Constantine the Great

By Emre Yıldırım

On the eve of the battle that would make him master of the West, Constantine looked at the sun and saw a cross of light above it, with the words "in this sign, conquer." Whether vision, propaganda, or both, he painted the Christian chi-rho on his soldiers' shields — and won. The most important conversion in Western history may have begun as a military decision.

Constantine was born around 272 CE, son of the general Constantius Chlorus and Helena. Proclaimed emperor by his troops at York in 306, he spent six years fighting rivals until the Milvian Bridge in 312, where he destroyed Maxentius outside Rome. The following year, with his eastern colleague Licinius, he issued the Edict of Milan: Christianity, persecuted for most of three centuries, became a legal religion, its confiscated property restored. Constantine showered the church with money, built basilicas — including the first St. Peter's in Rome — and made Sunday a public holiday. After defeating Licinius in 324 to become sole emperor, he went further: in 325 he summoned the Council of Nicaea, the first ecumenical council, to settle the Arian controversy over Christ's divinity, producing the Nicene Creed recited in churches to this day. The emperor who had been pontifex maximus of the pagan gods now presided over Christian doctrine.

His second great act was geographical. In 330 he dedicated Constantinople — Nova Roma, New Rome — on the Bosphorus, a Christian capital to replace a pagan one. The city would outlive the Western Empire by a thousand years, carrying Roman law, Greek learning, and Christian orthodoxy through the Middle Ages as the seat of Byzantium.

Constantine was no saint — he executed his wife Fausta and his son Crispus, and was baptized only on his deathbed in 337 — and historians still debate whether his faith was conviction or calculation. It hardly matters. By binding the church to the state, he ended the age of persecutions and began the age of Christendom: seventeen centuries in which Christianity and Western power would be inseparable, for better and for worse. The cross on the labarum at the Milvian Bridge became the standard under which Europe marched for a millennium. The Donation of Constantine, a forged document claiming he granted the pope temporal power over the West, would be used for seven centuries to justify papal claims — proof of how thoroughly his name became authority itself. He died at Nicomedia in 337 and was buried among the apostles in his own mausoleum: the first Christian emperor, laid to rest as the thirteenth apostle.

Impact on civilization

Constantine's legalization of Christianity — and his patronage that made it the empire's favored religion — redirected the course of Western civilization: the persecuted sect became the established church, and Christian ethics, law, and institutions shaped Europe for seventeen centuries. The Council of Nicaea fixed the doctrinal boundaries of mainstream Christianity, defining orthodoxy for billions. His founding of Constantinople created the Byzantine Empire, which preserved Roman law and Greek classical learning through the Middle Ages and transmitted them to the Renaissance. The Constantinian settlement — the alliance of church and state — became the political theology of the West, producing both the glories of Christendom and its wars of religion, until the modern age began to disentangle them. His reign also fixed the pattern of the Christian capital: a city built around churches rather than temples, with the emperor as God's vicegerent — the model for every Christian monarchy from Charlemagne to the Russian tsars. The week itself, with Sunday as the day of rest, is his quiet legacy in every calendar on earth.