes will be over at Antioch, which is the military capital for the East when he has to have wars against the Persians, and then under him is the Eastern Caesar Galerius, who will be along probably somewhere along the Danube frontier, that northern frontier, and in the town there of Sirmium in Pannonia. By the way, this word diocese, this is why this is, as a Latin word, diocese, this is where the Catholic word for diocese comes from, because over time, as we'll see in this, when the Catholic Church, the Christian Church becomes Catholic and Orthodox Church, when the Christian Church becomes intertwined with the Roman government, they make essentially each of these smaller and smaller dioceses, they have a territory of a Roman province, will have a, will also have a Christian bishop as its official in each one of the cities, and so that's why we have the word, this word diocese comes from the Latin Roman administration, the secular administration. There are pros and cons of Diocletian's Tetrarchy model. The pros of the Tetrarchy include a much more responsive imperial government. If you're a provincial in Judea and you want to complain to the emperor, there's now an emperor that is much closer to you over in Nicomedia than if, for example, there was only one emperor and he's off campaigning with the legions in Britain. It's going to take a whole long time for you to send your entreaty to the emperor. So there's an imperial government that is close by. Also, if you get invaded, so let's say the emperor is off campaigning against the Picts in Britain, well, that's a great time for the Persians to attack. It's going to take a whole long time to get over there when there's only one emperor with one big field army. Now that there's four emperors and four field armies, when the Persians attack, there's an emperor right there who can go and deal with it, and in fact, it's the biggest, most important emperor that is going to be there, right? The emperor frequently faced challenges on the Rhine, Danube, and Eastern frontiers. Now there are emperors with armies defending all these simultaneously. However, one of the cons of the Tetrarchy, you could probably just imagine this right away, we've already just come out of a period where there's civil wars and where the empire is divided and there are different rival sources of power. There's sort of an obvious built-in rivalry here when you have multiple legitimate emperors. Yes, Diocletian, in setting the whole thing up, he has kind of seniority and is able to maybe browbeat the others into doing what he says as the most senior emperor, but they're all very heavily armed now and they all have the legitimacy and title of being a Caesar or an Augustus, and there has never really been this situation where there are emperors above emperors before, which is confusing to everybody in a way. Diocletian nevertheless hopes that this is going to solve the overall succession crisis that the empire has been facing. He seems to have looked back on that time of the Five Good Emperors we talked about, where each of the emperors, like Hadrian, would then find somebody who was, instead of having their own son take over, they would find somebody who was going to be a very effective and able administrator and adopt them and have them be the next emperor. The same kind of plan is going on here for Diocletian. At a certain point, he becomes ill, he decides to retire in the year 305. He also makes his co-Augustus Maximian retire, and so when they both retire, their Caesars, so they're the Augusti and their Caesars under them, Galerius and Constantius, those are elevated to become the new Augusti, and then there are two new Caesars that are appointed under those guys, so Valerius Severus and Maximinus Daza. There's a lot of, I'm sorry, Maximinus Daza, there's a lot of people in this one named Maximian, Maximus, Maxentius, and so forth. There's a lot of Maxes on this thing, that's people like that, it means, you know, great or, you know, Maximus, the maximum, and so forth. Romans like that, but anyway, we'll try to make it through who all of these guys are. They're not as important as the ones named Constantinus, we'll see. Essentially, that is Diocletian's plan, and then he goes and builds himself a retirement palace, this vast city-palace complex on the Adriatic at the dividing point between the East and West Empires, and this, because it has its own big defensive walls, ultimately becomes, in the Middle Ages, its own city, the city of Spalato, now Split in Croatia, which is famous for all kinds of reasons, for being beautiful and so forth, but as a filming location for "Game of Thrones," for example, and it's a big tourist destination today, even to this day. Unfortunately, although Diocletian's other reforms were pretty good in terms of his new provinces and his bureaucracy and so forth, in terms of bringing, creating stability, his Tetrarchy system breaks down almost immediately. We have here a coin of Constantius, he's on the head side of the coin, and on the tail side, you can see are the four Tetrarchs, and so it's showing here those four guys kind of here offering a sacrifice together, it's showing the unity of the Tetrarchy. After he was elevated to be the Western Augustus, Constantius, who had previously been the Western Caesar, determines that he's going to launch a campaign against the Picts. These are the Celtic people that live north of Hadrian's Wall in what's now Scotland, and so he goes and attacks them with a big army. It has the same ineffectual way of it always is, kind of attacking Pictland in Scotland or Celtic lands, because you burn a bunch of stuff, they don't have too much stuff, you go back around and across the wall, and what do you do? And so they're still there at the end of it, and so anyway, it didn't really accomplish too much of it, but the next year, he has an illness, he becomes ill, and he dies in Eboracum, which is now the city of York in 306. So probably as kind of a deathbed wish, he directs his troops to proclaim his son Constantine as the new Augustus of the West. So rather than wait for a decision from the other three Tetrarchs, especially, let's say, the senior Augustus that is ruling off in the East, the army just on its own accord proclaims Constantine not just the new Caesar, but actually replacing his father as the Augustus of the West. This makes the other Augustus, the senior Augustus back in the East, Galerius, absolutely furious. So Constantine sends him the news and sends him, you know, an icon and so forth of him in the Augustan purple and so forth, and it almost makes Galerius want to go to war immediately, but ultimately is talked down from that by his own advisors, and he essentially proposes a compromise where he's saying to Constantine, "Okay, you can be the Western Caesar, but you're not going to get to be the Augustus." So he takes the Western Caesar Severus and he says that was the legitimate Tetrarch, he's going to get to be the Western Augustus, and so Constantine is prepared to do that because he wants to have the legitimacy of the other Tetrarchs naming him emperor, even if it's not the high emperor. Nevertheless, that doesn't mean everybody's happy. So there's another guy in the wings, a guy named Maxentius. I told you there's a lot of these Max names. Anyway, so he is the son of that retired co-Augustus Maximian. So Maxentius, he's like, "Well, wait a second, if Constantius's son Constantine gets to be a Caesar, then I should get to be a Caesar too, at least a Caesar, because, you know, my dad had also been an Augustus and so forth, I should inherit my father's power." So he was able to make that case, and he went and found his father's old legions who wanted to support him. His army declared him an Augustus, and he seized Italy and North Africa from the, let's say, legitimate tetrarch. He was able to rule from 306 to 312. After 306, only the East was ruled by tetrarchs who had been legitimately chosen by Diocletian. We have Galerius, who's the senior Augustus, and his Caesar, Maximinus Daza. Meanwhile, Constantine, who is ruling the West, his father's tetrarchy, is only grudgingly allowed to be it. They didn't pick him; Galerius didn't want him to be the Caesar, but they recognized his rule. However, they said no way to Maxentius.

