138- The New Rome

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Hello, and welcome to the history of Rome, episode 138, The New Rome.

So, last time, we focused exclusively on Constantine's relationship with and promotion of Christianity.

Obviously, the Emperor's push to convert the Empire was a hugely important step in the development of the Western world, but it was by no means the only thing he was up to in the years after he became sole ruler of the Roman Empire.

There were still wars to be fought, a government to be run, and oh yeah, a whole new Rome to build.

So today, I want to dive into all the not overtly Christian aspects of Constantine's reign.

I say not overtly Christian because the emperor's religion was so tangled up in everything that he did that you can't just separate it out and say this stuff has to do with Christianity, and this stuff doesn't.

Even something as basic as the construction of Constantinople, which was a project undertaken first and foremost for strategic and political reasons, winds up taking on a heavy Christian dimension.

It's inescapable.

That was just the nature of the man.

They didn't wind up calling him the equal of the apostles for nothing.

Speaking of Constantinople, we might as well start there because Constantine broke ground on his new capital practically the morning after he defeated Licinius in September of three hundred twenty four AD.

The rapidity with which he moved to transform the ancient city of Byzantium into the new city of Constantinople speaks to how much thought Constantine had given the project prior to his victory over Licinius.

So the questions we must ask are why did Constantine feel like he needed a new capital and why did he choose Byzantium for his imperial makeover?

As you know, Rome itself had ceased to be the political and military capital of the Roman Empire a long time ago.

Round about two hundred sixty the emperors had moved decisively away from the eternal city to more strategically sound locations across the empire, and in the sixty five years or so since Gallienus first set up shop in Milan, multiple cities had wound up serving as imperial capitals at one point or another Trier along the Rhine, Milan in Italy, Sirmium along the Danube, Nicomedia at the crossroads between Europe and Asia, and Antioch in the Far East.

But as Constantine surveyed the military and political situation of the Empire following his victory at Chrysopolis, no one of these cities really satisfied his vision for what a true imperial capital should be.

They all had their merits as regional capitals, but if it was really going to be one emperor ruling one empire, then one capital was called for.

Constantine needed a city that was centrally located, easily defensible, situated on the sea with a good harbor, and had easy access to the Danube frontier, which everyone understood to be the most volatile in the empire.

Of the existing capitals, Nicomedia was the most obvious candidate to become Constantine's headquarters, and by that point it was already recognized as being one of the preeminent cities of the Empire.

But the Emperor didn't really like that it was located on the east side of the bosphorus, and while he found the city's defenses adequate, Nicomedia did not necessarily scream, I am immune to siege.

But over the course of his two wars with Licinius, Constantine had become aware of a city that, if upgraded properly, would fit all his conditions for a great capital: Byzantium.

Located right on the west bank of the southern entrance of the Bosphorus, Byzantium had a fabulous natural harbor, which meant supply and trade would be no problem.

It was also located right smack dab at the crossroads between east and west, which would not only allow the emperor to quickly move to trouble spots, but it would also keep communication lines relatively short, meaning that Constantine would become aware of trouble spots that much quicker.

But the coup de grace was that the ancient Greek city was surrounded on three sides by water.

This meant that a hostile land army could approach from one direction and one direction only, and if you were to say, build a massive wall covering that flank, the city would be impregnable.

And while the hostile army banged their heads against that wall, the residents of the city could sit tight and enjoy the benefits of infinite resupply by sea.

Constantine looked at Byzantium, and it screamed to him, I am immune to siege.

As with everything else he did, though, there was a religious rationale for building a new capital to go along with the obvious military and political rationales.

By basically building a brand new city from the ground up, Constantine ensured that he would not have to deal with any pushback from entrenched religious interests when he revealed the fact that his new capital was going to be an exclusively Christian capital.

The major cities of the empire, by virtue of being the major cities of the empire, hosted all of the most important cults and temples of the empire.

Byzantium, being a relatively minor city up until this point, was not saddled with that kind of pagan baggage.

Though the story would not take root for at least a generation, it was widely believed in the Byzantine age that the Christian character of the city was set from the start, and that it was an archangel, visible only to Constantine, who told the emperor where to set the boundaries of the new city.

In November 324, and just a month after his victory over Licinius, Constantine made the short trip from Nicomedia to Byzantium and began eagerly marking up the layout, possibly with the help of an invisible archangel, for what he grandly declared would be the alterna Roma, the new or second Rome.

The name Constantinople, which meant literally the city of Constantine, was at first only an informal nickname for the emperor's pet project, but within a few years the unofficial name stuck, and it would remain stuck for more than a thousand thousand years.

