Constantinople

The Emperor Constantine is probably best remembered for his conversion to Christianity. But his founding of the city of Constantinople was another landmark event that was to shape the entire future of the Roman Empire. 

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Hello and welcome back to the fall of the Roman Empire. My name is Nick Holmes, and this is episode 25 called Constantinople. In the last episode, we heard about Constantine's conversion to Christianity, which must be what he's best remembered for. In this episode, we move on to what he's second best remembered for, the founding of the city of Constantinople. But before we hear about that, let's pause to reflect a moment on Constantine's character because he is perhaps the most enigmatic of all the Roman emperors. And I say that because both contemporaries and historians tend to divide into two camps, either passionately positive or passionately negative. The positive ones are, of course, mainly the contemporary Christian chroniclers like Eusebius and Lactantius, whose writings are a key record of Constantine's reign, without which we really wouldn't have much to go on. And there's no doubt that they painted him as a devout Christian after his spectacular conversion before the Battle of the Milvium Bridge in AD 312, which as we discussed in the last episode, was probably fictional. They also portray him as wise, visionary, selfless, all of the attributes that you would expect of a heroic leader. But there was another school of thought altogether which came into existence in the decades after his reign, and which essentially represented a pagan backlash against Constantine. And this was led by the likes of the future Emperor Julian the Apostate, who led a pagan revival in the 360s, and condemned Constantine as short-sighted, brutal, and selfishly motivated. The Greek chronicler Zosimus, writing in the decades around AD 500, was also a pagan and highly critical of Constantine, claiming, for example, that he undid much of Diocletian's successful work in setting up frontier defences and left Rome exposed to the barbarian attacks that ultimately destroyed the Western Empire. Well that particular allegation seems a bit far-fetched to me, given that Constantine was clearly a very experienced and competent soldier. I think what Zosimus was getting at was that he spent most of his reign fighting rivals rather than Rome's enemies. And my own feeling about Constantine is that he was above all else a clever and ruthless politician, who was principally very good at destroying his political opponents. And one reason he did this so effectively was that he was truly revolutionary in his approach, as with the way he was prepared to sponsor Christianity as a new religion in the Empire. He was also extremely hard working and intelligent, as the great historian of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon, acknowledged even though he regarded him as a Machiavellian tyrant. Even those who censured the propriety of his measures were compelled to acknowledge that he possessed magnanimity to conceive and patience to execute the most arduous designs without being checked either by the prejudices of education or by the clamours of the multitude. In the field he infused his own intrepid spirit into the troops whom he conducted with the talents of a consummate general, and to his abilities rather than to his fortune we may ascribe the signal victories which he obtained over the foreign and domestic foes of the Roman Empire. He loved glory as the reward, perhaps as the motive of his labours, the boundless ambition, which from the moment of his accepting the purple at York appears as the ruling passion of his soul, may be justified by the dangers of his own situation, by the character of his rivals, by the consciousness of superior merit and by the prospect that his success would enable him to restore peace and order to the distracted empire. In his civil wars against Maxentius and Licinius, he had engaged on his side the inclinations of the people, who compared the undissembled vices of those tyrants with the spirit of wisdom and justice which seemed to direct the general tenor of the administration of Constantine. But perhaps Constantine's greatest strength was his ability to read the changing times during his life. For example, his adoption of Christianity reflected the exponential growth in popularity of this new religion in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries. And the next most radical step was his founding of Constantinople. So let's hear that story right now. Hope you enjoy it. There in the centre of a great colonnaded circle was an immense column made of porphyry rock, over one hundred and fifty feet high, higher even than Trajan's column in Rome, and as tall as the Colosseum. This was the new forum of Constantine in the city of Constantinople. The crowd followed the emperor and packed themselves into the open space within the forum centre. There they waited in silence. Ropes were slackly attached to a giant purple awning that covered a statue on top of the magnificent column. Suddenly the ropes were pulled tight and a pulley system contrived to lift the awning away and reveal the statue it was hiding. It was a gigantic figure cast in bronze, holding a spear in one hand and a globe in the other. Its head was adorned with a seven point radiant crown. In fact, the statue was an ancient one of Apollo that had been plundered from one of the Greek cities on the Aegean coast. The head had then been replaced with one resembling Constantine's features and anointed with a radiant crown in the fashion of Roman emperors in the past. The spectators gasped in awe. The statue had been polished so that it gleamed in the morning sun. It was said to be even larger than the legendary Colossus of Rhodes that had been destroyed centuries before. Constantine himself walked onto a platform beside the statue. He wore gilded armour and a diadem of pearls and precious gems. He turned to the cheering people. They fell silent. Then he addressed them, he declared he would now dedicate this new city. Henceforth it would no longer be called Byzantium, but Constantinopolis, Constantine's city. The date was the eleventh of may AD three hundred thirty. Little could the thousands of people gathered in the Forum of Constantine, including Constantine himself, have realized that for centuries to come this date would be seen as a historic turning point, the marking of a new era, for it is now seen as the beginning of the second age of the Roman Empire, the age when power passed from Rome to Constantinople. So