134- And Then There Were Two

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Hello, and welcome to the history of Rome.

Episode 134, and then there were two.

When Constantine defeated Maxentius in the autumn of 312 AD, the question of who would rule the Western Empire was settled for a generation, and it would not be until after the death of Constantine in 337 that it would be raised again.

But in the East, the picture was still cloudy, and it would take another decade of on again, off again civil war to clear things up.

As it stood on the morning after Constantine's triumph, there were two men vying for power in the East, Maximinus Daia and Licinius.

The two rival Augustae hated each other.

Maximinus thought Licinius an unworthy usurper, and Licinius thought Maximinus a brutish tyrant.

It would not take long for the tense peace the two men had agreed to at the Hellespont in three hundred eleven AD to devolve into open war.

Following the summit at the Hellespont, Maximinus Daia took up residence in Nicomedia, which had become the de facto capital for whoever was the senior Eastern Augustus, which Maximinus most assuredly considered himself to be.

He immediately set himself to the task of consolidating his power base by issuing edicts lessening the tax burden for the citizens of Asia Minor.

He already had a firm grip on the Far East, but the provinces of Anatolia were new territory for Maximinus, and he wanted to make sure everyone's first impression of him was a good one, and, indeed, it was.

Everyone likes a tax break.

But this initial generosity was followed up by the return of a policy that just about everyone had been glad to see retired once and for all, the Great Persecution.

Maximinus was one of those few people in the Empire who had been dismayed when Galerius pulled the plug on the persecution, as he was in that hardcore minority of advisors who had always wanted to push the persecution harder and further.

Now that he ruled in his own right, Maximinus had no intention of letting the wish of some dead emperor get in his way, and just months after Galerius had cancelled it, the great persecution was fired right back up.

But despite the fact that he was now the unquestioned ruler of the East, Maximinus still had trouble getting the persecution back up and running to his liking, and rather than tales of mass murders and large scale destruction of property, we instead see more isolated incidents in Maximinus's persecution.

For example, the Bishop of Alexandria will be executed in November of 311, and after being tried by the Emperor personally, a church scholar named Lucian of Antioch will be killed after he refused to renounce his faith in January of 312.

For the rest of his life, Maximinus maintained his bitter hatred of the Christians, and had he beaten Licinius, a pre-battle vow he made to Jupiter, that we'll get to in a moment, likely would have resulted in something close to genocide.

But, happily for the Christians of the Empire, the rest of Maximinus' life was taken up with more pressing matters, and he never was able to devote himself exclusively to their persecution, as he no doubt would have loved to do.

One of those pressing matters came to his attention over the winter of 311-312, namely, that an alliance had likely been forged between Licinius and Constantine.

As we discussed two weeks ago, this alliance spelled trouble for Maximinus Daia and Maxentius both.

So Maximinus sent envoys promising to use his power as senior Augustus, self-proclaimed power, of course, to recognize Maxentius's legitimacy in exchange for military support.

The move towards friendship with Maxentius was necessary given the circumstances, but ultimately, in the grand scheme of things, it turned out to be little more than a footnote in the history books, because in less than a year, Maxentius would be dead and Constantine would rule the West.

This would have been bad enough for Maximinus, but his problems were exacerbated by another pressing matter.

The Sassanids were getting shifty again.

Forced to head east to deal with the Persians, when Maximinus learned of Constantine's victory, he was bogged down in the Syrian desert.

So, right at the moment when he found out that his enemies were triumphant, Maximinus was as far away from being able to do anything about it as he could have possibly been.

With Maximinus busy fighting the Sassanids, Constantine and Licinius felt like they had more than enough time over the winter of 312-313 to meet in person, cement their alliance, and make a plan for how they were going to deal with their brother in the East.

The main upshot of their meeting was the publication of one of the more famous edicts ever issued.

Constantine left Rome in January 313 and headed up to the more convenient imperial headquarters of Milan.

When Licinius finally showed up in March, the first order of business was tying the families of the two Augusti together, and the marriage between Licinius and Constantine's sister Constantia was finally officiated.

Now that they were one big happy family, the two Augustae got down to the business of figuring out what their alliance really meant.

In the main, at least for now, it meant joining forces to dispense with the hated Maximinus Daia.

