Emperor Constantine

How did Constantine the Great conquer his rivals and shape the Roman Empire? Tristan Hughes discusses the dramatic rise of Roman Emperor Constantine I with Professor David Potter. They discuss the scandalous tales and strategic manoeuvres that defined Constantine's ascent, including his brutal execution of his son Crispus and his wife Fausta, his significant victory at the Milvian Bridge, and his delicate balance between Christianity and Roman paganism. Together they uncover the personal dramas and political strategies that reshaped the Roman Empire and cemented Constantine's legacy. Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Theme music from Motion Array, all other music from Epidemic Sound Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

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• 1:22Tristan Hughes?

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• 2:45Tristan Hughes?

  It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and today, where we're once again delving into the Ancients archive over the Christmas break, I bring you back to the fore of another of my favourite episodes from the back catalogue. Now, this episode was within the first 20 that the Ancients ever released back in mid 2020, more than four years ago. It is a real golden oldie, and I've always had a soft spot for this interview. One, because when it was released, it gave the Ancients one of the first ever notable spikes in listens. We were only talking hundreds, if that, back then, but that was big for me at the time. And two, because this episode covers such an interesting period in Roman history.

• 3:29Tristan Hughes?

  It's the story of how the famous Roman emperor Constantine I, also known as Constantine the Great, rose to power. His early years, his proclamation as emperor at York in Britain, the rivals he defeated, the well-known victory he gained at the Milvian Bridge, his careful balancing of Christianity and the traditional Roman gods, his terrible parenting, and much more. Now, our guest for this episode was the fantastic Professor David Potter from the University of Michigan. So, sit back and relax as we revisit one of my favourite early episodes of the Ancients: The Rise of Constantine.

• 4:11Tristan Hughes?

  Now, Constantine the Great, a man whose religious significance sometimes overshadows Shadows his other extraordinary achievements.

• 4:19Speaker 03

  Yes, it does. Of course, a lot of later record was written by Christians and very heavily influenced by especially the work of Eusebius of Caesaria, a man who was not actually very close to Constantine at any point in his life, and wrote his biography of Constantine after the emperor was dead. The other records for Constantine, which are primarily the record of his legislation, gives us, I think, a much better take on his personality and on what drove him. There's a particularly notable letter to the prefect of Rome after the palace had been struck by lightning. And this is well after Constantine became a Christian, saying, okay, and remember to consult the Horus Peces as well.

• 5:04Speaker 03

  I mean, Constantine was a man who knew how to hedge his divine bets, which is not something you'd ever find in Eusebius's biography.

• 5:13Tristan Hughes?

  You mentioned Eusebius just there and the fact that so many of our sources about Constantine are Christian sources. And do we have any pagan sources written near the time of Constantine that talk about Constantine's life?

• 5:24Speaker 03

  Yes, the basic pagan sources come from the imperial palace. These are a series of speeches in praise of Constantine, and we can trace the way that he wanted to be seen by his subjects through the way the story of his life is changed in these speeches. This especially, of course, has to deal with his relationship with his father-in-law, who he hung for rebellion in 310. And so, you know, got to be very careful around that one. Other people he doesn't mention, the previous emperor's Diocletian at all. Then in the latter, Panegyric, there's some, the last of them, there's some very

• 6:07Speaker 03

  negative commentary on his deceased brother-in-law, who of course he killed at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. You basically don't want to be married, you know, related to Constantine by marriage at all. But he paints his then other brother-in-law, Lysenius, in this speech very much as a sort of suggestion that brothers-in-law need to know how to behave. The message there about Licinius, I think, is very clear. And then we have an extraordinary legislative record. And we can really get a sense of Constantine's personality. Not just as, I just said, sort of hedging the divine bet. But also, there are moments where he's clearly very impatient with his senior subordinates.

• 6:50Speaker 03

  And he basically says, why didn't you do this? Get on with it. And so we do get this sense of the real personality coming through some of this legislation. And we know that there's some question, did the emperor really write this? Did he know this? Was it his secretary? But when we concentrate on the documents which are written to the most senior officials in the empire, you can be pretty sure that the emperor is sitting there dictating this. And you can sort of see him pacing back and forth.

• 7:20Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, that's a remarkable source to have for an emperor. It sounds, I guess, diaries is too strong a word. But as you say, these administrative papers, these orders, they sound like they're coming from Constantine's mouth himself.

• 7:34Speaker 03

  They very much are, in the case of these letters to the senior officials. And they all tell a story because somebody's got a problem. And they've written to the emperor and the emperor is responding to the problem. And you can get a sort of sense of consistency in his approach here. I mean, he was a man who valued efficiency enormously. And we can see him coming back to these points again and again. And then if we transfer that to the record we have of, say, Constantine in the military sphere, this is a man who got an army across the Alps at the beginning of the spring in 312. This is an enormously complicated military operation, but it doesn't come as any surprise

• 8:18Speaker 03

  that he managed to pull it off. This is a man of enormous attention to detail. And he's also, as I say, a guy who you can sense is a bit passionate at times. And that would cause him a certain amount of difficulty at points in his life.

• 8:33Tristan Hughes?