They did not recognize the fact that Maxentius had taken over the territory that even included the city of Rome itself. Maxentius's rule remained de facto from the standpoint of the other tetrarchs; the other Emperors didn't recognize him, although he was able to get the Roman Senate to recognize him. Indeed, he became the last Emperor to really rule from Rome and make Rome his home base. He worked and was on good terms with the Senate and so forth.

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How Constantine Changed History

Alright, so we've reached the point where we are discussing Constantine. Constantine is the topic of this lecture.

When I was back up here, I asked, "Who is Constantine?" As we saw, Constantine, or Flavius Constantius, his Latin name, is the son of a Roman general born in the year 272. That Roman general was eventually elevated to be Augustus. Constantius may or may not have been married to a low-born Greek woman named Helena; she might have been his concubine. There are many slurs to that effect from Constantine's enemies, so that may well be the case. Constantine was born in the Danube frontier province of Moesia, in the present-day city of Niš in Serbia. This is along that frontier where you're protecting against the confederations to the north of the Danube River. His primary language was Latin, and he spent most of his time growing up in the courts of Diocletian and later Galerius. During the tetrarchy, Constantine was effectively held hostage in Galerius's court. Galerius was the senior Augustus, living in the East. Constantine was there with him, ensuring that his father Constantius, Galerius's co-Augustus, remained on good terms. Essentially, this was part of the idea of the tetrarchy: you send sons to the other courts to make it more difficult to break into a civil war because you could immediately kill the hostage if necessary.

Late one night, when Galerius had been drinking, according to later Constantinian propaganda (we don't know for sure about this story, but anyway, this is a story that later circulates), Galerius foolishly granted Constantine permission to join his father's campaign in Britain. They were having a drinking party, and at the right moment, Constantine sort of threw in there, "Well, uh, you know, your majesty, this is so great, or this or that. Can I, you know, grant me this boon that I can go and have glory and be part of my father's campaign against the Picts in Britain?" And the guy was like, "Ah, sure, go ahead." So he did that while he was in the middle of being drunk at the party. Constantine then immediately took off and left. He got the permission and bolted as quickly as he could to Britain. Obviously, when Galerius woke up, he sent envoys with countermanding orders, realizing he didn't want this to happen. But Constantine made his way to Britain.

After Constantine's father's death, Constantius's troops in Gaul and Britain recognized Constantine as the new Augustus. This meant that this 30-year-old or so guy, who was largely untried as a general, gained control over one of Rome's two largest field armies. This was the army for the Augustus on the Rhine, counterposing Galerius's army for the Eastern frontier. To avoid civil war, Galerius chose to recognize Constantine with the lesser title of Caesar, which the latter accepted to remove any doubts about his legitimacy, which was helpful. For example, Maxentius, who was ruling down in Rome, didn't have that legitimacy because the other tetrarchs never recognized his authority, although the Senate did.

Galerius from the East kept attempting to reorganize the tetrarchy. He had one of his allies, Licinius, elevated to be a new Augustus, but the system continued to unravel. By the time of Galerius's death in 311, the whole thing broke down and led to civil war. There was a lot of back and forth, but essentially, in the West, Constantine ended up invading Italy, where Maxentius was ruling, claiming the title of Augustus. He brought about a quarter of his army from Gaul to challenge Maxentius. Maxentius had continued to rule there despite his lack of recognition from the tetrarchs. Rather than remain behind those substantial Aurelian walls, Maxentius chose to lead his troops out into battle against Constantine's invading army. They fought just north of Rome in front of the Milvian Bridge. Maxentius went out with more troops, outnumbering Constantine, but his troops were less experienced and less skilled, and he was routed. While backed up against the river as his army was retreating, Maxentius drowned.

Constantine took control of the city of Rome and immediately initiated a large building program. He wanted to win over the citizens and the old senatorial elite that had been siding with Maxentius. He wanted them to be part of his cause. For example, one of the monuments he immediately began building was a victory monument archway in the Roman Forum. If you go to the Roman Forum, this is one of the major artifacts that has still been preserved to this day. It's on the opposite side of the Forum from the Arch of Titus. This triumphal arch was one of his projects, but he also did things like vastly expanding the Circus Maximus. This is the horse racing stadium just south of the Imperial Palace in Rome. As time went on, as the Roman Empire became Christianized, there ceased to be the same kind of blood sports happening in the coliseums. The gladiatorial games fell out of favor, but horse racing, particularly chariot racing, became really popular, especially in Constantinople. So he vastly expanded the Circus Maximus, providing more of these "bread and circuses," as they say. In other words, let's bring bread to feed the population of the city in Rome, getting free bread that makes everybody happy, and we'll also put on races in the Circus Maximus.

Diocletian's tetrarchy then collapsed totally over the next decade. Constantine had dispatched Maxentius, as I mentioned. Meanwhile, Licinius, who was the Augustus in the East, was able to eliminate Maximinus Daza, reducing the tetrarchy to a diarchy. In other words, there were four rulers, then two rulers. Over the next decade, the two emperors maintained an uneasy truce, which broke down in 323. Constantine aggressively invaded the East and defeated Licinius on land and sea in the area around the Hellespont, the space where Europe and Asia meet. After winning all these battles and capturing Licinius, he had Licinius hanged in 324. This resulted in the reunification of the Empire under Constantine. With the defeat of Licinius, Diocletian's tetrarchy system was effectively eliminated. From 324 to 337, Constantine ruled the entire Empire. In a way, Diocletian is often credited with all kinds of important reforms, and I think his provincial and bureaucratic reforms had much more long-lasting effects. The tetrarchy seems to have broken down right after he tried to get the succession of it to work. It's something you would have wanted to work, looking back on that model of that period of time of the five good emperors and so forth. Yet, at this point, it was not possible to arm four emperors and have them not all want to vie with one another, apparently. Anyway, that simply didn't work out. It seems like the idea would have just been, "Okay, we tried that, and it really didn't work." Yet, before the end of the century, the Empire was divided again to defend the two frontiers. People started to see that it was impossible to defend the Rhine frontier and the Eastern frontier at the same time from the same place. We needed to have a Western emperor defending that and an Eastern emperor, and that ends up happening at the end of the century.