Constantine planned for the city to be the greatest in the empire and laid the boundaries and the grid lines accordingly.

But Byzantium by no means became Constantinople overnight.

At this point in history, Rome was a city of maybe a million people.

The other big cities of the empire, Alexandria and Antioch and Nicomedia, were filled with populations in the hundreds of thousands.

When Constantine began to transform Byzantium, though, it was a city of tens of thousands.

In other words, it had a lot of growing up to do if it was really going to compete with the big boys.

In a way, the early days of the New Rome parallel the early days of the old Rome.

You will recall from way back in episode two that the first generation of Romans were a motley bunch.

In an effort to populate his city quickly, Romulus had thrown the doors open to anyone who happened by beggars, thieves, malcontents, exiles, basically the cast offs of civilized society.

As Byzantium transformed into Constantinople, this new Rome followed a similar pattern.

The emperor put out the word that he was looking for men and women and families to come fill up his new capital.

But the respectable citizens of the empire were respectable because they had a good thing going right where they were.

So the citizens who initially heeded Constantine's call were the struggling, the failed, and the disliked from across the empire who were desperate for a fresh start.

This group was augmented by the greedy, the ambitious, and the ruthless, who saw in Constantine's city an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of something really big and make a killing in the process.

I think it's safe to say that you would not want to invite Constantinople's first generation of citizens to dinner.

As we saw last time, after initiating the process of transforming Byzantium into Constantinople, a process that would take just six years, Constantine turned his attention most especially to establishing unity within the Christian church.

When the Council of Nicaea wrapped up its business, though, he invited the bishops up to Nicomedia to help him inaugurate his 20th year on the throne, backdating his rule to the death of his father, of course.

Antoninus Pius had been the last emperor to serve for more than 20 years, and at just 53 years old and with his health never an issue, Constantine looked poised to set a new standard for longevity.

Though in the end he will only be sole ruler for about 12 years, when Constantine died in 337, his 31-year tenure in the purple will rank him second only to the divine Augustus on the all-time list.

And speaking of Augustus, after celebrating his anniversary, Constantine made his way over to Aquilea in the spring of 326, and it was here that he decided to follow in the footsteps of that first and greatest of Roman emperors.

Unfortunately, the footsteps he decided to follow were the ones that contemporaries and historians alike agree were the biggest missteps of Augustus' career.

First up, you remember the ill-fated and overly cruel Lex Julia that sought to legislate sexual morality and failed miserably?

Yeah, we're back to that.

Second up, you remember how Augustus lashed out at wayward members of his family by exiling them?

Well, Constantine is about to outdo the emperor in cold-hearted brutality, because where Augustus merely exiled members of his family, Constantine is about to kill them dead.

Constantine's morality laws followed the Augustan precedent in that they established an idealized model of family life and then rigidly demanded adherence to the model, with draconian punishments doled out to the wayward.

The only difference really was that Constantine's laws came down particularly hard on women, especially on the issue of premarital virginity, and were rationalized with appeals to Christian scripture rather than appeals to traditional Roman virtue.

As with the Augustine attempt to scare everyone straight, though, Constantine's morality laws wound up inflicting punishments on a few unfortunate souls far in excess of their crimes, pouring molten lead down the throat of a servant who aids a couple in eloping really

while ultimately having very little impact on how people actually live their lives.

It was while he was in Italy in three twenty six that Constantine then took his second cue from Augustus, and, deciding to do the old boy one better, wound up committing one of the more heinous crimes you can possibly commit.

He ordered his eldest son Crispus seized and executed.

No one knows exactly why Constantine suddenly turned on his son, that is, what specifically Crispus was supposed to have done, but there is near universal agreement that the Emperor's wife Fausta was behind it all.

Some people claim Fausta attempted to seduce Crispus and was rejected.

Others claim Crispus raped his stepmother in a fit of passion, though this accusation can almost certainly be dismissed, while others simply roll with the old familiar tale of a stepmother looking to get rid of a stepson so that her own children can ascend to the throne.

Whatever the reason, she allegedly framed or set up Crispus.

The frame up or set up job was effective, and the emperor, convinced of something, ordered his boy executed.

There is a centuries old rumor that Crispus fell victim to Constantine's numerality laws, but a far more likely guess is that Crispus was implicated in a plot to overthrow his father.

We have no way of knowing if the charges were true, and certainly nothing in Crispus's life or career even hint that he planned to turn on his father, but as that great military philosopher Saul Ty once said, no one is a traitor until they are.

So, who knows?

The consensus, though, is that Crispus was framed, and most likely framed by Fausta.

Certainly what happens next does not bode well for her historical reputation.

