Lost to the West (5 page)

There was more than a touch of arrogance to this desire to establish a city in a single lifetime. Rome, after all, wasn’t built in a day. But Romulus didn’t have the resources of Constantine. The emperor was the master of the civilized world, and he was determined to move heaven and earth to finish his masterpiece. Artisans and resources from the length and breadth of the empire were marshaled for the project, and the city seemed to spring up almost overnight. Slopes once covered by grass soon sported baths and columns, universities and forums, even a magnificent palace and a vast hippodrome. Senators wanting to remain close to the halls of power were tempted east by the excitement of new opportunities, and were loaded with honors and installed in an expansive new Senate House. More than just the rich came, however. Constantinople was a new city as yet unclogged by centuries of tradition and blue blood, and therefore tremendous social mobility was possible. Public grants were made available to the poor who flocked to the Bosporus, and enough free grain was provided to feed more than two hundred thousand inhabitants. Water was provided by public cisterns, multiple harbors supplied fresh fish, and wide avenues led through squares dotted with beautiful sculptures culled from all over the empire.

The energy of the city was palpable, but despite its flash and youth, New Rome was born old. The famous serpent column commissioned to celebrate the Greek victory over the Persians in BC 479 was brought from Delphi, an Egyptian obelisk from Karnak was set up in the Hippodrome, and the forum was packed with statues of famous figures from Alexander the Great to Romulus and Remus. They gave the city a feeling of gravitas, rooting it in the familiar traditions of antiquity and (Constantine hoped) providing an unsurpassed prestige. The speed of its completion took the watching world’s breath away. Only six years after construction began, the new capital was ready for dedication.

The emperor had already given the people of his new city bread, and now he made sure they would have their circuses as well. Official factions were appointed to oversee the festivities, sponsoring lavish chariot races in the Hippodrome while handing out clothing and money to the spectators.
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The assembled populace was treated to an array of events, each more astounding than the last. Graceful gymnasts leaped over wild animals or astonished the crowd by walking along wires suspended high above the ground, bears were goaded into fighting each other, and painted actors delighted with lively pantomimes or bawdy songs. After the displays, the cheering senators and assembled dignitaries who filled the marble seats closest to the track could join citizens from all strata of society in a grand new bathhouse that the emperor unveiled in the central square of the city. The wealthiest, of course, had private baths in their mansions sprawling between the triumphal arches that lined the Mese—the central thoroughfare of the city—but even they couldn’t fail to be impressed with the sheer opulence of Constantine’s new public buildings.

The city that would become an empire was officially dedicated on May 11, 330, and though Constantine had named it Nova Roma, it
was always known as Constantinople in his honor.
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The celebrations were lavish on a scale only the master of the known world could bestow and they culminated with a strange mix of pagan and Christian services. Accompanied by priests and astrologers, the man who had set himself up as the defender of Christianity processed to the center of his forum, stopping before the great column that he had erected in his own honor. The tall structure was surmounted fittingly enough with a golden statue taken from the temple of Apollo and recarved to look like Constantine. Crowned with a halo of seven rays (which, according to rumor, contained the nails used in the Crucifixion), the impressive figure gazed confidently toward the rising sun, dreaming of the glorious future that awaited. At the base of the column, the emperor presided over a solemn ceremony, dedicating the city to God while the most sacred items he could find from both the pagan and Christian past were buried below it. At a moment chosen by his astrologers, the relics were interred in great porphyry drums brought from the Egyptian desert and sunk below the column. There the sacred cloak of Athena, the ax that Noah had used to make the ark, and the baskets from the feeding of the five thousand would lie incongruously together through the centuries.
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As far as his soul was concerned, Constantine clearly preferred to hedge his bets.

For the rest of his reign, the emperor tried hard to maintain a political and religious harmony. Under his firm hand, a measure of prosperity returned, but at times his ruthlessness bordered on petulance. Annoyed that his oldest son, Crispus, was wildly popular, Constantine accused him of trying to seduce his stepmother, Fausta. Not bothering to give his son a chance to protest his innocence, the emperor had him executed, then decided to kill Fausta by scalding her to death in her
bath. He had spilled too much blood to unify the empire under his rule to brook any rivals—especially within his own family.

When it came to his dealings with the church, however, this decisiveness was nowhere to be found. Bored by theological speculation, he cared only that Christians were united behind him, and this led to an irritating habit of backing whichever side he thought was in the ascendancy.

The main problem was that a council—even one as prestigious as Nicaea—could establish doctrine, but it couldn’t change the minds of the common men and women who made up the body of the church. Arius may have been branded a heretic by a group of bishops, but that did nothing to diminish his effectiveness as a speaker, and he found warm support throughout the East, where people continued to convert to his cause. His Egyptian congregation had been given a new bishop—Athanasius, the fiery champion of the mainstream position—but they continued to prefer Arius’s sermons. If Constantine had stood firmly by the decisions of his own Council of Nicaea, all would have been well. With strong leadership from the top, the Arian heresy would have withered away soon enough, but Constantine decided that public opinion had swung behind Arius, so he reversed his position and condemned Athanasius. When the accused man came to Constantinople to plead his case, the emperor was so impressed by his oratory that he reversed the ruling again and condemned Arius. By this time the citizens of Alexandria must have been suffering whiplash from wondering which of the two men was their bishop.

