From Naissus to the Purple

Constantine’s political ascent: born at Naissus around 272 to the officer Constantius and Helena; raised at the eastern tetrarchic court; acclaimed emperor by his father’s army at York in 306 on Constantius’s death; and, through eighteen years of civil war against Maxentius and then Licinius, made sole ruler of the reunited Roman Empire in 324. This file follows the politics; the vision that Christian memory sets at its center is treated in Section 03.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Birth and the Years in the East

Constantine was born at Naissus (Niš) around 272, the son of the officer Constantius — the future Caesar of the West — and Helena, a woman of humble origin (see The Life of Helena). When Constantius was raised to the tetrarchy in 293 and required to make a dynastic marriage, the young Constantine was sent east, effectively as a surety for his father’s loyalty, and spent his formative years at the courts of Diocletian and Galerius at Nicomedia (Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981, ch. 1; Lenski, Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine, 2nd ed., 2012, ch. 3). There he was educated, served with distinction in campaigns on the Danube and in Persia, and — as Eusebius stresses — witnessed the outbreak of the Great Persecution from within the palace that launched it (Eusebius, Life of Constantine 1.19; trans. Cameron and Hall, 1999).

The Acclamation at York (306)

By 305, when Diocletian and Maximian abdicated together and Galerius and Constantius became the senior Augusti, Constantine’s position at the eastern court had grown precarious: he was a grown, capable, and popular officer whom Galerius had reason to fear and no interest in promoting (Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 24; trans. Creed, 1984). In 305 or early 306 Constantine obtained — or seized — leave to join his father, and made a hard ride across Europe to reach Constantius in Gaul, riding on to Britain (Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 24, with the vivid detail of maiming the post-horses to foil pursuit). He arrived in time to campaign with his father against the Picts and to be at his side when Constantius died at Eboracum (York) on 25 July 306. The army there acclaimed Constantine Augustus on the spot (Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 24; Eusebius, Life of Constantine 1.21–22; Barnes, The New Empire of Diocletian and Constantine, 1982, on the date). Galerius, unable to reverse the acclamation, recognized Constantine only as Caesar, the junior rank; Constantine accepted the title for the moment but held the real power of the West — Gaul, Britain, and Spain — and the loyalty of his father’s army (Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981, ch. 3).

The Collapse of the Tetrarchy

The orderly succession Diocletian had designed disintegrated almost at once. Within months of Constantine’s acclamation, Maxentius, the son of the retired Maximian, seized Rome and Italy (306); Maximian himself came out of retirement; and over the next six years the empire dissolved into a shifting field of as many as six simultaneous claimants to the purple, bound and unbound by marriages, betrayals, and short-lived alliances (Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981, chs. 3–4; Potter, The Roman Empire at Bay, 2nd ed., 2014, ch. 10). Constantine consolidated the West, defended the Rhine, and married Fausta, Maximian’s daughter, sealing an alliance he would later have to break — Maximian rebelled against him and died (by suicide or execution) at Marseille in 310 (Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981; and see Crispus and Fausta for the family’s later tragedies). By 312 the western struggle had narrowed to Constantine against Maxentius, master of Italy and Africa.

The War Against Maxentius (312)

In 312 Constantine invaded Italy, defeating Maxentius’s generals at Turin and Verona and marching on Rome. On 28 October 312 the two armies met at the Milvian Bridge over the Tiber, just north of the city; Maxentius’s forces were broken and driven into the river, where Maxentius himself drowned (Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 44; Eusebius, Life of Constantine 1.38; Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981, ch. 3). Constantine entered Rome as its liberator. It is to this campaign that both Christian traditions attach the vision and the sign — the dream reported by Lactantius and the daytime vision reported by Eusebius — whose divergent accounts are the subject of The Diverging Accounts. The victory left Constantine master of the entire West, and in February 313 he met his remaining colleague Licinius at Milan, sealing an alliance with the marriage of Licinius to Constantine’s sister Constantia and issuing the religious settlement known as the Edict of Milan (see Milan, Legislation, and New Rome).

The War Against Licinius and Sole Rule (324)

For a decade the empire was divided between Constantine in the West and Licinius in the East — an uneasy partnership punctuated by a first war in 316–317 and by Licinius’s renewed pressure on the Christians of his territories, which allowed Constantine to present the final conflict as a war of liberation for the Church (Eusebius, Life of Constantine 1.49–56; Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981, ch. 4 — noting that Eusebius’s framing of the war as a crusade is retrospective and partisan). The decisive campaign came in 324: Constantine defeated Licinius at Adrianople on 3 July and, after his son Crispus won the naval battle of the Hellespont, again at Chrysopolis on 18 September 324. Licinius surrendered, was spared on Constantia’s plea, and was executed the following year (Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981; Lenski, Cambridge Companion, 2012, ch. 3). With Chrysopolis, Constantine became for the first time in nearly forty years the sole ruler of the whole Roman world — and inherited, with the East, a Church already convulsed by the Arian dispute (see Constantine at Nicaea).

What the Rise Establishes

The bare political record establishes two things the later hagiography must be read against. First, Constantine was, before anything else, a supremely successful soldier-politician who fought his way to sole power through eighteen years of civil war, and who removed rivals — including his father-in-law and his co-emperor — with the ruthlessness the age demanded. Second, from 306 he was already, in the West, the ruler of a house friendly to the Christians, so that his later favor to the Church has a prehistory and is not simply the fruit of a single battlefield vision. The Church venerates the man this history produced; it does not need him to have been other than he was (see A Sober Assessment, and the model of the warrior-saint in St. David the Builder: A King and a Saint).

See Also

• The Diverging Accounts — the vision Christian memory sets at the center of 312
• The Sources for Constantine — how far each witness to this rise can be trusted
• Crispus and Fausta — the son who won the Hellespont and the wife whose father Constantine had removed
• Constantine at Nicaea — the Church he inherited with the East in 324

References

• Barnes, Timothy D. Constantine and Eusebius. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
• Barnes, Timothy D. The New Empire of Diocletian and Constantine. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.
• Eusebius of Caesarea. Life of Constantine 1.19–56. Trans. Averil Cameron and Stuart G. Hall. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999.
• Lactantius. De mortibus persecutorum 24, 44. Ed. and trans. J. L. Creed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.
• Lenski, Noel, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
• Potter, David S. The Roman Empire at Bay, AD 180–395. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2014.