  And this real attention to detail, let's have a look at the background to all this, before he becomes emperor, before his clashes with his fellow Roman leaders. What do we know about Constantine's background? What sort of world is he born into?

• 8:49Speaker 03

  Constantine is really born into a world of incredibly rapid change. His father was a senior official, married his mother Helena, who was probably a fairly well-off woman from what we would now think of as Western Turkey. Her home city was later renamed Helenopolis in her honour. There are later stories, of course, that Helena was a barmaid and that Constantine had picked her up on the side. And this is simply not true. Constantine was the legitimate son of Constantine by a legitimate marriage, and that is why he could be picked back up by Constantine in 305 and put in the line of

• 9:30Speaker 03

  succession. But Constantine himself, a very, very able general, was promoted to be deputy emperor by Maximian, who would later also become Constantine's father-in-law. And at that point, he had to divorce Helena and marry a daughter of Maximian. And at that point, Constantine and Helena are sort of, they're making their way in the world. Constantine is sent to the court of Diocletian, that's a Nicomedia, get him away from his father. He grows up there, has a career as a sort of military officer, mid-level military officer.

• 10:10Speaker 03

  He tells us at various times that he accompanied Diocletian to Egypt. He served with Galerius in the great campaign against the Persians, where the Romans undid a massive disaster that they'd suffered back in 260, really changed the balance of power on the frontier. A lot of the influence on his life is really, I think, from Diocletian. And hilarious, because those are the people who, in his teens, he's observing. And Diocletian is an enormously powerful personality himself. I mean, here's a man who, again, was a mid-level officer, is placed on the throne by the general staff, because who wants to be emperor? There's a death sentence at this point.

• 10:53Speaker 03

  If you go back to 238, you have the Emperor Maximian, who was murdered by his men. His two immediate successors, Pupae Anis and Balbinus, murdered by their men. There's Gordian III, murdered by his men. Philip the Arab, murdered in a revolt. Decius dies in battle. Valerian is captured by the Persians. You know, Aurelian, the most successful of these people, murdered by his men. So Diocletian takes off, "How am I going to fix this? How am I going to survive?" And he manages it. And then, you know, this astonishing ceremony in May of 305. You know, I mean, one of the things that Diocletian establishes is that emperors wear purple cloaks. Nobody else wears the purple cloak. And he'd established an imperial image, a very square, bearded chap, you know.

• 11:36Speaker 03

  But he gets up on the platform outside of his capital at Nicomedia. He takes off the purple cloak, drapes it over the shoulders of the new Caesar, walks down off the platform, far better than the President of the United States recently, gets into a cart and drives off into retirement. And I mean, it's an extraordinary thing to think, and if you're Constantine, this is what you're watching. How did this man reshape the Roman Empire? What did he do right? What did he do wrong? And a lot of what we see Constantine doing is a dialogue with Diocletian.

• 12:11Tristan Hughes?

  It's fascinating how his early career, as you said, at the court of Diocletian and in the East. Do you think all this knowledge, looking and watching, as it were, gaining all this experience, really sets him up for when he goes to the other end of the empire in the 300s with his father, which ultimately ends up with him being crowned emperor?

• 12:31Speaker 03

  I think it absolutely does, because he really knew the imperial system from the bottom up, from the inside out. He also, I think, recognised the personalities he was dealing with. When he takes the throne in 305, he is directly defying Galarius, on whose staff he served. But I think he knows enough about Galarius to know he can get away with it. And the staff around him that he meets when he goes and rejoins his father in 305, he is able to establish himself as somebody they're going to trust. And it's their necks that are going to be on the line if they don't do what Galarius

• 13:13Speaker 03

  expects them to do, which is allow the deputy that Constantine didn't want Severus to become the senior emperor. They don't want that, but Constantine has really taught them that they can trust him to be a good manager and a good leader. And I think he also realised that Galarius is somewhat risk averse, and so that if they do it right, they're going to get away with it.

• 13:39Tristan Hughes?

  So it's kind of exploiting the new system as well, exploiting the tetrarchy and this joint rule over the Roman Empire?

• 13:47Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. Knowing where the weak points are.

• 13:50Tristan Hughes?

  Fascinating. So when Constantine arrives in Britain, what is Constantine's relationship with Britain?

• 13:57Speaker 03

  Well, he'd never been there, probably. I mean, we wouldn't know if he had been a little boy. But he's in York, on the staff of his father, and they're on the campaign against tribes north of the Wall. I mean, this is something that happens from time to time, as the Wall fails, the emperor's got to go up there and do something about it. Most likely, he would have served as a liaison between his father and other senior officials at that point. But it's also, I think, important to him that the whole organisation is up there at this time, and they make this radical decision when Constantine dies.

• 14:41Speaker 03

  Which I think Constantine, he knew that he wasn't in good health when he insisted that his son come back to him. And I, God knows, maybe he got report cards from, you know, from the guys that he say, yeah, the kid's doing well, you know, you can, you can trust him. But it's that sort of moment of having everybody together in York that means that this coup can work.

• 15:01Tristan Hughes?

  And as soon as he is crowned emperor by his troops, how does he go about, I mean, what are the immediate challenges he faces?