In the meantime, Constantine was ruling it all by himself. Since the primary responsibility of the emperor was to lead the army and defend the frontiers, strategic location was essential for the capital. Rome was too distant from any of the frontiers to make sense as a capital. Maxentius was the last emperor who really spent all of his time there. Diocletian and Galerius had made Nicomedia the capital, and you can see where that is in Asia Minor, what's now Turkey. There are other capitals along the frontiers. We saw Eboracum, the city of York, where Constantine was elevated by his troops to be an emperor. Augusta Treverorum, Trier, on the German frontier, on the Rhine frontier, was a major capital where Constantine built a large palace, especially an audience chamber that is still there. There are all kinds of other amazing ruins. Some of the best Roman ruins in Europe are actually in Germany as a result of that. Colonia Agrippina is another center, now Cologne, and so forth. Sirmium, Serdica, the Danube frontier, and Antioch. For his capital, Constantine chose a site pretty close to Nicomedia but actually in a much more defensible place, a defensible peninsula that was guarding both the land crossing between Europe and Asia, a very narrow strait that you can cross from Europe to Asia here at the Hellespont, and also the very narrow passage of the sea crossing between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. Probably the most strategically important and defensible piece of real estate in the ancient and medieval worlds, where the Greek city of Byzantion had already been founded and was a place. Constantine refounded the city and made it his capital. It provided him quick access, especially to the Danube frontier, which is right there. Crossing over fairly easily, he could get to the Eastern frontier, not much more complicated than it was from Nicomedia. It's a little farther to get over to the Rhine frontier, but then, in the event, the focus now shifts east in the Empire. Constantinople, a new Rome, vastly expanded the earlier city of Byzantium. Constantine consciously built his city to be a new Rome. It's not just a little military capital; this is going to be a great city modeled on Rome itself. It includes monumental walls and monumental new buildings. Statues were plundered from all across the eastern cities of the Empire. Lots of these, during the third century, the monumental buildings and so forth had all fallen into disarray and disuse. Where there was artwork and pagan statues and so forth, these were all declared to be national, you know, imperial property, and they were brought to Constantinople to decorate Constantinople. It also included the trappings that would have existed in the city of Rome, including a new imperial Senate. There would be a Senate in Constantinople just as there was a Senate in the old Rome. This is all by itself. If this is all Constantine did and was known for, this would be enough to be very well known because this was an amazingly strategic and defensible city. Constantinople proved a very durable success. Constantine's successor, Theodosius the Great, expanded the city and built these vast walls, the Theodosian Walls, which are still mostly there today. They held out throughout all of late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period. The tide of Islam, when the Arabs broke out of the desert and destroyed the Persian Empire and conquered Syria and Egypt and all the way across to seize and destroy the Visigothic kingdom of Spain, nevertheless, their advance broke against Constantinople's walls. It was too much; they couldn't get in. To take Constantinople, you have to have both a giant siege army and a giant siege navy because if you only have an army, they can constantly supply the city from the water. If you only have a navy, and so forth, despite lots of trying, that didn't work out. Ultimately, the Arab caliphate moved its capital from Damascus, which was focusing on attacking Byzantium, and actually moved to Baghdad, so it ceased to look in that direction and started looking more towards the east after that. Constantinople held. It only fell during the backstab from the Western Crusaders in the Fifth Crusade, who were able to sneak into the walls and conquer the city during a civil war. The city actually fell in that way. Then, from then on, after the Byzantine Empire, the East Roman Empire recovered, it continued to hold out until it was just a little tiny city-state surrounded by the Ottoman Turkish Empire and fell because of the invention of cannons, which were simply able to, let's say, fifth-century walls or fourth-century walls were not able to hold out against modern cannon and so forth.

Constantine also had financial reforms. Diocletian had tried to re-establish trustworthy silver coinage to address rampant inflation. We saw how that devaluation of the silver currency had worked. That really didn't work; it was expensive, and people still didn't trust the coins. Constantine ultimately kind of gave up on that and instead adopted a gold standard. Diocletian had minted a few coins, kind of show coins, called solidi, kind of solid gold coins, or, you know, they're solid in terms of their capacity to not go down in value. Very expensive, valuable coins, you know, based in gold. Constantine now mints lots of solidi. One of the ways he's able to do it is by plundering pagan temples and pagan gold statues and so forth. He gets access to a bunch of gold and makes it into coins. This had the effect of stabilizing the economy for people who were wealthy enough to afford gold coins. Most gold is too valuable for most small transactions, and so for property sales and so forth, this stabilized the economy. Meanwhile, the poor, unfortunately, had to continue to cope with inflation as the bronze coins continued to degrade in their value and so forth. He also had a bunch of administrative reforms, just like Diocletian. One of the things he did was bring the old senatorial nobility, who had been alienated from the imperial bureaucracy, back into the system. Because emperors were concerned that the senators could potentially be rivals, they were forbidden from certain offices and so forth, and Constantine relaxed that division.

Taking all together all of these successes that he had, both militarily against all of Rome's enemies across the frontiers, internally defeating the different rivals in the civil war, fixing the economy, more administrative reforms, creating stability, and ultimately really founding this new capital, Constantinople, that probably would have been enough to earn Constantine the epithet "the Great." Not everybody gets to be called in history as Constantine the Great or Theodosius the Great or everybody that, you know, Alfred the Great. But one additional action resulted in a legacy that kind of changed everything, which is the topic of this, and that, of course, is Constantine's conversion to Christianity, which resulted over time in totally changing the Empire and the course of Western history. For example, we can see this imagery in Constantine's official imagery here, in a silver medallion dating to the year 315, that includes in his helmet a Chi-Rho symbol, the Greek letters Chi and Rho, which look like an X and a P in Latin, in the Roman alphabet, which are the first two letters of Christos or Christ. Constantine's conversion in 315 was a game changer. We talked about how that battle of the Milvian Bridge, how he destroyed his rival, the first of these rival emperors. Prior to that, according to his later accounts, Constantine had had a vision where he saw a sign, that XP sign probably, sometimes seen as a sign of the cross, but probably more likely it's the XP sign, where it said, "In this sign, you will have victory." According to those accounts, he had his soldiers put that symbol on their shields and used that, the symbol of the Christian God, to bring him victory, which announced to him, or it was a sign to him, that this God, you know, he was favored by this God, and this God had real power. Whether or not Constantine knew much about what Christianity was about at this point, he probably didn't. Christianity, in its earliest form, if we look at what we've talked about, the Gospels, what Jesus is proclaiming, and so forth, this is pretty alien now to what Constantine is understanding. Nevertheless, this is his understanding of it at this moment.