They decided, or more likely Constantine decided, that the best way to simultaneously provoke Maximinus militarily while isolating him politically would be to hammer him for his hardline anti-Christian policies.

To this end, they issued a joint resolution concerning the status of Christians in the Empire that has become known as the Edict of Milan.

The Edict is famous because it essentially legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire.

Over the centuries, the Christians had been alternatively tolerated or persecuted, but their religion had never been, strictly speaking, legal.

When Galerius attempted to end the persecution, his deathbed edict basically just said, well, I give up, let's stop persecuting them, but it went no further than that.

The Edict of Milan, on the other hand, firmly established not only the Christian right to worship, but it also directed provincial authorities to restore all confiscated wealth and property to the victims of the persecution.

So the same officials who had so recently been kicking down doors and wrecking lives were now ordered to go back hat in hand and return to the Christians everything that had been seized.

Even in the tolerant West, this was a clear break with precedent.

Usually in these situations, Christians felt lucky to just not be harassed any more.

But to have everything that had been stolen restored to them by the authorities at the the direction of the emperor?

Well, that was new.

As momentous an event as it was, though, and it was a momentous event, when the Edict of Milan was issued in March of 312, it was initially more theory than practice, especially in the East, where Maximinus's ideology of persecution continued to reign, which, moral imperatives aside, was kind of the point.

Though I have no doubt that Constantine wrote wrote the edict in part for moral reasons, he was also acting for political reasons.

By issuing an edict that struck directly at one of Maximinus's core principles, Constantine and Licinius were painting Maximinus into a corner.

Either he could comply with the edict, signaling at least tacitly that he was indeed still the junior member of the Tetrarchy and could be pushed around, or he could refuse to comply, which would give his Western brothers a convenient justification for war.

There is little doubt that Constantine and Lycinius fully expected the latter.

And indeed, Maximinus would give them what they wanted, but probably sooner than they would have hoped.

Maximinus, you see, was already spitting mad before he even heard of the Edict's promulgation, because of the contents of a very polite letter Constantine had sent him following the Battle of the Milvian Bridge.

What was in this very polite letter that got him so hot?

Well, at first, Maximinus was informed that the Senate had gone ahead and declared Constantine the senior Augustus, a declaration Constantine hoped wouldn't cause any rupture in their friendship because I look forward to working with you, blah, blah, blah.

That alone was probably enough to start a war.

If there was one thing Maximinus was super sensitive about, it was his standing within the Imperial College, and here was his prestige being undermined yet again.

But the letter went on, and requested Maximinus' cooperation with a few changes Constantine wanted to make as to how the Empire was governed.

And here, probably, is where the war was really sparked.

Constantine essentially sent Maximinus a rough draft of the Edict of Milan and demanded that Christians in the East be allowed to worship freely and that their confiscated property be returned to them.

This, naturally, redlined Maximinus, as Constantine no doubt expected that it would.

Probably around March of 313, just as Constantine and Licinius were meeting in Milan, Maximinus wrapped up his operation in the east and then raced west at full speed to prepare for war.

The march is described as a brutal one, with Maximinus pushing his men and pack animals to the limit because he was determined to secure control of all of his territory before his adversaries could make their move.

This meant marching them at an absurd pace.

The hard drive west paid off, though, and Maximinus did indeed reach the Bosphorus before his rivals were really ready for him to be there.

Not only that, but along the way Maximinus had accrued an army of about seventy thousand men, enough to do battle against the strongest of armies.

So they can make all the private demands they want, and issue all the public edicts they want, but let's see them make me comply with any of it.

Upon his arrival in Nicomedia, Maximinus recognized that he had perhaps caught his enemies flat footed, so he took the initiative to cross the Bosphorus, and lay siege to the port of Byzantium, which was garrisoned by a detachment of Licinius's army.

Though the city's location made it easy to defend, something Constantine had probably already taken note of, the soldiers manning the walls were vastly outnumbered by Maximinus's army, and they surrendered after about a week and a half.

Maximinus then moved on to the city of Heraclea, which also fell after a brief siege.

While Maximinus was engaged in these siege operations, his adversaries were scrambling to respond.

In all likelihood, both Constantine and Licinius thought that there would be plenty of time to prepare for Maximinus' return from the east, plenty of time, anyway, to rearrange the Danube troop deployments so that Licinius could have the men he needed to fight the war, and this would be Licinius's war, without leaving some huge gaping hole in the border defenses.