• 15:10Speaker 03

  The immediate challenge he faces is to control the passes over the Alps so that Severus can't get at him. And so again, he has to move with extraordinary speed, really getting his people in position before any kind of response can come from the south. Because Severus, we know, was based in northern Italy around Milan. He had the army that had served under Maximian around him. He could move potentially fairly quickly into southern France if that was the case. So he had to be also quite confident that Constantine' own officers going from northern France to southern France would be loyal to the regime.

• 15:54Speaker 03

  And he does start as a sort of negotiations, oh, I'll only be Caesar, I won't be the senior Augustus. We'll let you be Augustus Galaria, you just have to accept this arrangement here. And so the interesting thing here is that Severus is left with this sort of a problem. Can he get himself across the Alps in the fall to take on Constantine? Because you'd figure it takes a couple of weeks for the news to come, the end of July, we're coming into August, and by the time you get the army together, you know, it's going to be October, November, and you don't want to be wandering around the Alps at that point in time. So Constantine is going to take advantage of having the protection of the mountain range while he pulls his regime together.

• 16:36Tristan Hughes?

  So if you can control those crossings, as it were, over the Alps in this time of the Roman Empire and you're controlling Gaul and Britain, or Roman Britain, and Constantine's managed to do this, is he now able to focus more on consolidating that north-western part of the empire under his control?

• 16:54Speaker 03

  Exactly, that's what he's looking to do as soon as he becomes emperor, is consolidate his position. He'll move back from Britain to Trier, which will remain his main capital up until, well, really, even after he takes Rome in 312, he'll go back to Trier. It's also there where he will, as a way of consolidating his power, lead campaigns across the Rhine to prove to his generals that he really is the right person to have here. Constantine was never afraid of exemplary brutality. I mean, this is another thing that he learned from Diocletian. And he captures a couple of kings of the Franks who ordinarily you'd

• 17:36Speaker 03

  let them go and make sure you pay them off to make sure their people behaved. Instead, he throws them to the lions in Trier.

• 17:42Tristan Hughes?

  That's brutal, nasty.

• 17:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. This is that other side of Constantine, who is capable of being extremely brutal if he sees that there's a reason for it. And the memory of his execution of the Frankish kings is carried through, really, as sort of one of the first acts of his reign. And we see it in later Panegyrics. It's picked up in Western accounts of Constantine's life as a sort of a big moment. This is where he, he sort of puts his stamp on, on the regime. I am in charge, and I have a lion.

• 18:16Tristan Hughes?

  Yeah. You're talking about Diocletian just then, and of course, one of the things Diocletian is infamous for, and almost famous for, is his brutal persecution of the Christians. Do we have any idea, did Constantine treat with the Christian Church at all during these earlier years of his emperorship?

• 18:35Speaker 03

  We don't have any real evidence that Constantine had any contact with the Christian Church.

• 18:43Speaker 03

  Up until the campaign against Maxentius in 312, at that point, he certainly did have contact with the church, because he has a group of bishops with him on campaign. In 310, he advertised a personal meeting with the god Apollo. So certainly, he's very much in the traditional range of things. But he also has a great deal of, as it seems his father may have done, in the version of the sun god called Invincible Sun. And this was a sort of reinvented and redesigned divinity, connected with the city of Emesa in Syria.

• 19:24Speaker 03

  Originally, El Gabal, which is the name of this god, is a meteorite, and the name means "god mountain". By the third century, he's already been called sun god, and he's brought to Rome by the emperor Alagabalus, and then shipped back. But then Aurelian seems to have a vision of him before a battle against the Palmyrenes, who'd been running the eastern part of the empire for more than a decade. And Constantine was on the staff of Aurelian. And Invincible Sun is going to remain very important for Constantine well after his conversion. And one sort of senses with Constantine, because Christians would allow the solar imagery connected with resurrection.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  And for Constantine, the Christian god, Invincible Sun, et cetera, seemed to sort of meld together until finally, I suspect, some bishop sat him down 10 years after the fact and said, "You've really got to stop this."

• 20:19Tristan Hughes?

  That's absolutely fascinating. So Sol Invictus, this eastern god, as it were, has a principal importance, a prime importance on Constantine, you know, from the times he's in Britain, from the times he's in North West Europe, all the way to he's in Rome and then back in, well, what will be Constantinople.

• 20:37Speaker 03

  Exactly, I mean, invincible sun stays on the coinage into the 320s. And then, you know, if you go to Istanbul today, you can go and see the burnt column, which is this great black column, which would have been in the form of Constantine. And on top of it in antiquity would have been a statue of Constantine as the sun god in heroic nudity. This is one thing I suppose we didn't really miss, but we have a picture of it. So even after the foundation of Constantinople, we can see that the solar imagery remains a significant thing to Constantine. And we know that he will tell Christian audiences that, "Oh, yes, it's the Christian god. He leads me to victory. And that's why I win."

