Milan, Legislation, and New Rome

The public work of the Christian emperor: the religious settlement reached with Licinius at Milan in 313 — properly a letter to provincial governors, not an “edict” — which restored confiscated Christian property and granted freedom of worship; the legislation and lavish church-building that followed; and the founding of Constantinople as New Rome, dedicated on 11 May 330. This file follows what Constantine did with power on the Church’s behalf.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The “Edict” of Milan (313)

In February 313, in the winter after the Milvian Bridge, Constantine met his co-emperor Licinius at Milan, sealing their alliance with Licinius’s marriage to Constantine’s sister Constantia and agreeing a common religious policy. That policy is remembered as the Edict of Milan — but the name is a later convenience, and precision matters. [Corrected: the "Edict of Milan" was not, strictly, an edict, and was not issued at Milan as a promulgated law. What survives is the *letter* (or rescript) that Licinius, implementing the Milan agreement, sent to the provincial governors of the East after defeating Maximinus Daia — preserved in Latin by Lactantius, *De mortibus persecutorum* 48, and in Greek by Eusebius, *Ecclesiastical History* 10.5. Modern scholarship therefore speaks of the "so-called Edict of Milan" and stresses that it was an administrative protocol carrying out an imperial agreement, not a single legislative act (Barnes, *Constantine and Eusebius*, 1981, ch. 3; Corcoran, *The Empire of the Tetrarchs*, 1996). It also built upon, rather than initiated, toleration: Galerius's Edict of Toleration of 311 had already legalized Christianity (see the Great Persecution file).]

What the document actually granted was substantial. It extended freedom of religion “to the Christians and to all” to follow whatever worship they chose; and — going decisively beyond Galerius’s grudging toleration — it ordered the restitution of property confiscated during the persecution: the churches, lands, and goods taken from Christian congregations were to be restored without payment, the state compensating any current holders (Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum 48; Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 10.5; trans. Creed, 1984, and NPNF II/1). This restoration of corporate property, recognizing the Church as a body able to own, is the settlement’s most consequential provision (Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981; Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, 2000, on the significance of legal recognition).

The Pro-Christian Legislation

Over the following two decades Constantine’s laws and benefactions moved the Church from tolerated to favored. He exempted the Christian clergy from the burdensome civic obligations (munera) that fell on other men of property, freeing them for their office (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 10.7; Codex Theodosianus 16.2, the laws on clerical immunities; Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981). He granted the Church the right to receive legacies, poured imperial funds into building and charity, gave bishops a recognized role in adjudication (the episcopalis audientia), and legislated in a Christian direction on manumission of slaves in church and on public morality (Lenski, Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine, 2nd ed., 2012, ch. 13, on the legislation). In 321 he made “the venerable day of the Sun” (dies Solis, Sunday) a day of rest for the courts and urban trades — a law whose phrasing, invoking the Sun, again shows the overlap of solar and Christian language in his reign (Corcoran, The Empire of the Tetrarchs, 1996, on the Sunday law; and see The Sources for Constantine). At the same time he did not outlaw paganism: sacrifices were discouraged and some temples closed or despoiled, but the old cults remained legal throughout his reign, and Constantine retained the title pontifex maximus and tolerated the imperial cult in a de-sacralized form (Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981; Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, 2000, on the policy of restraint). His was a program of favor to the Church, not yet the suppression of its rivals.

The Church-Building

The most visible sign of the new order was stone. Constantine and his mother endowed a wave of monumental churches that fixed the shape of Christian sacred architecture. At Rome he gave the Lateran palace for the cathedral of the bishop of Rome and built the first basilica over the tomb of St. Peter on the Vatican hill, along with other foundations (Krautheimer, Rome: Profile of a City, 312–1308, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980, ch. 1; Lenski, Cambridge Companion, 2012, ch. 12). At Jerusalem, after the site was cleared, he built the great complex over Golgotha and the Holy Sepulchre — the Martyrium basilica and the Anastasis rotunda — dedicated at the Encaenia of September 335 (Eusebius, Life of Constantine 3.25–40; and see The Elevation of the Cross Feast). Churches rose too at Bethlehem and on the Mount of Olives, associated with Helena’s pilgrimage (see The Holy Land Pilgrimage), and at his new capital. This building program made the Church, within a generation, the most conspicuous institution of the empire’s cities.