So what was the Christianity that Constantine converted to or inherited? As we've seen in past lectures, our Lost Christianity's lecture, prior to Constantine, there was not one single Christian Church, but rather there were multiple Christianities. The Christian movement, what became known as the Christian movement, might have originally called themselves the poor. They're sometimes called the poor of Jerusalem, people who were followers of Jesus, people who were followers of John the Baptist, people who were followers of Jesus's brother James. They were initially a sect of Judaism that was especially interested in living. There was a central community that was living in sort of an ascetic, almost monastic or sort of Franciscan-like way, where there are people who renounce property and who are instead living a spiritual life of prayer. There's a community around them that is supporting that movement, and that movement is also concerned about inviting people from the margins to be included in the community instead of excluded. But they continue to observe Jewish law and are a sect of Judaism. Groups of Christians who prioritize that continue to exist, and we've seen some of that. One of them is being called, variably, the Ebionites, sometimes from a Hebrew word meaning the poor, and that continues on for a time. Meanwhile, converted to Christianity or converted to the testimony that Jesus was the Messiah is a Pharisee named Paul, who becomes kind of a self-appointed apostle and begins preaching Christianity as he understands it based on the authority that he's had in that vision. He's a missionary, a very active missionary, and he also creates a whole school of missionary companions who plant churches, which are especially good at recruiting or converting Greek-speaking pagans who are called God-fearing people. People who are interested in Judaism and they're interested in the Hebrew Bible and worshiping the Hebrew God, but they are not Jewish by background and they're not interested in all of the different observances of Jewish law, for example, being circumcised and so forth, keeping kosher. Paul tells them, "Well, guess what? You don't have to do any of that in order to do that because Christ has come and he has fulfilled the law, and so now we don't need to do that anymore." That creates an explosion of converts compared to the original Jewish sect. In the Pauline church, then there are additional variations in terms of Marcion, Valentinus, Marcionism, Gnosticism, where they take it even a little further. When Christianity starts to become not just a Jewish sect but its own religion, how much relationship should we have with the Old Testament, with the Hebrew Bible, and so forth? Marcion says essentially none, and the Gnostics generally as well, which they see the God of the Old Testament as evil and so forth, not the true God, and they reject most of the Jewish components and want to have kind of a more fully Greek, let's say, Christianity. The Gnostics are essentially very spiritual, and they create a spiritual mythology that is more dependent on Platonism, for example, than on the Jewish tradition. In other words, there's a whole bunch of these different Christianities that are rivals even in the first century, and these continue on by the time we get to Constantine. But there's also additional disputes within the proto-orthodox group, the group that emerges out of the Pauline church.

As part of his response to the crisis of the third century, the emperor Diocletian, who created the tetrarchy, if we remember, also promoted religious reform. He also saw one of the problems in the division of the Empire here as disunity because we have abandoned the old traditional gods of the Greco-Roman religion, and instead, we have all of these alien traditions like Mithraism, like Isis cult worship, Christianity, and so forth. These are alien traditions, and so he suppresses them and persecutes Romans who will not renounce this tradition and prove that they're willing to worship the Christian, I'm sorry, the old gods. Essentially, worship the divine, you take a little thing of incense and you put it before an altar to show your respect or veneration of the emperor and so forth. That little bit of practice is something most Christians won't do because they consider that to be blasphemy for the true God. It's essentially worshiping idols and so forth. However, some of them are more pragmatic. For example, in the African provinces of the Roman Empire, rather than be tortured or killed, many of the clerics and bishops even pretended to renounce their faith. They went through the motions and didn't get thrown to the lions. However, when Diocletian's persecutions ended, the people who really did stand firm, the people who were being martyred and the people who were their family members and so forth, led by a guy named Donatus Magnus, they proclaimed everybody who had kind of pretended and so forth, those were collaborators, those are heretics. A big schism occurs, especially in North Africa, between the folks who essentially had collaborated and said, "Look, I don't want to get killed over this. I'm still a Christian, but we didn't want to, I mean, the government was being crazy," and the kind of people who were like saying, "No, we have to, I mean, Christ was killed, come on, he stood up. If we're going to worship the idols, you're not true Christians." The Donatists more or less said that all of the ordinations, all the baptisms, all the sacraments that are performed by the previously lapsed bishops and clerics, all the ones that they did don't count. Unfortunately, that had the effect of dividing that into two churches and calling into question even people's being members and baptized, whether they're truly married and so forth. That's one of the things, the Donatist controversy, that's alive and well at the time Constantine joins.

Another is just further wrangling over the idea of the Trinity. What is the relationship between the Creator, Christ, and the Holy Spirit? Christians are absolutely monotheists, and yet they are understanding three persons here as God. How do they understand that? It's very difficult for Christians to understand even the idea of the Trinity, mostly even today, and also it's very divisive among Christians, especially in antiquity. I think it's still divisive today, but people don't split up as much over it. They just have their own belief, and people say, "Okay, whatever, you know, you don't," and so forth. I think that it's still very confusing to people, but essentially, at this point, there is a compromised position or a different position, an idea that is maybe easier for people to understand. A theologian named Arius proposes that Christ is divine, he's saying, but Christ is not co-eternal with the Creator, with God. There is a time period when God exists and Christ does not exist. Christ is begotten, this is before time, even though they'll say there is a before the rest of creation, Christ is begotten by the Creator, and now Christ exists. Christ has not always been, in other words. This is a way to assert a stronger monotheism in the sense of there's really the God that we're going to be focusing on is God the Creator, and Christ is a kind of divine person, but it doesn't have to be understood somehow mystically to be the same as God, not the same as the Creator, obviously, since that's against the Trinity doctrine too. Anyway, this proposal by Arius is popular. Actually, Arian missionaries end up converting all the Germanic tribes, so the Goths and everybody all become Arians, which is a problem later, that's outside of the scope of this lecture. But it's strongly rejected by a counter-theologian, Athanasius, who is promoting what becomes the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity along with other proto-orthodox leaders. For example, this is an Eastern painting depicting Arius, who is attending the church council at Nicaea, and Saint Nicholas, who's so angry with him for saying all this Arian stuff, has come and punched him in the middle of this church conference. So, Saint Nicholas of Myra, Santa Claus, as he's later known. If you ever wondered if Santa Claus was kind of mean to Rudolph in that special too, right? So, he's kind of got a temper on him, Saint Nicholas.