After Crispus was executed, the imperial court moved down to Rome, where it was joined by Constantine's mother Helena, who had been living in the city since her son's victory at the Milvian Bridge.

Shortly after the Emperor's arrival, Helena appears to have met privately with Constantine to discuss the circumstances of her grandson's death.

We don't know exactly what proof she presented to Constantine, but it apparently convinced him that his lovely wife had just tricked him into murdering his own son, because straight away he had Fausta seized and put under guard.

Then, torn by an understandable mix of grief and rage, he decided that an eye for an eye was the best way to go.

The most commonly told version of the story is that he had his wife put in a steam room, the doors were locked, and the heat was cranked up to eleven.

The Empress suffocated in the unbearable heat.

Just like that, the Emperor's son and wife were both dead, and both were dead at the emperor's hand.

Even in the far more permissive ancient world, these were serious crimes that would haunt Constantine for the rest of his life.

The emperor remained in Rome for a time and then began a slow journey back to Nicomedia.

Well aware that he had maybe screwed up pretty royally and that his reputation was going to suffer, especially in the Christian circles who tended to look sideways at things like murdering members of your own family, Constantine sought to minimize the damage, and maybe change the subject by sending his mother Helena on a religious pilgrimage to the Far East.

She was sent to identify key locations in the life of Jesus, initiate construction of any shrine she felt appropriate, and wherever she went, to liberally spread the imperial wealth.

In other words, she was on a good will mission to help head off any tarnishing of Constantine's image.

The mission succeeded beyond the emperor's wildest expectations, and his mother's tour of the East, which, among other things, officially determined the site of both Jesus' birth and his death, built a number of important churches that stand to this day, and then came home with pieces of the true cross, inspired thousands and then millions to follow in her footsteps and make a pilgrimage to what was now starting to be known as the Holy Land.

Like her son, she is not known as Saint Helena for nothing.

With the heat from this double murder partially deflected, Constantine was able to get back to the business of being emperor without suffering too much for his crime.

The questions I want to spend the rest of this episode on then are, aside from his promotion of Christianity, what kind of emperor was Constantine, and what role did he play in the evolution of the Empire?

In general, the answer is that he was in almost every way the ideological heir of the old senior Augustus Diocletian.

There were differences, of course, the biggest being that Constantine had no truck with the division of imperial labor, but other than that, we see him continuing Diocletian's policies and refining Diocletian's policies and extending Diocletian's policies.

But only rarely do we see him turning away from Diocletian's policies.

Despite the failure of the Tetrarchy, in the end, most of what Diocletian put in place wound up defining the next few centuries of the Empire's evolution.

Even Constantine, radical, visionary Constantine, appears to have seen no reason to fundamentally change much of anything at all.

First off, Constantine completely bought into the ideology of the emperor as the divinely appointed ruler, and fully embraced the pageantry that Diocletian had built up to elevate the emperor above mortal men, though obviously Constantine looked to God rather than Jupiter as his ultimate patron.

Constantine dressed exquisitely, wore a diadem, remained sequestered from all but the most important dignitaries, sat while others stood, and was addressed as Lord Constantine, or Sacred Constantine, or Divine Constantine.

Diocletian had redefined the role of the emperor in the Empire, and Constantine played the new part to perfection.

But it was not just in the optics department that Constantine followed Diocletian's lead.

In the realm of imperial administration he followed the old senior Augustus as well.

He made only minor tweaks to the reformed provincial divisions Diocletian had established, military and civilian careers were kept separate, and real power was increasingly shifted to the emperor's ever expanding central bureaucracy.

Constantine added new positions and new layers to the already elaborate governmental apparatus he inherited, and did everything he could to enhance the dignity and cement the authority of the imperial bureaucrats.

His only break with Diocletian in this regard is that Constantine was not so eager to thumb his nose at the senatorial class, especially since he was in the middle of an all-out assault on their religious beliefs.

Following through on the promise he had made following the Milvian Bridge to renew their old privileges, Constantine reopened most of the higher offices in the empire to men of senatorial rank, and eagerly welcomed them into his administration.

He coupled this reform with a deliberate move to reduce the number of equites serving in government.

Now, this appears to be a pretty significant shift in policy, but there was actually less to it than meets the eye.

Because though Constantine opened up all these positions to men of senatorial rank, he also significantly lowered the bar for admission into that class.

In effect, all those equites who were now barred from this office or that post didn't really care, because, hey, look at me, I'm a senator now too.

When Constantine enrolled a new Senate to serve him in Constantinople, it did not number 300 or even 600, but 2,000.

The senatorial class was welcomed back into power, sure, but only after Constantine had carefully watered it down.