The Founding of New Rome (330)

Constantine’s most enduring creation was a city. After defeating Licinius in 324 he chose the ancient Greek town of Byzantium, on the Bosporus at the meeting of Europe and Asia, to be refounded as his capital — a “New Rome” commanding the strategic and economic center of the empire’s surviving wealth in the East (Eusebius, Life of Constantine 3.48; Dagron, Naissance d’une capitale: Constantinople et ses institutions de 330 à 451, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974). The rebuilt city was solemnly dedicated on 11 May 330 and named Constantinople, “the city of Constantine,” though its official style was Nova Roma, New Rome (Dagron, Naissance d’une capitale, 1974; Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, 1981, ch. 12). Constantine adorned it with a forum, a senate, churches (Hagia Eirene, and the foundations of the Holy Apostles), and antiquities gathered from across the empire; he built it as a Christian city, without the old temples at its heart, though it retained pagan monuments and a still largely pagan population for generations (Dagron, Naissance d’une capitale, 1974; Bassett, The Urban Image of Late Antique Constantinople, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

The founding of Constantinople is among the most consequential acts in Christian history. It created the political and ecclesiastical center around which Eastern Christianity would organize for over eleven centuries; its bishop would be ranked second after Rome at Constantinople I (381) and given honors “because it is New Rome” (Constantinople I, 381, Canon 3), a canon whose logic would become a fault line with the papacy (see Papal Claims and the Frankish Factor, and the hub Constantinople (Ecumenical Patriarchate)). The “God-guarded City” whose fall in 1453 the whole Orthodox world would mourn was Constantine’s foundation (see The Byzantine Church). In founding New Rome, Constantine gave Orthodoxy its historic imperial home.

Symphonia in Germ

Taken together — the legal recognition, the endowments, the churches, the capital — these acts inaugurated the relation of Christian emperor and Church that Byzantium would theorize as symphonia, the harmony of the two God-given powers (classically stated in Justinian’s Sixth Novel of 535; see The Byzantine Church). Its critics, ancient and modern, have charged that it subordinated the Church to the throne — the accusation of “caesaropapism”; the Orthodox reading, argued in the Byzantine Church hub, is that symphonia was a theory of distinct but cooperating spheres, and that the Church repeatedly resisted emperors who tried to impose heresy, from the iconoclasts to the unionists of Florence. Constantine himself would test the limits of the arrangement at once, in the Arian crisis he inherited with the East (see Constantine at Nicaea). The pattern he set — an emperor who convenes councils, funds the Church, and legislates in its favor, but does not define its doctrine — is the germ of the whole Byzantine settlement.

See Also

References

  • Barnes, Timothy D. Constantine and Eusebius. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
  • Bassett, Sarah. The Urban Image of Late Antique Constantinople. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
  • Corcoran, Simon. The Empire of the Tetrarchs: Imperial Pronouncements and Government, AD 284–324. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
  • Dagron, Gilbert. Naissance d’une capitale: Constantinople et ses institutions de 330 à 451. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1974.
  • Drake, H. A. Constantine and the Bishops: The Politics of Intolerance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
  • Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History 10.5–7; Life of Constantine 3.25–48. Trans. NPNF II/1; and Cameron and Hall, Oxford: Clarendon, 1999.
  • Krautheimer, Richard. Rome: Profile of a City, 312–1308. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.
  • Lactantius. De mortibus persecutorum 48. 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.
  • Constantinople I (381), Canon 3. Trans. NPNF II/14.