• 21:22Speaker 03

  And but he tells all of his subjects that he worships the great and supreme god who brings him victory. He's very subtle about this. And I think what he what he really learned watching Diocletian is that persecution fundamentally cannot work. That what he will never do is attempt a widespread persecution of pagans. The closest he comes to actually engaging in persecution is in a fight within the Christian church. When he had to order a persecution of one faction in North Africa. And in a sense, it's as if a bishop pulled him aside and said, "That's going a bit too far." But it's really quite noticeable that in sort of matters of conscience,

• 22:06Speaker 03

  Constantine recognized that there was a limit to what the emperor could compel people to do. And I'm sure that in 303, watching the persecution of Diocletian, he would have been there in Nicomedia when it happened. He realized it was just a dreadful mess.

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• 24:42Tristan Hughes?

  Let's talk about Constantine's arrival in Rome in one of the most famous episodes in Christian history, the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. How does Constantine's relationship with Maxentius, why does it descend into war?

• 24:55Speaker 03

  Well, Constantine and Maxentius were brothers-in-law. And while Galarius was alive, Maxentius was very nervous about Galarius, because Galarius had already tried once to invade Italy and unseed him. In one of the more astonishing moments in this period, in 307, Galarius was beaten by Maxentius. And this is the great soldier of the age. And Maxentius' army drove him from Rome. It was a logistical failure, as much as anything, on Galarius's part. And so, as long as Galarius is there, though, both Constantine and Maxentius are sort of looking over their shoulder at him. Once Galarius dies, he's succeeded by Licinius.

• 25:38Speaker 03

  And Licinius has a terrible relationship with the other junior emperor in the east. And one of the problems of this period is everybody has the same sounding name. So this is Maximian, Maximinus, not to be confused with Maximian or Maxentius. And Maximinus and Licinius don't like each other. So Maxentius and Maximinus seem to be making an alliance. And there's Licinius caught in the middle between the two of them. So he now makes an alliance with Constantine and says, "I'll deal with Maximinus if you could take care of Maxentius." The relationship between Maxentius and... I mean, you might want to sort of look to the fact that, as I mentioned earlier, Constantine had executed Maxentius's father, Maximian. But Maximian was in the court of Constantine because Maxentius had driven him out of Rome.

• 26:25Speaker 03

  And Constantine is still married to the very much younger sister of Maxentius, Fausta, at this point. So I think it really is ambition that drives this in the beginning. He's made an alliance with Licinius. He's going to attack Maxentius. And it's going to be a very difficult campaign. Nobody has taken Rome, no matter what their superiority looks like. I mean, if you go back to 238, another Maximinus had attacked Italy and didn't get further than Aquileia before he was murdered by his men. Galarius had failed, Severus had failed to take Rome when Maxentius had seized power. It's a very difficult operation.

• 27:08Speaker 03

  And then you also have the army that Maxentius has in northern Italy. So how do you fight your way down the peninsula? And I think at this point... And Constantine does seem to feel that he and the divine have a lot in common. And who is the God who is most unlike any divinity that Galarius would ever have had anything to do with? Oh, that happens to be the Christian God, and he's not unlike the Son, and so and there's nice bishops here, seems to be quite willing to tell me whatever I want to hear. And so we get an indication that Constantine has advertised that he has a new God on his side before he crosses the Alps. Now, the most famous story, of course, of this is the one that Eusebius makes up later,

• 27:53Speaker 03

  which is before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, Constantine saw a cross in the sky, and this sign conquer. That's total nonsense. Constantine never mentions anything like that himself. Nobody in the West knew the story at all, because it was in Eusebius's Life of Constantine is when it comes into existence. But what Constantine would later write to a group of bishops is that he realized that there were some things in himself that could be improved upon. And as he thought about this, he then thought and met the God who sits in the Great Watchtower of Heaven, who showed him how to be a better person. And this is the way emperors do things, they talk to God in their private time.

• 28:34Speaker 03

  And this is what was said in the Panegyric of 313, that the emperor had had an experience with God, the, in this case, divine mind. And so, but what he's reading is that I need somebody, a new God, to help lead me south under these extraordinary circumstances, it's going to be a difficult campaign. And this new God, I think he feels is with him as he crosses the Alps, as he moves into northern Italy, as he moves south towards Rome. But this conversion of Constantine may not be as dramatic a story as the one that Eusebius makes up. But in many ways, it is an incredibly dramatic story of an emperor, and you can feel him wondering, how am I going to pull this off?

• 29:18Speaker 03

  How am I going to outdo my former boss? You know, who we know as, you know, was a great soldier himself. And it's this confidence he gets from believing that he has a God on his side that I think helps him as he's planning the campaign and leading his people across the Alps in the spring to take on the army of Maxentius. Then when he gets down to Rome, it's rather interesting. There seems to be a rather good fifth column operating in the city. And you'd think that Maxentius could just have sat tight, as he really did against Severus and against Galerius, because Rome's a big place. It's got some wonderful new walls. As you can see, you walk around Rome today, the walls that are really inbuilt around the city.

• 30:03Speaker 03

  It was very powerful, well supplied, very hard to besiege. And if Constantine was forced into siege operations, he probably wouldn't have been any more successful than anybody else had been. But somehow he forces Maxentius, creates a situation where Maxentius has to leave the city. And October the 28th, the day that Maxentius had taken the throne himself, Maxentius comes out to fight Constantine over the Milvian Bridge. Constantine is ready for him and destroys his army. You wonder what kind of general Maxentius is anyway. Draws his army up with a Tiber at the rear.

