Who was Constantine the Great?

From York to sole emperor

Constantine was born at Naissus, today’s Niš in Serbia, probably in 272. His father, Constantius, was an army officer who rose to become one of Diocletian’s four rulers. His mother, Helena, was a woman of humble birth, later honored as a saint. In July 306 his father died at Eboracum, today’s York, and the soldiers proclaimed Constantine emperor on the spot. It took eighteen years of civil war before he ruled alone: Maxentius fell at the Milvian Bridge in 312, Licinius at Chrysopolis in 324.

The sign before the battle

The most famous moment of his life came just before the Milvian Bridge, north of Rome, in October 312. Two Christian writers tell it two ways. Lactantius, writing a few years later, says a dream told Constantine to mark the Chi-Rho, the first two letters of Christ’s name in Greek, on his soldiers’ shields. Eusebius, writing after the emperor’s death, says Constantine himself described a sign in the sky to him and swore to it.

He said that about noon, when the day was already beginning to decline, he saw with his own eyes the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing the inscription, Conquer by this. At this sight he himself was struck with amazement, and his whole army also.

The arch the Senate raised for him in Rome in 315 is more careful. Its inscription says he won by the inspiration of the divinity, instinctu divinitatis, words a pagan and a Christian could both accept.

Was he really a Christian?

In many ways he acted like one. In 313 he and Licinius granted freedom of worship to everyone, Christians included, and returned seized church property. He paid for great churches, among them the first St Peter’s in Rome and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and in 325 he gathered some three hundred bishops at Nicaea. Yet for years his coins still showed the sun god, and a law of 321 made Sunday, the day of the Sun, a day of rest.

He was baptized only as he lay dying near Nicomedia in May 337, by the local bishop, another Eusebius. Waiting was common then: baptism was believed to wash away every earlier sin, so many put it off. Christians have long seen in him a sincere convert, critics a shrewd politician who backed the rising church. Many historians think he truly believed the Christian God had given him his victories, while still ruling as emperor of pagans and Christians alike.

Blood in the family

In 326 Constantine had his eldest son, Crispus, a successful general, put to death at Pola, today’s Pula in Croatia. Soon after, his wife Fausta died in an overheated bath. Their names were chiseled off inscriptions, and no writer of the time explains why. Zosimus, a pagan historian writing around 500 and hostile to Constantine, links the two deaths and claims the emperor turned Christian because only Christians promised forgiveness for such crimes. Most historians read that as polemic. The truth is unknown.

What he left

Constantine died on May 22, 337, and was buried in his Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople, the second Rome he had dedicated in 330 (why he built it). His gold coin, the solidus, kept its value for some seven centuries. The Orthodox churches honor him as a saint, equal to the apostles, with his mother Helena on May 21. Later writers called him the Great.