Things only got worse. Arius, doing his level best to ignore the fact that he had been deposed, started his own church, and an embarrassingly large number of Alexandrians soon supported him. Constantine responded by trying to tax them into obedience, announcing that any professed Arian would have much higher rates. This didn’t seem to have much effect, and before long the Arian faction at court talked the vacillating emperor into reversing himself once again. Athanasius, in what by now must have been a familiar drill, was deposed and sent into exile. Thanks to Constantine’s wavering, the situation
was now hopelessly confused and continued to deteriorate even after Arius’s rather lurid death.
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Constantine had no patience for the confusing religious problems, and before long his mind started to wander to thoughts of military glory. In his younger days, Christians had flocked to his banner when threatened by Licinius, and perhaps another military campaign would bring the church back into line. Casting about for a suitable opponent, his eye caught Persia, the favorite enemy of Rome. The Persian king Shapur II had just invaded Armenia, and a campaign to conquer and Christianize the fire-worshipping Persians would serve perfectly.

There was no love lost between the two empires, and Shapur II had much to answer for. The dyed skin of a Roman emperor still hung in a Persian temple and captured Roman standards still decorated its walls. The time had come to avenge these insults. Gathering his army, Constantine set out just after Easter in 337, but only made it as far as Helenopolis (modern-day Hersek), the city named after his mother, before he felt too sick to continue. The waters of a nearby thermal spa failed to improve his condition, and by the time he reached the suburbs of Nicomedia, he knew he was dying.

The emperor had always played it safe with religion, postponing his baptism in the belief that a last-minute consecration, with its cleansing of sin, would give him a better chance of entering paradise with a clean slate. Now, feeling his last breath approaching, he threw off the imperial regalia and donned the white robes of a new Christian. Vacillating between the sides of Nicaea to the end, he chose the city’s Arian bishop, Eusebius, to perform the baptism. A few days later, on May 22, the first Christian emperor expired.

Even in death, he managed to trumpet his self-importance. He had taken to calling himself the “equal of the apostles”—though he
certainly considered himself superior to them—and his burial left no doubt about how he saw himself. In a departure from the usual Roman tradition of cremation, he was laid in a magnificent sarcophagus in the sumptuous Church of the Holy Apostles that he had built in Constantinople. Arrayed around him were twelve empty caskets—one for each disciple—with himself as the Christ figure at the center. It was one last bit of propaganda worthy of the man who had couched his brutal and opportunistic maneuvering as a divinely inspired mission. Despite having murdered his wife and eldest son, he was venerated as a saint—quite an impressive feat for a man who was both deified as a pagan god and baptized by a heretic.

Aside from the unpleasantness of his character, few rulers in history have had such an impact on history. He had found an empire and a religion fractured and hopelessly divided, and bestowed on both an order that would serve them well. His limited understanding of Christianity made the divisions within it much worse, but his adoption of the faith set off a cultural earthquake that began a sweeping and permanent social transformation. In the West, he laid the feudal foundations of medieval Europe by making peasant jobs hereditary, and in the East, the faith he professed would become the binding force of his empire for the next thousand years. In time, the city that he founded would grow to become the great bulwark of Christendom, protecting an underdeveloped Europe from countless Asiatic invasions.

By the time of Constantine’s death, the transformation that had started with Diocletian had come to its final fruition, and the old Roman Empire began to pass away. The capital on the Bosporus was founded on a Latin model, its bureaucracy and planning echoing that of Rome, but transplanted on an eastern shore, this New Rome had already begun to change. The Greek, Christian culture around it was beginning to take hold.

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It’s still there, although today it’s known as Constantine’s basilica. After he entered Rome, the victorious Constantine replaced Maxentius’s statue with one of himself put some finishing touches on the building, and claimed it for his own.

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Constantine’s association with the city actually went back to 292, when he had been kept there with his mother, Helena, as a hostage of the eastern emperor, Galerius.

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This was the origin of the famous Blue and Green Circus Factions that would soon dominate the Hippodrome and play such a large role in Justinian’s reign.

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From 323 until the empire was destroyed more than a thousand years later, the citizens of Constantinople would meet in the Hippodrome every May 11 to commemorate the city’s birth.

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Where presumably they still are. In time, the column itself came to be seen as a sort of relic, and each New Year’s Day (September 1) the citizens would gather at the base of it and sing hymns.

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While walking in the Forum of Constantinople, Arius was suddenly seized with a desire to relieve himself. Squatting down in the dust behind a column, his intestines spilled out, along with his liver and kidneys, killing him almost instantly.

3

T
HE
P
AGAN
C
OUNTERSTROKE

Tell the king, on earth has fallen the glorious dwelling, and the water springs that spoke are quenched and dead. Not a cell is left the god, no roof, no cover. In his hand the prophet laurel flowers no more.

—WILMER C. WRIGHT,
Julian: Volume III

T
he empire might have been profoundly transforming itself, but its citizens were oblivious to the change. They had called themselves Roman at the start of Constantine’s reign, and they would still be calling themselves Roman 1,123 years later when Constantinople finally fell. On the evening of May 22, 337, they were only aware that Constantine’s thirty-one-year reign was over. It had been the longest one since Augustus, and had ushered in sweeping changes. Christianity had struck its first blow against paganism for the soul of the empire, but that war was by no means over.