• 30:35Tristan Hughes?

  The 28th of October, as you said, it sounds a very auspicious day for Maxentius, as you say, if it's the same day that he was crowned emperor.

• 30:44Speaker 03

  Yes, absolutely. And I think that he consulted oracles in Rome and said, you should go do this. You know, this is your big day. But also, I think he has watched his armies fall apart fighting Constantine as Constantine has come south. And I think that there's a real question amongst his own supporters as to whether or not he's somebody they can continue to trust. So Maxentius, in a way, has to prove himself to his own people, which is why he leads the army out to fight Constantine.

• 31:18Tristan Hughes?

  So at this battle, one of the most famous things is the Cairo symbols. What do you think is the truth behind the Cairo is being painted on the shields?

• 31:28Speaker 03

  The story about the Cairo comes from Lactentius, who wrote a book on the deaths of the persecutors. And Lactentius, he wrote the book before he had come west, but he was using official information to describe the campaign and the battle. So this has to been part of whatever the messaging that was sent out. Is not mentioned in the Panegyric of 313, which is our most contemporary description of the account, but it must have happened. But the Cairo signal can also mean luck. So it's a Christian symbol, it becomes a Christian symbol, but it is also a common symbol, meaning good luck.

• 32:10Tristan Hughes?

  So it might not have been done for Christian reasons. It may have been done for luck, for good fortune in the battle.

• 32:17Speaker 03

  Well, I think it's a typical Constantinean moment. It's both and. It's a symbol of Christ for Constantine and anybody who wants to see it that way. And it's a symbol of good luck for everybody who doesn't. And with invincible son slash Christ standing behind you, there's a remarkable consistency to the ambiguity that we see here.

• 32:38Tristan Hughes?

  Fascinating. Yeah. As you were saying earlier with solemn victors and the Christian god, as you say, this ambiguity, this ability to appeal to both sides of a population, as it were.

• 32:50Speaker 03

  Exactly. And that's what Constantine had sensed is that the job of the emperor is to bring people together. And he saw the persecution as divisive. There may not have been a whole lot of Christians in the empire, but the notion that the imperial government is persecuting people for what they believe, rather than what they do, is something that Constantine, I think, felt was was completely wrong. And in doing it, Diocletian failed. Diocletian himself revoked the persecution edict. That Diocletian had previously sold himself to the world as a man who restored the unity of the Roman Empire. And I think

• 33:32Speaker 03

  that Constantine takes away from Diocletian the impact of the notion of the job of the emperor being ensuring the unity of the empire. And you can't do that by telling people what to think.

• 33:46Tristan Hughes?

  Healing the divides and bringing the empire together. How, after defeating Maxentius, does Constantine go about consolidating his control over the West?

• 33:56Speaker 03

  Constantine has a great deal of difficulty when it comes to taking over the area that had been ruled by Maxentius. There'd been a major revolt shortly before Constantine took power in North Africa. So he's got to build up confidence in the regime. And one of the things that we see him doing is actually using a lot of Maxentius's own people in government. Again, instead of exiling everybody, this is part of the unity of the empire. I have jobs for everybody but maybe the top five under Maxentius. Governors of North Africa, for instance, which is critical because that's where a lot of the grain for Rome

• 34:37Speaker 03

  comes from, are former officials of Maxentius. He's got to find a way of blending his staff and Maxentius's staff. Because also, you know, he recalls that one of the tensions that led to his becoming emperor was distrust on the part of Constantine's staff and the people of Severus to the south. And in fact, Maximian's people, when they put Maxentius on the throne, again, they'd been sort of cut out by Severus. And so Constantine knows what doesn't work. And works to build a unity government, as it were.

• 35:10Tristan Hughes?

  So maybe if this is the wrong way, but is it kind of keeping your enemies close?

• 35:15Speaker 03

  Yes, keeping your enemies close is the best way of keeping them from staying your enemies. And the people who are running the show for Maximian and Maxentius are really the senior aristocracy of Italy and North Africa. So if you're going to run this part of the empire, you need their buy-in.

• 35:33Tristan Hughes?

  Fascinating. And where does the edict of Milan come into all of this?

• 35:38Speaker 03

  The Edict of Milan is a document that was composed by Constantine and Licinius when they met in Milan in the autumn of 312 for the wedding of Constantine's half-sister and Licinius. The edict was never posted in the West. Calling it the Edict of Milan is something of a misnomer, because it was an edict of toleration that was publicized by Licinius as soon as he defeated Maximinus in 313. It's actually a letter from the emperor to all of the governors of the East ordering the restitution of Christian property to the church and announcing very clearly freedom of conscience.

• 36:18Speaker 03

  And I think that Constantine probably did have significant influence over the text, but the text as it was published was actually published by Licinius in the eastern provinces. But it's another way of saying that the new regime isn't like the old, because Maximinus had persecuted the Christians. Galerius had persecuted the Christians. So again, what you're doing is drawing a line between the world of Constantine and Licinius, which is a world of toleration, and the world of persecution, which Maximinus had certainly been part of.