Constantine also continued with Diocletian's almost scientific approach to taxation, though when coupled with his monetary policy, Constantine really did a number on Diocletian's vision of everyone sharing in the burden of empire according to their particular means.

Though for the most part Diocletian's tax structure continued to function as it previously had, Constantine began pushing to augment the in-kind system with new taxes that were to be paid in precious metal, just like the good old days.

The political and economic systems of the empire had stabilized considerably since Diocletian had initiated his tax reforms, and Constantine felt like it was time for his subjects to start paying in cash again.

This move was coupled with the emperor's introduction of a carefully crafted gold coin called the Solvadus, seventy two of which were to equal one Roman pound.

Though no one knew it at the time, the soundness of the solvus would become legendary, as its weight and purity would be maintained for the next 700 years at least, forming the basis of the Byzantine economy and almost single-handedly helping to keep the West from falling into a strictly barter economy following the fall of the Empire.

But unfortunately, Constantine focused only on the gold standard, and he basically left silver and copper coins to fend for themselves, which helped to exacerbate the growing divide between the rich and everyone else.

Those rich enough to deal in gold found that their wealth and power was now shielded from the ravages of runaway inflation, while those further down the ladder, in particular the middle-class merchants, once again saw their lives and livelihoods threatened by an unstable economy.

The most pernicious aspect of Constantine's new gold and silver tax, which was directed primarily at the commerce of the merchant class, was that it was only assessed once every four years.

That is, the collectors would come around and demand a lump sum of what you owe to cover the next four annual budgets.

You can imagine how much stress this would cause us today, and we have automatic withholding.

For a population also dealing with runaway inflation, the new tax was a disaster.

What money they had was virtually worthless, and nowhere near enough to cover the patently absurd demands that were now being laid down from on high.

So every four years, the citizens of the empire would have a collective panic attack as they tried to figure out how in the hell they were going to pay the tax collectors.

And of course, since the tax collectors themselves were on the hook if they did not meet their quota for revenue, well, let's just say that exceptions were never made, and eventually Constantine had to step in and publish edicts banning the more sadistic forms of torture.

It was not at all uncommon during this quadrennial nightmare for children to be sold into slavery to pay tax debts, or for households to simply give up and become indentured servants to wealthy landowners when they were unable to pay.

Constantine was not indifferent to the problems of his new tax system, and over the years he did his best to make sure tax obligations lined up with a citizen's actual ability to pay.

But the long and short of it was that he needed the money, and sometimes you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.

So, what was the omelet Constantine was trying to make?

That is, why did he need all of that money?

The Emperor, of course, had an army to pay for and frontiers to defend, which we'll talk about more next time.

He also had a bureaucracy to pay for and a government to run.

He also had initiated an empire wide building program that was unprecedented in its size and scope, at least in the context of its time.

And that building program, though dominated by church construction St.

Peter's, for example, was a hugely expensive undertaking.

Constantine did not ignore the secular infrastructure, and he did his best to help cash-strapped municipalities keep their public buildings from falling into disrepair.

And of course, there was the city he was building on the Bosphorus, which was officially inaugurated in May of 330 AD, but which remained a persistent drain on the treasury as the emperor got his city up and running.

All of this added up to a very large number on the bottom line, and it is actually much to Constantine's credit that he was at least mindful of the fact that at the end of the day, the credits and debits ought to line up.

Tax and spend might be bad, but tax cut and spend is even worse.

Plus, while Constantine could never be accused of being frugal, neither could he be accused of being mindlessly extravagant.

Everything he did had a point, and for the most part, that which Constantine paid for was well worth the cost.

That said, his handling of the economy and his monetary policy in particular inflamed problems that would, in time, lead to nothing less than the fall of the Western Empire.

For example, one of the most interesting side effects of the commercial tax was that large landowners were able to avoid paying it simply by making their estates as self-sufficient as possible.

No trade, no tax.

Along with a number of other factors, this increased self-sufficiently allowed the super-elites to begin withdrawing from public life altogether, undermining the imperial system and creating little independent fiefdoms that would in time form the backbone of feudal Europe.

And that's the problem with these things.

Sometimes you don't know what the final cost is going to be.

Next time, we will cover the last years of the man history will come to know as Constantine the Great.

With his heir apparent Crispus now dead, the aging emperor will have to quickly bring his younger sons up to speed so that the empire would not be left in the hands of novices when he was gone.

Pressures in the north will plunge him and the empire back into war, and a crisis in the east will very nearly lead to armed conflict with the Persians.

And of course, at the very end, and with no time left for any further sin to stain his soul, Constantine, the first Christian emperor, will finally be baptized.

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