There was no one structure of the church; it was not like the bishop of Rome, the pope, was in charge and then over top of the bishop of Antioch, Alexandria, Corinth, Ephesus, and so forth when Constantine took over. Rather, it's more like there were all of these bishops of all of these different cities who were largely autocephalous, which means they're the head of their own sort of structures and are generally equal. The bishop of Rome had the argument that they were the first among these equals, but essentially there was no structure to compel uniformity, and that really resulted in multiple Christianities. In some cases, there were whole separate church structures, as we saw with the Donatists, who would have their own rival hierarchies to the non-Donatist church structure. But in a lot of other cases, like with the Gnostics, they're just kind of snuck in and having their special Gnostic teachings within the structure of an individual diocese. Constantine inherited a church without structure, divided about its most basic doctrines. One of his solutions to that is to call a council of the bishops. The church is divided into these co-equal bishops; they disagree. Constantine's solution is something new: he summons them all together to form an ecumenical, which just means a Greek, you know, worldwide council, over which he presides as emperor. The council defines orthodox or Catholic beliefs and creates the Nicene Creed, which is essentially a definition of the Trinity. How are we all to believe? How are we all to understand and formulate what we mean when we're talking about the Trinity? We believe in one God; there are three persons, and God the Creator is not the same God as God, you know, Jesus Christ is God, the Spirit is God, Christ is not the Spirit, the Spirit is not the Father, and so forth. The council defined alternate beliefs like Arianism as heresy and condemned Arianism particularly, and we saw Saint Nicholas was there punching Arius. The council also creates a hierarchy with metropolitan bishops above bishops, and so this becomes part of the church's toolkit. There are general or ecumenical councils of the church convened by emperors over the course of the next several centuries, and the churches still do this. The Catholic Church, all by itself, which considers itself Catholic or universal, even though it's out of communion with the Eastern churches and the Protestant churches, held one of these councils in the 1960s. It was called the Second Vatican Council or Vatican II, the second council to be held on the Vatican Hill in the city of Rome. So, again, one of these kinds of councils like the Council of Nicaea.

As I say, there had been these all the bishops were equal. Now Constantine creates a little bit more administrative structure. Now there are metropolitan bishops, so the bishop of Rome is essentially the archbishop over the bishops of Milan, Carthage, and Ravenna. The bishop of Constantinople is over Nicaea, Ephesus, Adrianople. The bishop of Antioch is over Caesarea, Laodicea, and Edessa, and so forth. There is also now a kind of emerging org chart where the ecumenical council that is called by the emperor is also over top of and makes decrees for all the bishops, all in the archbishoprics, and that is presided over by the Roman emperor, by Constantine.

This causes a remarkable transformation. Before Constantine converted, less than 10 percent of the population of the Roman Empire were Christians. It was not a particularly influential group. It's an obvious and noticeable group. It's a group that different emperors had chosen either to work with or work against, but it wasn't necessarily anything that would bring you, you know, there's no particular reason to imagine that you'd convert to this religion the way Constantine did. He seems to have done it out of, you know, an actual personal conviction that may not have been based on what the religion was really about, but it could have been, like I say, based on this idea that it had brought him, that the Christian God had brought him victory. If we just look at the transformation of that population over the course of the next three centuries, the population of the Roman Empire and its successor states in the West, now it's the pagans who are a minority of the population, and everybody's been Christianized. This is a huge transformation, at least nominally. So how did it happen? Why did it happen? What changed? What stayed the same? You know, just in a way, we've just talked about what Christianity was. I want to say a little bit about what paganism was.

In Western civilization, the vantage from which we view the past is kind of built on Christian conceptions, even though we say Western civilization, that phrase is largely a secularized euphemism for the older term Christendom. We would have probably been saying that anyway a while ago, and even if we replace AD with CE, like I often do when we're talking about biblical texts especially, you know, the underlying number and count remain the same. Because of our history, we view the idea of religion itself usually with Judeo-Christian lenses. So what's paganism? Although Jesus and his followers emerged from the rural culture of Galilee, and we'll talk about that a lot next week, Christianity from Paul onwards spread largely as an urban phenomenon. When Nicene Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine's successor, Theodosius the Great, the guy who built the Theodosian Walls of Constantinople, who ruled a couple of generations later, temples in the cities were destroyed or repurposed as churches, as the old religion increasingly relegated to the rural peasantry. The Latin word for rural peasantry is the Pagani, that's where we get the word paganism. So Pagan began to acquire its meaning. Nobody would have called themselves pagans in antiquity; it only begins to be called that as a religious divider after the mid-fourth century, after the Christians had really won, either because the remaining pagans were viewed as, you know, hicks from the sticks, or alternatively because they were outside the bounds, the Paganus of the Roman Christian community. I think it's probably a slur, which is one of the reasons why we don't usually always use the word pagans; we sometimes say polytheist. But the reality is that even saying polytheist is using a Christian lens. Polytheists didn't consider themselves polytheists; you only think of yourself as a polytheist after monotheists tell you that having more than one god is wrong.

Because of the survival that we know about of classical literature, much of our exposure to Roman paganism is through Greek mythology. We have a whole lecture, it's one of the most popular ones, about separating Greek and Roman mythology. We're probably also aware of the systematized pantheons of the Greco-Roman syncretism, where Zeus, the Greek god, is understood to be the Roman god Jupiter, Athena is Minerva, Ares is Mars, etc., even though they actually have different origins and are later syncretized together in the later Empire. Literature survives, unlike the lived experience of the non-literate masses, and our Christian focus on text, so the fact that Jews, Christians, and Muslims focus on text, scripture, as well as correct teaching, orthodoxy, neither of those is actually particularly central for paganism. It's not really about text. Homer and Virgil are very revered, but pagans don't have something like the Bible or the Quran. Lived paganism was much more than the mythology or the relationships in the pantheon, the sort of charts that we make of which gods are related to which gods and so forth. While syncretism allowed pagans to get along in a shared worldview, actually, it's the individual practices that mattered to them for real, and they were highly localized. Jupiter may have been understood to be Zeus when a Roman was a Latin Roman talking to Greeks, but his worship in Rome is particular to Rome. Roman paganism is primarily about ritual observances rather than doctrine, and in Rome especially, these were performed very legalistically as a contract between divine forces and humans. The Roman formula was "do ut des," which means "I give that you may give." It illustrates how Romans thought about things like animal sacrifice. They were sacrificing in order that the gods are then also going to give them something in return. But it also is their thinking behind just comprehensive ritual behaviors that accompanied all lived activity for Roman pagans. The Romans also had no concept of the separation of church and state. The state was intimately connected with religious ritual activity. The Republic and later its assemblies, and later the Empire and its officers, are sacred, and politicians filled public priesthoods. For example, Augustus here, who's the first emperor, this is a picture of him acting as a priest. All the difference for the Romans between a senator and a priest is if you take your toga and you kind of put it up over your head like that, now you're acting as a priest. All time and space, the calendar is part of the Pagan religion, the sacred boundaries of Rome, those are all governed by Pagan religious observance.