• 36:51Tristan Hughes?

  And is this helpful, this drawing a line under what's happened before? Is this also helpful in the regime changing from four emperors, as it were, to two?

• 37:01Speaker 03

  I think it is absolutely an important aspect of this, because on the one hand, we look back to the great figure of Diocletian and the reunification of the empire, and on the other hand, we've just fought a couple of civil wars. We have to point out that these are the people who are not really living up to the standards that we expect of an emperor. But now that the two of us, brothers-in-law happily, will rule this empire together, I think it's a way of showing. And you know, with a very important statement in this edict, that one of the policies most easily associated with Galerius and Maximinus was that of persecution. And we are undoing the mistakes of the past.

• 37:46Tristan Hughes?

  Fascinating, these two brothers-in-law, as it were, ruling the empire together. But this relationship doesn't stay cordial for long.

• 37:56Speaker 03

  No, it doesn't. And it really only takes three years for the relationship between the two of them to break down. And I think the facts that we have indicate it worked out. It was Constantine who decided that, you know, really, one emperor is better than two. But Licinius himself is a pretty good soldier. And in the first campaign in 317, Constantine is certainly the aggressor. Licinius has come west as well. I mean, he's not taken by surprise. It's clear that the relationship has broken down in the previous year. Constantine is accused, uh, Licinius of trying to instigate his assassination. So Constantine attacks, Licinius is defeated, withdraws back towards Byzantium.

• 38:40Speaker 03

  And then actually manages to outmaneuver Constantine. And even though he doesn't win a battle, when he withdraws, he places himself over Constantine's lines of communication, which forces Constantine to negotiate. And so a peace treaty is made whereby Constantine and Licinius will remain co-emperors. Their eldest sons will be their deputy emperors. And Constantine will get one quarter of the empire of Licinius. So if you think about the empire really being divided up into 12, well, really 16 parts, Constantine is now going to be emperor of nine parts and Licinius of seven parts.

• 39:24Tristan Hughes?

  That's too much maths for me, I think.

• 39:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:28Tristan Hughes?

  But, I mean, that's remarkable. It's sounding like you don't really want to be a family member of Constantine. It's not going to save you if you're another powerful figure in the empire.

• 39:38Speaker 03

  No, it certainly is not. I mean, the most dangerous job you can have is being related to Constantine. By this point, he's killed one brother-in-law, one father-in-law, and he's been at war with the other brother-in-law.

• 39:52Tristan Hughes?

  I know in your work you've talked about how Constantine exploits the weaknesses of his opponents, and what weaknesses does Constantine target in Lysineus?

• 40:02Speaker 03

  I think that what Constantine exploits in Lysineus is that Lysineus moves a little bit more slowly than he does. If we look at where the battle, the first battle is fought at Ciballae, Constantine is well over the border into Lysineus's part of the empire. Lysineus had plenty of warning, but as had been the case with Maximinus in the previous civil war, Maximinus had actually gotten his army into Lysineus's part of the empire before Lysineus reacted. And so I think Constantine sort of looks over there, "Well, he's a little slow on the uptake. We can move a bit faster than he does." The descriptions of the battles, and it's a little hard to know how accurate these are,

• 40:47Speaker 03

  but there are some fairly extensive descriptions of the campaign, and we can see Constantine launching some quite daring attacks with his cavalry around the flanks of Lysineus's army. He tries to be far more mobile than Lysineus is.

• 41:03Tristan Hughes?

  And after this first clash of Lysineus, what happens afterwards? Is there further conflict between the two?

• 41:11Speaker 03

  Well, the situation settles down for a while, in seven years, until 324, when Constantine will attack again. And at this point, it's a very heavily prepared campaign. He has greater resources than Lysineus does at this point, and he's ready, and he exploits them. But again, it's interesting that what he does initially is he gets Lysineus to fight on the European side of the Bosphorus, where Constantine has the advantage. And then when he drives him back, and Constantine now has to cross the Bosphorus, Constantine has a well-prepared fleet, which he's able to use, is commanded by his son, by his own first marriage, Christmas.

• 41:54Speaker 03

  Again, it's a family affair with Constantine. And he seems to be, again, able to land the army where... Licinius isn't expecting him. And it's not an easy matter. And any kind of amphibious operation is going to be complicated. And antiquity is now. But again, there's a lot of very good intelligence work is going on, seeing where Licinius is. And I think being able to count on the fact that Licinius is going to react more slowly than would be advisable. So Constantine inflicts the final defeat on Licinius at Chrysopolis, on his side of the straits. And then Licinius goes back to Nicomedia, which had been the capital of Diocletian.

• 42:36Speaker 03

  And there, his wife negotiates his surrender to Constantine.

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• 44:02Tristan Hughes?

  It's amazing that kind of homecoming to Nicomedia which you mentioned earlier when he was at Diocletian's court. It's as if he learns so much from Diocletian, the man who creates the tetrarchy, this four-man rule, to ultimately destroy the tetrarchy.