why did Constantine found this new city? The main reason was political. It was his city, and it marked him as the sole emperor. It had taken Constantine eighteen years to achieve this. The Tetrarchy not only broke down immediately after Diocletian's abdication in AD three hundred five, but even after Constantine had secured control of Italy in the Western Empire, defeating Maxentius, the empire was still split between him and his co-emperor Licinius in the East. Constantine only finally defeated and executed Licinius in 324, twelve years after the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. Thereafter he ruled the empire by himself until his death in 337. His founding of Constantinople, like his adoption of Christianity, was also a sign of the times. It was explicit confirmation that Rome was no longer the political capital of the Empire, and that the Roman senators were no longer the governors of the Empire. This had, of course, begun a long time before, starting with Septimius Severus's monarchical government and continuing throughout the troubled third century when Rome had been replaced by capitals at Trier, Milan, Sermium, and Nicomedia. Indeed it was Diocletian who had removed any possibility of Rome's political comeback when he established the Tetrarchy as the new political order, and Nicomedia as his residence. Why then did Constantine not make Nicomedia his new capital? The answer is that he probably didn't want to live in Diocletian's shadow. In addition, if his Christian credentials were to carry weight, Nicomedia was too tainted with the crimes of Diocletian's Christian persecution to be acceptable. Another reason was location. His choice of Constantinople was undoubtedly influenced by its excellent strategic location, halfway between the Danube and the eastern frontier with Persia, providing an outstanding harbour dominating the sea lanes through the Bosphorus. It was also easily defended since it was situated on a peninsula that could be protected effectively with land walls on just one side. Another reason was that it was near the site of his recent victory over Licinius at Chrysopolis, so he might have seen it as a sort of victory city. It also reflected a trend that would become increasingly pronounced over the next two centuries. The centre of gravity of the Roman Empire was moving east. While it had always been true that the eastern half of the empire was wealthier than the West, it was the West that had experienced the most economic growth during the Pax Romana. Gaul, Spain, and Britain had caught up to some extent with the far wealthier Eastern Mediterranean in the first and second centuries AD. Of course, Italy had also occupied a special place in the Empire during its centuries of expansion. Wealth had flowed into it, making Rome the largest city in the ancient world. But the crisis of the 3rd century reversed these trends. The barbarian invasions were most painfully felt in Gaul and the Balkans. Gaul's economy had never really recovered from the devastation of the 3rd century. However, in the East, although the Balkans were significantly impacted, Anatolia, the Levant, and Egypt escaped the worst of the barbarians' destruction. Therefore, the East started to reassert its economic superiority over the West. Both Diocletian and Constantine knew that the most important part of the Roman Empire now lay in the East. Making Nicomedia and then Constantinople the new imperial residences simply reflected this. What of Constantinople's Christian status? Although the Christian chronicler Eusebius would later portray the founding of the city as a thoroughly Christian undertaking, much of this in fact seems to be Christian propaganda, and historians believe there is plenty of evidence to suggest that both pagan and Christian ideologies were respected. For example, Constantine's grand statue of himself was ambiguous. It could be seen both as traditional, i.e. that of a Roman Emperor with a radiant crown, even perhaps with connections to the god Sol like Aurelian had, but also as Christian, in the sense that it portrayed him as the protector of the church. The latter view was certainly the one adopted in future centuries until it was toppled by a storm in 1106 and replaced with a Christian cross by the Byzantine Emperor Manuel Komnenos. However, even if Constantinople was not intended to be exclusively Christian, one thing was for sure it was meant to challenge Rome in terms of size and splendour. For six years between its consecration in three hundred two four and its dedication on the eleventh of may three hundred thirty, Constantine built dozens of grand new buildings, including a vast hippodrome, a palace, the churches of Hagiary and the Holy Apostles, a huge forum called the Augusteon. Modern archaeological evidence suggests that Constantine destroyed many of the original buildings in Byzantium in order to rebuild them according to his own design. To pay for his new city he confiscated funds from pagan cults considered by both Christians and pagans to be immoral, such as the shrine of Aphrodite at Heliopolis, where sacred prostitution was apparently practiced. If artisans were no longer sufficiently skilled to make the statues of antiquity, then the originals could of course simply be stolen. For example, the hippodrome was decorated with classical Greek statues pilfered from disused temples. So in summary, the founding of Constantinople marked a new beginning for the Roman Empire, one that would enable it to last in the East for centuries after the fall of Rome itself, until in 1453 the canons of the Ottoman Empire silenced it forever. And that ends this episode. Thanks so much for listening, and I hope you enjoyed it. And next week we'll continue with Constantine and one of the most underappreciated aspects of his reign, which was the restoration of the Roman currency with a new gold coin called the Solidus, which helped to boost the Roman economy in quite a startling way after the traumas of the crisis of the third century. Oh yes, and I also wanted to mention that at long last I've set up a website, which you might be interested in, especially since I'll put a map of Constantinople into a blog about this podcast episode. So if you want to see that, go to nickholmesauthor.com. Again, that's Nickholmes Author, all one word, and then dot com. And if your search engine can't find it, which it may well not since it's a very new website, you might want to put the prefix www dot or even the full ul, which as you know starts h t s colon forward slash forward slash, and then the rest. So thanks very much for listening and see you next time.