Nowadays, because historically there's a Christian connection that's of sex and sin and much more recent Anglo-Protestant moralizing against alcohol, that's left many people in the post-Christian world with the idea that paganism is a lot more fun than Christianity, and a lot of them have wished that Christianity hadn't displaced paganism. However, a post-modern person would actually find the penetration of ritual obligations into every aspect of personal, familial, and civic life to be decidedly unfun. There's just so much obligatory custom in every aspect of a person's life in paganism. As we've actually seen in a lecture, we had a lecture on Christianity and sex, it's not so much inherent in Christianity that this kind of attitude towards sex, rather this was an attitude that was emerging in Greco-Roman philosophy, the later Roman moral philosophy that impacted Christianity, and it was also impacting Christianity, I'm sorry, paganism at this time.

I'll just say quickly, in terms of how this is just intertwined with life, there are so many components of paganism. Personal rituals, you're crossing your fingers, saying "Gesundheit" when somebody sneezes, you are living dutifully to family, you are having reverence for your ancestors. The Romans have wax masks of their ancestors who were revered. There's obedience to sacred and civic law, expiation for ill omens, so some sign has happened, you have to do something to prevent that from occurring in your life, offering sacrifices to the gods in order so they'll do something in return, continually consulting auspices and oracles to make sure that if you plant a crop, it will not be destroyed, and so forth, praying to the gods, reverence for cult objects, statues that are both in temples but also your household gods, your little statues that you carry around with you for fortune and luck. Civic rights, assemblies, parades, the initiation into shrine cults, military confraternity memberships, so you would all, all of the guys you go drink with at your local tavern, you're all part of a confraternity, and you're the Brotherhood of the Crossroads, and you keep up certain duties, like maybe you provide burial services for each other so that your ghosts aren't haunted and so forth afterwards. It's all necessary things in the scary world of paganism to participate in civic festivals. You do hear about the myths in the poetry, the stories about the gods, there's concern for astrology, sort of the more intellectual component, sometimes the delectable, it's really not separated from astronomy at this time. Markets, so whether or not, you know, just trade is all done as part of the religion, watching civic games, we talked about bread and circuses, and also that decurion class that had to pay for the games and the circuses, watching and providing for plays, so you know, all of these things, sports and entertainment, those are all part of religion in this all-encompassing thing that religion was for the Pagan Romans. Same thing, studying philosophy, ethics of dealing with others, personal morality and austerity, these were things that weren't part so much or connected to things like the mythology or things like the rituals of offering sacrifices, but they had become important as some of the earlier practices don't seem to have provided a lot of meaning. What is the meaning of life in all of this?

So that's all of this integrated system of paganism. Why did it break down? In some ways, monotheistic religions struggle with the problem of evil, which is if there is an all-powerful good God, why does God allow all of this suffering in the world? Why is there a Holocaust? Nevertheless, paganism doesn't have that. You can say essentially you've suffered even though you did everything right by your main god Mars, but then you accidentally wronged Neptune, and he made your ship go astray and so forth. In other words, there's competing forces, that can explain the problem of evil. Nevertheless, paganism struggles with the problems of impiety, which is to say, faithful observance of religious obligation. Why do the impious people find divine favor? Why are the pious made to suffer? Aren't all of these customary ultimate obligations that we're doing, like sacrifices, aren't those hollow? Is blind obedience to duty good, or is a good life lived through ethical behavior? The moral philosophers that have emerged question the traditional religion and deconstruct the traditional religion, and this is all part of its challenge of world religions.

In broad terms, the earliest religions are usually understood to be things like animism. Animism is the idea that essentially all animals and things are possessed of spirits or energy. Animism explains why things happen for people prior to having an organized religion. Animism is probably just operating in very small hunter-gatherer groups where shamans are able to capture this energy that spirits or animals have through rituals such as going into a trance and so forth. In animism, life is filled with the constant fear of succumbing to harmful forces. Paganism is another layer that develops in places that have especially agricultural societies. When you have a big state society, divine forces are often anthropomorphized as human-like gods, Jupiter, Venus, and so forth. Gods are not ethically predictable, but you can propitiate them. You give them sacrifices in order for them to make sure that you're able to get pregnant or something like that, whatever the goal that you have, you can propitiate them and have them not bring their thunderbolts on you and so forth if you do it right. Magistrate classes perform the rituals like sacrifice and augury. We saw how Augustus puts his robe up and suddenly he's a priest. Life is really about obedience to law through prescribed behaviors. You do these kinds of things. If you sneeze, you say "Gesundheit." If you do something wrong, you cross your fingers. You step on a crack, you break your mom's back, you knock on wood, you do all these kinds of ritual behaviors in order to propitiate the different gods.

World religions come from the later idea that there's a source of order in the universe. Once you've been studying the heavens and you sort of see that things like the seasons and tides and all these kinds of things are very predictable, even eclipses can be predicted, something is beyond just these chaotic forces of the individual gods that you were associating with rivers and lightning and so forth. There's something bigger than that. The idea in world religions is that individual actions and knowledge are important to that source, that one source, to God. Philosophers and other reformers are calling for real ethical behavior as opposed to simply the traditional things, the traditional rituals like sacrifice that are simply propitiating or causing the gods to continue to make the world continue to function. Now we're saying, "Wait a second, we really need to be doing things like caring for widows and orphans and so forth." These are also about concern beyond self, clan, and city, and your present life. People start to have concerns with, "Is this all I am? Is there nothing more? Am I about to die? What happens after death? Is there anything after death?" and so forth.

Was Christianity's triumph inevitable? When Constantine converts and the later emperors continue and ultimately make Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire, if we kind of even accept that proposition that I had in talking about a general development from animism to paganism to world religion, and the idea that paganism represents a more primitive stage of religious development, does that mean really paganism's fall to a world religion was inevitable? Whether it was going to be Christianity or Mithraism or any other sort of mystery religion or Manichaeism, any other number of ones that might have been available, Buddhism, although we really enter here into the hazards of counterfactual, can we envision a sequence where the Roman Empire remained pagan? I think that there are counterexamples because we have counterexamples. There are survivals of old gods, the old religions in historic societies in India and Japan. Both of these encountered world religions, and the old gods adapted. In the case, for example, of Hinduism in India or Shinto in Japan, in India, the proto-Hindu religions, which are effectively Indian paganism, reacted to the world religion of Buddhism, which evolved at the pagan roots into an evolving religion of Hinduism, even though it wasn't called that yet. But it has essentially taken some of these ethical ideas and other ideas, universal ideas that it has encountered, and built those into the tradition. Then it encountered another very serious threat of a world religion, Islam, when Islam enters into the subcontinent and conquers the northern component of it. In response, Hinduism itself emerges as its own kind of world religion that has the features of world religions. Hindu paganism met those challenges from those world religions and ended up absorbing some of their characteristics, retains many of the ancient traditions while evolving to become a world religion of its own. There's a similar, although also complicated, path for Shinto in Japan.