• 44:17Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. What he learned from Diocletian, I think, was how to govern, how to project himself as emperor. What he was not going to do, and we see this in his relationship with his senior subordinates, is he's a man who doesn't have a great deal of patience. And whereas Diocletian can rule by committee, Constantine sees himself as the chief executive, and he's going to tell the committee members what to do. But I think that what Diocletian had seen is the way to protect the imperial office was to create co-stakeholders. Because the empire has been disunited and fragmented for decades

• 45:02Speaker 03

  prior to his taking the throne. And so in order to protect himself, he needs deputy emperors he can trust. Constantine conversely sees that the empire was reunited by Diocletian and that Constantine's style of government is to tell people what to do. And he is very happy to sit on top of a college of efficient, experienced senior administrators who served as Praetorian prefects for a very long period of time in many cases. But it is a much more top-down approach than Diocletian's.

• 45:38Tristan Hughes?

  And to be the head of this new administrative system, is this one of the reasons he chooses Byzantium to become his new capital instead of Rome?

• 45:48Speaker 03

  I think that the reason that Constantine chooses Byzantium is he needs to rule in the east and he can't bear living in Nicomedia. Ah, I mean, this is the city of Diocletian, it's the city of Maximinus, the city of Licinius. It is not the city of Constantine. The palace is full of statues. We've now discovered the Imperial Palace at Nicomedia. It's one of the great new discoveries of the last decade. And there we have sculptures of Diocletian and Maximian hugging each other. Now, this is really not Constantine's kind of place. And he's come to appreciate Byzantium as a very strong city. It held out against his armies. He knew that it had held out for a long time in a previous civil war, more than a century before.

• 46:33Speaker 03

  It had some of the amenities of an imperial city. And so he just said, "No, this is going to be my city." And it's going to be named Constantinople. Because it is the city that celebrates my victory, I think, as much as anything else. Other people might be more tempted to give a city the name like Nicopolis, which is Victory City or something like that, but for Constantine, it's Constantinople. You know, it takes a long time to build the city. But it is very much seen as a capital on a par with the other capital cities of the empire. You know, at this point, you have Trier, you have Milan, you have Rome, you have Sermium, you have Nicomedia, you have Antioch. All these places have imperial palaces.

• 47:18Speaker 03

  So Constantine City is going to have that. It's going to have, as you can see today, when you go to Istanbul, the great Hippodrome running in front of the palace, which is, I mean, the blue mosque is now is on top of the Imperial Palace. And it's going to have its circus. And then the other sort of high point in the city, looking out from the palace, you're going to have the great Mausoleum of Constantine himself. And that, visually, if you look across the city from one side to the other, you have the Imperial Palace to the Imperial Mausoleum. So if you come down the Bosphorus, you know, you'll see Constantine literally from one end to the other.

• 48:00Tristan Hughes?

  When he's overseeing the construction of these pieces of monumental architecture, is he still continuing this policy of ambiguity, as it were? Is he still constructing temples to solemn victors but also honouring the Christian god?

• 48:14Speaker 03

  Absolutely. There are temples in Constantinople and they're open when he dies. Under his successors, they'll be transformed into churches and things like that, but they're still open when he dies. But the most remarkable document of all is really from the last year of Constantine's life, which is a letter from the city of Spello in Italy. An absolutely beautiful place. If you go there today, you can see the remains of a small amphitheatre, as well as this inscription of this long letter. And what the people of Spello, or Hispelum as it was named in the past, wanted was to set up a temple of the imperial cult and to have their own festivals so they don't have to go over to their neighbours and celebrate a festival every year somewhere else. And in this case, the Praetorian prefect for Constantine writes back, says, "Sure, yeah."

• 48:57Speaker 03

  He's writing in Constantine's name, "Absolutely delighted to have a temple erected, just no sacrifice." And this would be, I mean, it's clear that Constantine would not allow public sacrifice to himself. It seems, depending on how you read Eusebius, that he told imperial officials that they shouldn't engage in animal sacrifice. But he does not ban sacrifice in the empire as a whole. That's why the people of Hispelum have to be told, "You can have your temple, but you can't have a sacrifice in front of it."

• 49:29Tristan Hughes?

  So it's his successors, which, as it says, takes the more, I guess, non-tolerant step of going further with the embracing of Christianity as the prime religion?

• 49:40Speaker 03

  Exactly. And I think some of the messaging here is actually in Eusebius's Life of Constantine, who paints Constantine as being far more devoutly Christian than Constantine actually was. But Constantine's son, Constantine II, is a very devout Christian and is quite happy to stomp down on temple sacrifice and cult and things like that. So for Constantine, he's just, he's being the father that Eusebius told him that Constantine was. And the sons of Constantine will justify their harsher policy towards pagans by saying it's really their father's policy.

• 50:17Tristan Hughes?

  You mentioned the sons of Constantine there. I feel it wouldn't be a proper podcast about Constantine if we don't mention Constantine's son, but you mentioned his first son earlier, Constance. What is the infamous story behind Constance's demise?

• 50:34Speaker 03

  Okay, well, there are ultimately four sons of Constantine. The oldest is Crispus.

• 50:39Tristan Hughes?

