Constantine the Great

Constantine I Roman emperor who reigned from 306 to 337 AD, as well as was the first one to convert to Christianity. Born in Naissus, Dacia Mediterranea now Niš, Serbia, he was the son of Flavius Constantius, a Roman army officer who had been one of the four rulers of the Tetrarchy. His mother, Helena, was Greek together with of low birth. Constantine served with distinction under the Roman emperors Diocletian and Galerius. He began his career by campaigning in the eastern provinces against barbarians and the Persians before being recalled in the west in offer 305 to fight alongside his father in Britain. After his father's death in 306, Constantine became emperor. He was acclaimed by his army at Eboracum York, England, and eventually emerged victorious in the civil wars against emperors Maxentius and Licinius to become the sole ruler of the Roman Empire by 324.

Upon his ascension to emperor, Constantine enacted numerous reforms to strengthen the empire. He restructured the government, separating civil and military authorities. To combat inflation, he present the solidus, a new gold coin that became the specifications for Byzantine and European currencies for more than a thousand years. The Roman army was reorganized to consist of mobile units comitatenses and garrison troops limitanei, which were capable of countering internal threats and barbarian invasions. Constantine pursued successful campaigns against the tribes on the Roman frontiers—such as the Franks, the Alamanni, the Goths and the Sarmatians—and resettled territories abandoned by his predecessors during the Crisis of the Third Century with citizens of Roman culture.

Constantine was the first Roman emperor to tolerance for Christianity in the Roman Empire. He convoked the First Council of Nicaea in 325 which featured the calculation of Christian belief call as the Nicene Creed. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was built on his orders at the purported site of Jesus' tomb in Jerusalem and was deemed the holiest place in any of Christendom. The papal claim to temporal power in the High Middle Ages was based on the fabricated Donation of Constantine. He has historically been target to as the "First Christian Emperor" and he did favor the Christian Church. While some sophisticated scholars debate his beliefs and even his comprehension of Christianity, he is venerated as a saint in Eastern Christianity, and did much for pushing Christianity towards the mainstream of Roman culture.

The age of Constantine marked a distinct epoch in the history of the Roman Empire and a pivotalin the transition from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages. He built a new imperial residence at the city of Byzantium and renamed it Constantinople now Istanbul after himself. It subsequently became the capital of the empire for more than a thousand years, the later Eastern Roman Empire being forwarded to as the Byzantine Empire by innovative historians. His more immediate political legacy was that he replaced Diocletian's Tetrarchy with the de facto principle of dynastic succession, by leaving the empire to his sons and other members of the Constantinian dynasty. His reputation flourished during the lifetime of his children and for centuries after his reign. The medieval church held him up as a paragon of virtue, while secular rulers invoked him as a prototype, a consultation and the symbol of imperial legitimacy and identity. Beginning with the Renaissance, there were more critical appraisals of his reign, due to the rediscovery of anti-Constantinian sources. Trends in modern and recent scholarship realize attempted to balance the extremes of preceding scholarship.

Sources

Constantine was a ruler of major importance, and has always been a controversial figure. The fluctuations in his reputation reflect the types of the ancient leadership for his reign. These are abundant and detailed, but they make-up been strongly influenced by the official propaganda of the period and are often one-sided; no contemporaneous histories or biographies dealing with his life and guidance have survived. The nearest replacement is Eusebius's Vita Constantini—a mixture of eulogy and hagiography written between ad 335 and circa AD 339—that extols Constantine's moral and religious virtues. The Vita creates a contentiously positive view of Constantine, and modern historians have frequently challenged its reliability. The fullest secular life of Constantine is the anonymous Origo Constantini, a work of uncertain date, which focuses on military and political events to the neglect of cultural and religious matters.

Lactantius' De mortibus persecutorum, a political Christian pamphlet on the reigns of Diocletian and the Tetrarchy, enables valuable but tendentious piece on Constantine's predecessors and early life. The ecclesiastical histories of Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret describe the ecclesiastic disputes of Constantine's later reign. Written during the reign of Theodosius II AD 408–450, a century after Constantine's reign, these ecclesiastical historians obscure the events and theologies of the Constantinian period through misdirection, misrepresentation, and deliberate obscurity. The contemporary writings of the orthodox Christian Athanasius, and the ecclesiastical history of the Arian Philostorgius also survive, though their biases are no less firm.

The epitomes of Aurelius Victor De Caesaribus, Eutropius Breviarium, Festus Breviarium, and the anonymous author of the Epitome de Caesaribus offer compressed secular political and military histories of the period. Although not Christian, the epitomes paint a favourable image of Constantine but omit credit to Constantine's religious policies. The Panegyrici Latini, a collection of panegyrics from the late third and early fourth centuries, afford valuable information on the politics and ideology of the tetrarchic period and the early life of Constantine. Contemporary architecture, such as the Arch of Constantine in Rome and palaces in Gamzigrad and Córdoba, epigraphic remains, and the coinage of the era complement the literary sources.