I talked about that crisis of the third century that caused essentially the periodization even of classical history to end until late antiquity to start beginning. The Empire was divided by all these civil wars, and it had political and economic crises, but it also had a spiritual crisis. Much of Roman paganism was civic; it relied on those local Roman magistrates, the decurions, not only for local government but also to hold other offices, pay for things like games and religious festivals, decay for the upkeep of temples. They don't have a clergy; it's those same state officials that are maintaining the highly localized expressions of paganism, the old religious. By the third century, it was just increasingly difficult to find any decurions who wanted to shoulder this expense. In fact, actually, just as an example, there's almost no public building for decades during this whole crisis. Romanism is, you think of Roman civilization as about building amphitheaters and aqueducts and all these kinds of public buildings. That all stops during this whole crisis time, and that also prevents a lot of what Pagan practices had been.

There's a potentially alternative path. If the Pagan Roman Empire, which encountered what is functionally the world religion of Greek philosophy, that could have potentially created a philosophical Pagan Roman Empire. In other words, where the old gods are maintained. If local leaders increasingly turned away from civic expenditure, including Pagan rights, to find other spiritual meaning, the era of this late antiquity becomes actually the great age of popular practical philosophy. More people are interested in philosophy by a percentage of the population in the later Roman Empire than almost any other time in history, if you think of philosophy as separate from religion. It's conceivable, given time, that a Roman world religion might have evolved out of a combined reverence for the old gods with something like stoic morality. Although nominally the same, the religion would nevertheless be very different from the original religions of people like Pliny the Elder and other Romans from the Republican and early Imperial period.

Why do we have that? Why did it go to a Christian Roman Empire rather than a philosophical Pagan Roman Empire? The answer here is Constantine, which is the whole source of how Constantine changed everything. While the emperor's general religious evolution might have been inevitable, we might have had that philosophical Pagan Roman Empire in a philosophical Pagan world religion. Constantine's conversion just had massive ramifications for the particular path that was taken. I think that his conversion appears to be personal and genuine because I don't think that there's much he gained from it, although historians have argued that there are various economic and political motives. Any of the gains that he had from this front seem to have best balanced losses. Not everybody, I mean, he's losing a lot of things by abandoning Rome's traditional gods as well, including lots of people who have been committed to their history and so forth. Constantine's long and successful reign gave him time to make Christianity more palatable. He also, by creating those structures, as we saw with the ecumenical council and a hierarchy and so forth, he actually created a kind of an actual apparatus that paganism lacked. Over time, he made Christianity more palatable to the imperial elite, and he simultaneously gave the religion time to take root at the center. The short, failed reign of his nephew Julian, who left Christianity and wanted to instead create a revived Pagan state religion, might have been possible if Julian hadn't been killed. His reign was too short to do that, but because Julian failed, that pretty much made the path inevitable. Patronage by all later emperors is really the single most important factor of Christianity's victory over paganism. Rome, like we said, had long since ceased to be the administrative capital. Now Constantine built a new capital, and in addition to being centered with all of these new buildings, a new Senate, and all those things, it's also made based on not on Pagan temples and so forth, but on new Christian monuments. By essentially starting over here in Constantinople, he's able to make this be the center of a new imperial understanding and identity.

Just to add on a little bit, there are other strengths. While philosophy required significant education, Christian leaders, so Constantine, in the Council of Nicaea, formulated a doctrinal creed that anybody could memorize. You can learn the complicated thing about having Christ and the Spirit and the Creator, the Father, being in a homeostatic union or something like that by memorizing that. Therefore, it's not formulated to reach the popular masses as opposed to philosophy, which requires a lot of education. Bishops, who were patronized by imperial governments, led churches and cities that provided for social services, so for example, alms for the poor, other works of charity that previously weren't part of the civic administration or which had collapsed because of the lack of having a secular civic government. This was seen as a really positive thing in the community, that this little bit of social safety net is taking place. Also, zealous Christian monks and hermits performed all sorts of feats of self-mortification at this time that just kind of amazed contemporaries. For example, Simon Stylites lived 47 years on top of a pillar, continuously fasting and starving himself, and he's up there essentially exposed to the elements. This was showing people, anyway, people, this was a causative sensation. This guy must really have amazing faith, and God must really be with him if you're doing these kinds of miraculous things. The same zeal and sense of spiritual power that allowed monks to live on top of these columns also animated their desire to smash Pagan shrines. This was a problem. If a monk comes up to your holy tree and he chops it down, or if he smashes the statue of the god, why doesn't the god strike down the Christian monks who desecrated shrines like this? Because that was an argument that was made. It's obviously a very cruel desecration and destruction of ancient traditions and things like that that these zealous monks are doing, but that's what they're doing, and it caused a lot of people to say, "Yeah, well, I guess he wasn't there to, there wasn't anything there to stop them." All the different rituals that you had to propitiate the gods, it turns out you could actually chop the tree down, and they wouldn't have done anything to you. Ground that had been holy to pagans was frequently Christianized, and so you take that shrine, once you've gotten rid of the statue, you bury a Christian martyr on the site, and all the old ladies that keep coming to it for the same rituals that they always have, now they're sort of Christians because they're coming to a Christian shrine because it's now on the same site. Pagans also lacked paid clergy; there was no structure. Julian tried to create a little bit of a structure for paganism, but it wasn't really working, so the pagans were really unable to have an organized resistance in the face of all of this. We went to Syracuse, Sicily, a couple of years ago, and it was just an amazing sight to see where you take all of these Greek columns, you can see built into the wall of what became the cathedral and what is now the cathedral in Syracuse. It was originally a temple of Athena, and for a little bit of time, because Sicily has had so much of an interesting and varied history, it spent time as a mosque, and it was also a Greek Orthodox church, now a Catholic church.

These are some of my thoughts on how Constantine changed everything. Thank you for going with us. It got a little bit eclectic at the end, but hopefully, you were able to follow that.

Q and A

So, Edward Peter had asked, "Do you think that Constantine's conversion was just pragmatic?" and like I said, I don't really think it was because I don't see why it would have benefited him much. I know there's a bunch of speculation, but what ends up happening is that, from retrospect, because everything became Christian within a century or so after, it seems inevitable. It seems like Constantine might have done it for pragmatic reasons, as everything was moving in that direction. However, it was such a tiny percentage of the population; it's not like it was all the richest or most important people, or that he suddenly gained a bunch of shock troops or something. A lot of Christians at the time were pacifists, and while there were some Christians in the army, it's not like he suddenly gained a bunch of rich followers with a big military or something very pragmatic.