  Sorry, Crispus, yeah.

• 50:40Speaker 03

  Who is the son of Constantine's first wife, Minervina, and who was clearly a little baby when Constantine became emperor. And he is raised very much to be the heir apparent. And in 326, things go really, really badly wrong. Here's another case. You don't want to be too close to Constantine. Now, there was a very nasty story told later by pagan sources about the conversion of Constantine. Because nobody really knew when he converted, you see. So everybody makes up their own story. And according to this story, Fausta tried to seduce Crispus. This is a very old story going back to the Hippolytes. And Crispus says, no, no, I won't sleep with you. And he goes off to Constantine. He said, Crispus

• 51:23Speaker 03

  tried to rape me. Constantine executes him. And then he finds out the truth through Helena, his mother. He says, you know, it's really, it's all Fausta's fault. And so he slams her into an overheated bathhouse and she dies. So in one summer, he murders his wife and his oldest son. In point of fact, things are still going to be very dramatic, but a little bit less dramatic than that. Crispus is executed in 326. Crispus had been in command in the West. And there are other suggestions that a number of Western officials could see where things are going. I could see that Constantine is moving the centre of government to the East. And there is some suggestion that maybe we need to re-establish a stronger centre

• 52:06Speaker 03

  in the West. The interesting thing is that this is also the 20th anniversary of Constantine's accession. So it's hard to say whether or not people, there's a lot of discussion. Is there a change in structure? Maybe Crispus should become Co-Augustus? Or something is happening? Because another source tells us that senior officials were executed at this time. We're told by a less biased source. That Crispus was actually tried and executed in the Balkans. And there's no, Ammianus, Marcellinus, when he tells the story, there's no indication that Faustus got anything to do with it. We're also told that Faustus actually outlived this event by a couple of years. But her face is taken off the coinage by the end of 326. And clearly she and Constantine are on the outs at that point.

• 52:50Speaker 03

  Now, another thing about this relationship is Faustus had always traveled with Constantine. So there's in fact no way that the story of Crispus could be true because he's in Trier and she's with Constantine. She's certainly not in Rome when this happens. One obvious effect of this is the fact that she has an awful lot of children in these years, and it's a clearly very passionate relationship between the two. But Faustus was very young when she married Constantine. He was about eight years old. It was a political marriage. She was about the same age as Crispus, I think. And I had a sense the two of them, in a way, grew up together in the Imperial Palace. And I have a strong feeling that she let Constantine know exactly what she thought about the execution of her close friend.

• 53:33Speaker 03

  And there was a split there that was never healed and she died a couple of years later. There's an interesting story about Constantine's sarcophagus. And the story is that after he died, the bones of Faustus were brought to Constantinople and mixed with his. Also very striking is that Constantine never remarried. And there's plenty of evidence that he very much enjoyed the matrimonial state. And so you get a sense of somebody who realized that he let his anger get the better of him. The passion that we see elsewhere in his life. And that in the last decade of his life, in a sense, is he in a way regretting what he did in 326 and how the relationship with Faustus ended?

• 54:17Speaker 03

  It's a very difficult story. And it's clearly there are no Roman tabloids to tell us. Uh, but the evidence will suggest that there was a great deal of rethinking on, I think, on Constantine's part. As you say there.

• 54:31Tristan Hughes?

  It sounds like that's one of the most difficult stories to sort the fact from the fiction about with sources that we have surviving. I guess, final question to wrap this all up. How do you think, as a historian who's written about Constantine, who's researched Constantine? How do you think Constantine would want to have been remembered as first and foremost?

• 54:51Speaker 03

  Constantine would want to have been remembered as in fact he described himself. The greatest. Victor in war. God's representative on earth. This was not a man given to modesty. He saw himself competing with all of the emperors in the past. And he wanted to be seen as the one who'd done the best job.

• 55:13Tristan Hughes?

  Is it competing with just with emperors or would it have been with other legendary figures like Alexander the Great or Cyrus or Darius?

• 55:20Speaker 03

  I think that Constantine's vision probably fairly limited to other emperors. Though you've mentioned Alexander the Great to him, he said, oh yeah, him too.

• 55:31Speaker 03

  And there's Julius Caesar before that, you know, I'm better than him.

• 55:35Tristan Hughes?

  David, thanks so much for coming on the show. It's been an absolute pleasure. You have written a book about Constantine?

• 55:41Speaker 03

  That's right. Constantine the Emperor, whereas the title suggests. What I'm trying to do is show you Constantine as the person I think he was. As an emperor first, who then had an enormous impact on the history of Europe following him.

• 55:57Tristan Hughes?

  Fantastic. David, thanks so much for coming on the show.

• 55:59Speaker 03

  It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

• 56:09Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was our rerun of one of our earliest ever episodes, The Rise of Constantine with Professor David Potter. Thank you for listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Please follow The Ancients on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and will be doing us a big favour. You can also follow me on social media. I'm on both Instagram and TikTok where I do even more ancient history stuff. Just search Tristan Hughes Ancient History, you should find me or Ancients Tristan. Don't forget, you can also listen to The Ancients and all of History Hits podcasts ad free. And watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe. That's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.

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