But that idea was premised on the notion that Maximinus was still out on the eastern edge of Syria.

When Licinius received word that Maximinus was on the march, and not just on the march, but on the double time march, it is probable that he hadn't even left Milan yet.

With Maximinus barreling west, Licinius dashed back across the Alps and began at once to gather an army, but he was was hamstrung by his conflicting priorities.

He wanted to crush Maximinus, yes, but it would have been madness to just call up huge swaths of the border troops, which would leave the Danube undefended.

By the time Maximinus crossed over the bosphorus and besieged Byzantium then, Licinius stood at the head of an army just 30,000 strong, the best he could do on short notice.

When Maximinus moved on to Heraclea, Lycinius moved on to Adrianople.

He was outnumbered almost two to one, but the war he himself had just sought to provoke had come to his doorstep, and there was nothing he could do about it now.

In late April 313 AD, Licinius advanced southeast, and Maximinus advanced northwest, and the two armies met on the plains beside a town that I have no hope at all of pronouncing correctly, Zeralum.

Beyond the fact that it is about to host a key battle of the Tetrarchy's running civil war, Zeralum is also famous for being a likely candidate as the spot where Aurelian was assassinated some thirty-eight years earlier.

And oh, by the way, has it only been 38 years since the death of Aurelian?

Like the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, the battle between Lycanius and Maximinus at Zeralum would be cast as a battle between paganism and monotheism.

And prior to the battle, both generals allegedly made this pretty explicit.

Maximinus vowed to Jupiter that if he won the battle, he would wipe Christianity off the face of the earth for good, while Licinius distributed to his troops a prayer to the great holy God that was to be recited by his men as soon as they were lined up for battle.

The prayer was supposed to have been dictated to Licinius in a dream by God, but T D Barnes, a noted scholar on the era, whose excellent book Constantine and Eusebius has been helping me out quite a bit lately, surmises that if the story is true, then the prayer was likely written not by God, but by Constantine.

Now, the two emperors knew full well that they were about to fight a great battle.

The only question was when said battle was going to take place.

When it came to deciding this question, there was the typical jockeying for the most opportune moment on the most auspicious day, and it appears that Licinius was waiting for May the first to attack.

Why May the 1st?

Because that would be the eighth anniversary of Maximinus' elevation to the purple, and Licinius was apparently looking to duplicate Constantine's feat of taking Maxentius down on his anniversary.

When Maximinus, by whatever means, heard why Licinius was stalling, he decided to attack on April 30th, because he said his eighth anniversary was better suited for holding a triumph than for fighting a bloody battle.

Maximinus got his way, and the Battle of Zuralum took place on April 30, 313 AD.

Now one of the interesting things about the war between Licinius and Maximinus is that throughout all of this Maximinus was actually trying to avoid battle.

Not because he didn't think he could win after all, he had a two to one advantage in the manpower department, but because he wanted to win a different way.

See, as much as Maximinus is painted as a villain, and given his ruthless treatment of the Christians, I think it's hard not to agree that the shoe fits, Maximinus himself thought that he was right, thought that in a world gone mad, he was the only one left defending the old Roman way.

He thought that Christianity was a genuine threat to the Empire, and that it dangerously disrupted the all-important connection between Rome and her patron deities.

To not eradicate the Christians then was criminally negligent behavior.

And here were his two brother emperors, not only defending their rights, but actively promoting them.

It was crazy.

So what Maximinus was hoping for was that the men under Licinius' banner would come to their senses, that they would see that they were hugely outnumbered, see that they were fighting for the wrong side, and defect to his banner, defect en masse to the only man who was still defending the honor of Jupiter, greatest and best.

Constantine was not the only one playing at politics.

Maximinus wanted a bloodless victory, premised on the notion that he was the good guy, not Licinius, and certainly not Constantine, who had blatantly turned their backs on all that was decent and pious in the world.

Unable in the end to avoid battle, Maximinus appears even with armor donned and sword drawn, to have stuck to this desire for defection rather than bloodshed giving him his victory.

As Licinius took the initiative and attacked, rather than just sit back and be overwhelmed, Maximinus maintained an almost strictly defensive posture, hoping that Licinius's men would see that their cause was hopeless and that the great holy god was a ridiculous sham.