I mean, it's pragmatic in the sense that he probably believed the Christian God was doing something for him. He had a vision or put the God symbol on their shields, and the God gave him victory. Initially, I think he might have just followed that path. He wasn't initially a sole Christian or a zealous Christian; he continued to recognize other pagan gods, especially Sol Invictus, the unconquerable sun. But over time, as he talked to more Christians and participated in church councils, I think he got a better idea of what it was all about.

Again, maybe it's pragmatism or just his understanding of faith. As an emperor, he was involved in acts that were not great, including ordering people to be killed and battles. He held off on being baptized until late in life, hoping that all those sins and bad acts he had to make pragmatically as a leader would be washed away in his baptism. So, I guess it depends on what you mean by pragmatic, but I don't think it's pragmatic in the sense that he gained something significant from the Christians.

Stephen Urbanec asks, "What are the myths about Constantine's conversion and what is the truth?" Hopefully, we've explained my understanding of the truth of his conversion. There are myths, and people like conspiracy theories. There's a conspiracy theory that earlier Roman emperors created the whole Jesus story to dupe people, but that's a myth and not true. It's anachronistic and doesn't relate to the time period.

I want to thank Edward Prater and Daryl Scott for supporting the channel. Thank you so much; we really appreciate it when folks donate. Leonberg asks, "How did all these far-flung tetrarch rulers communicate with each other? Did any of them ever meet in person?" They did at different times. We had Galerius, the senior Augustus in the East, who called a colloquy, and they all met to try to reorganize the tetrarchy. They communicated by post and messengers. The Roman Empire had a fast postal system, and the Romans were famous for their roads, which had a primarily military function. They were used to march troops and send messengers between army encampments, but they were also used by merchants and travelers. So, they communicated that way, but it still took a long time to get a message from Eboracum to Nicomedia in Asia Minor.

Rain asks, "How did the Roman people and Senate view adult adoption as a means to inherit the title or name of Caesar? Was it seen as a political move or a legitimate father-son relationship?" There is a big tradition in Roman aristocracy to adopt adults as heirs. You can see this in Roman names. If you're adopted, your name changes to reflect the new family. For example, Julius Caesar adopted his nephew Gaius Octavius, who then became Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus. It's very common, and names like Fabian, Julian, and Claudian reflect this practice. It's pragmatic, but they considered it a legitimate clan relationship, where you and your descendants become part of the new clan.

Triply Pibbles asks, "What was the religious landscape like at that point? What was left of older religions and cults?" Under Constantine, the old religions were still there. Constantine did not outlaw them; it was later emperors like Theodosius the Great who made Christianity the state religion and closed pagan institutions. At Constantine's time, there was general tolerance, and people could be Christian, Jewish, or worship the old gods. Most of the old religions and cults were still around, but fewer magistrates held great festivals. Mystery cults and shrines still existed, and personal and familial practices were maintained. They slowly died out or were stamped out over time.

Christopher Benham asks, "How were the bishops who attended the Council of Nicaea chosen?" In the old days, it's strange to me as an ancient historian and medievalist that in the modern Catholic Church, the pope chooses bishops. That wasn't how it worked. Each bishopric had its own apostolic tradition, and the local chapter or the people elected the bishop. The preceding bishop might have made their preference clear, or the chapter elected them, or the population acclaimed them. They weren't all picked by the bishop of Rome.

He also asked, "Were there any Arian supporters at the Council of Nicaea?" Arius was there himself, and some of his supporters were present, but they were in the minority and lost the argument.

Robert Garrison asks, "Would Christianity be what it is today without Constantine's conversion?" Absolutely not. It's hard to know what Christianity would be like without Constantine's conversion. Christianity survived outside the Roman Empire, like in Armenia, but if the Roman Empire had developed its own world religion, it could have persecuted Christians and Jews. It's possible that Arian Christianity could have existed in Germany and Scandinavia, but we don't know what it would be like.

Stephen Urbanec asks, "Was Christianity corrupted by paganism as some Protestants claim, or was it a bottom-up phenomenon like syncretism?" Protestants at the beginning of the Reformation saw developments in Christianity as corruption. Christianity absorbed pagan practices and philosophy, which some see as a falling away from essential truths. However, this lacks perspective. Christianity was already in a Hellenized society influenced by Greek thought. Many ideas in Second Temple Judaism, like immortality of the soul and resurrection, were influenced by other religions. The idea of corruption is wrong; it's more about sharing ideas and syncretism.

Edward Prater asks, "How would you describe Western science in the context of world religions given your evolutionary story of belief?" Modern science draws inspiration from ancient Greek and Roman science but is the direct offspring of medieval science. The idea of a Renaissance rebirth of classical civilization is a myth. Modern science evolved from medieval practices, like labor-saving devices. Western science is an invention of the medieval Church, and the university system and scientific language are rooted in the Church. It's only in the Enlightenment that there's a divergence between science and religion.

Miguel Angel asks, "Why wasn't Constantine made a saint after his death? How important was Constantine's mother to later Christianity?" Constantine is venerated as a saint in Eastern Christianity. His mother, Saint Helena, is important. Women in the family often converted first, influencing others. Helena went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, identifying sites that became traditional Christian shrines.

Daryl Scott asks, "Do many Protestant groups dislike Constantine for paving the way for the Catholic Church?" Yes, especially in the restoration tradition, Constantine is associated with a great apostasy when the legitimate Church ceased to exist and needed restoration.

Nitsky89 asks, "Early Christianity is often portrayed as the religion of the lower classes. Were there members of the elite who converted prior to Constantine?" Yes, there were some elite members who converted, but not enough to make it pragmatic for Constantine to convert for that reason.

Edward Prater asks, "Is there no salvation without Jesus?" Christianity teaches that salvation comes through Jesus, as expressed in John 3:16. Some Christians believe that only Christians can be saved, but not all Christians hold this view. I personally believe that Christ is part of the Trinity and that salvation can be found through many paths and names.

That's the end. Thank you so much for staying with us. People have been sharing lecture ideas, and I appreciate that because we only have one more lecture listed. A lecture idea someone suggested is the Holy Trinity. Thank you; I've had trouble discussing it, but it's a good idea. Other ideas include the historical Joan of Arc, Ark of the Covenant theories, and claimants of the title Messiah. I appreciate all those ideas; keep them coming. I'll be reading them in the comments. Save the date for our next lecture on the Fourth of July: "Why was the historical Jesus from Galilee?"