But he was sorely disappointed.

The men under Licinius' command did not give up and they did not defect.

And by waiting for something that was never going to happen, Maximinus didn't order his men to really fight back until it was too late.

Licinius's army was already all over them, and pretty soon it became apparent that they were going to win this battle.

That being so, Maximinus decided to at least prevent them from winning the war.

He ditched his imperial robes for slave clothes and fled to the east.

About half his army made good their escape, while the other half was rounded up by Licinius's men, and most of them, as is often the case in Roman civil wars, were immediately enrolled into the ranks of the army they had just been fighting moments before.

The defeated Maximinus fled back to Nicomedia, but he knew he had no chance to hold the city with Lycinius right on his heels, so he simply grabbed his family and a few close advisors and continued on east.

Licinius, predictably, then took Nicomedia without a fight a few days later.

But though things looked bad for Maximinus, he was not licked yet.

As he made made his way southeast across Anatolia, he gathered up the remnants of the army that had been beaten at Seraluum and appears to have called in reinforcements from the troops stationed in Syria.

Surveying the landscape, Maximinus then came to the same conclusion that so many generals before him and so many generals after him would come to, that the best place to make a stand would be at the Cilician gates.

He fortified the pass and waited for Licinius' pursuing army.

Licinius himself, though, would not be there in person to finish the job, having decided to remain in Nicomedia and keep a close eye on the capital.

Instead, he entrusted his army to subordinates and sent them off to hunt down Maximinus.

It did not take long for them to find the fugitive Augustus, and the subsequent battle at the Cilician gates, though smaller than the previous engagement at Zeralum, turned out to be the more decisive engagement.

Licinius' army broke through the the fortifications, and Maximinus was again forced to take flight.

He made for the city of Tarsus, but this time he had no ready access to reinforcements.

Dropped behind the city walls and protected by only a token garrison, Maximinus' time appeared to be at hand.

Shortly after being treed by Licinius' army, word came over the wall that Maximinus Dia was dead.

Whether it was suicide or some fluke disease we will never know, but Maximinus was in his early forties and had been first Caesar, then self-proclaimed Augustus, then full Augustus for just over eight years.

Licinius, now a master of the Eastern Empire, remained in Nicomedia for about a month before heading off in the direction of Antioch on a tour of his new provinces.

Once he got to Syria, Licinius quickly let everyone know that there was a new sheriff in town.

He not only ordered the Edict of Milan strictly enforced, but also went after known persecutors with a ruthless gusto.

Anti Christians who had for the last decade wielded their sadistic power unchecked, were suddenly rounded up and either exiled or executed, depending on the severity of their crimes.

This purge obviously had a political purpose, as the staunchest opponents of the Christians were also the staunchest supporters of Maximinus, but it was also a visible signal to everyone that a new day was dawning.

In addition to this one-part religious, one-part political purge, Licinius also engaged in a 100% political purge of any potential dynastic rivals.

It goes without saying that Maximinus' memory was damned, and his family was rounded up and executed.

But Licinius also tracked down the son of Severus, who had been serving with Maximinus and had him killed as well.

He also intended to dispose of Diocletian's wife and daughter, who were being held back in Nicomedia, but they managed to escape before the execution order came through.

It would take 15 months of searching before the two women were finally tracked down and beheaded in a public execution.

Killing women and children was not a nice thing to do, but clearly, Licinius had read his Machiavelli.

Later in 313, Licinius and Constantine formalized their power sharing agreement, with Constantine taking the west and Licinius the East, their territories divided roughly by the Adriatic.

It would not take long before relations between the two men began to deteriorate.

As I said last week, practically everything Constantine ever did points to him wanting from the get go to be sole emperor.

One emperor ruling one empire serving one God.

Now that Maxentius and Maximinus Dia were disposed of, Licinius was no longer a helpful partner in Constantine's quest for power, but was instead an obstacle in the way.

Next week, the brothers-in-law will waste no time getting on each other's nerves, and Constantine will waste no time digging up a pretext for war.

But before we go this week, I want to pass along a quick birthday message to devout listener Derek, who just turned 30 yesterday.

Derek, happy birthday.

Now stop listening to this podcast and go take care of your lovely wife and newborn daughter.

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