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The Emperor Constantine the Great Aly Omar Abdallah Shaza Gamal Ismail Radwa Ahmed Mohamed

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The Emperor Constantine the Great Aly Omar Abdallah Shaza Gamal Ismail Radwa Ahmed Mohamed IAJFTH Volume 4 , No, 4 2018 ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ The Emperor Constantine the Great Aly Omar Abdallah Shaza Gamal Ismail Radwa Ahmed Mohamed Abstract The Roman Emperors from Nero to Diocletian raised a long period of persecution against Christianity. After this long period of Persecution the peace was granted by the Emperor Constantine to Christianity as well as other religions.1 He declared the edict of toleration in 313 AD at Milan. The Emperor Constantine having embraced Christianity, became not only the Protector of the Christians, but endowed the Church with great Riches. Constantine did not impose his new faith as a state religion. Christianity was not the religion of the majority of his subjects, and he did not force it upon the pagans, indeed for some time he was retained the title „Ponitfex Maximus‟ of the pagan cults.2The age of Constantine marked a distinct period in the history of the Roman Empire. Constantine created his new capital as new imperial residence at Byzantium called Constantinople.3It would become the capital of the Empire for over one thousand years so the Eastern Empire was known as the Byzantine Empire. He filled Constantinople with churches dedicated to the Christian God.4 Keywords persecution; Milan; toleration; Pagan; Ponitfex Maximus; Constantinople Introduction The Emperor Constantine (Fig 1.1) was known as the most important emperor of Late Antiquity. His powerful personality not only laid to the 1Pamphilus, E., The Life of the Blessed Emperor Constantine: From 306 AD to 337 AD, (Lodnon, 2009), PP.4-5 2Grant, M., The Emperor Constantine, (USA, London), pp.7-10 3Southern ., P., The Roman Empire from Severus to Constantine,2ndrev.ed, (New York, 2001), PP.228-229 4Mcgeough, K., The Romans, (USA, 2004), PP.78-80 1 The Emperor Constantine the Great ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ foundations of Saint Peter‟s Basilica in Rome and Jerusalem‟s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but of the post-classical European civilization.5 His reign was eventful and highly dramatic. His victory at the Milvian Bridge was counted among the most decisive moments in the history.6 Fig 1.1, Head of Constantine the great. Bronze with traces of Gilding. Found at Nissa. After, Ostrogorsky, G., History of Byzantine state, (USA, 1969), P.1 Emperor Constantine was the first emperor who promoted the Christian religion, and the Church to a position equal to the traditional paganism. The Christian writers Lactantius and Eusebius saw that Constantine was a divinely appointed benefactor of mankind. Julian the Apostate, on the other hand, accused him of greed and waste, and the pagan historian Zosimus held him responsible for the collapse of the Western Empire.7 Constantine ended the persecution in his territories as soon as he came to power, providing not only for toleration but also for restitution.8 There is no doubt that he was sympathetic to the Christians already before 312 AD, that 5Odahl, C., M., Constantine and the Christian empire, 2ndrev.ed, (London, 2010), P.269 6Drake, H., Constantine and the bishops: the politics of intolerance, (London, 2002), PP.262-263 7Bardill., J., Constantine, Divine Emperor of the Christian Golden Age, (USA, 2012), PP.110-111 8Davidson, J., Birth of the Church: From Jesus to Constantine 30-312 AD,Vol I, (Britain, 2005), PP. 342-343 2 Abdallah, A Ismail, S h Mohamed, R ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ in 312 AD he committed to the Christian faith, and at that time he was committed and understood that faith.9 Throughout his rule, Constantine supported the Church financially. He built basilicas, and granted privileges to clergy. The church enjoyed more peace, the converted numbers were increased, and in the great cities large churches were built on the prominent sites. The Christians became provincial governors, and they were occupying high positions at the imperial courts. The state rejected the ancient cults. The Christian emperors began to allow pagan festivals to continue but prohibited their rituals.10 Historical back ground Constantine was in his thirty Fourth or thirty fifth years when proclaimed emperor. He decreed a formal end to the persecution of Christianity and restored its formal status and privileges. He was a good general and gave the empire rest from the invasions and civil wars and an efficient administration. His governmental reforms complemented those of Diocletian.11 Constantine was born in Naissus, Upper Moesia a garrison town in Dacia Redolent. He was the Roman Emperor from 306-337 AD. He was the son of the Emperor Flavius Valerius Constantius and Helena. He was also known as Constantine I, Saint Constantine, and known as Saint Constantine the great.12 The Emperor of the East Galerius was forced to respect Constantine‟s position. He saw himself forced to grant Constantine the rank of Caesar. 9Green, B., Christianity in Ancient Rome: The First Three Centuries, ( London, 2010), PP.208-210 10Pamphilus, E., blessed Emperor Constantine From 306AD to 337AD, (2009, London), PP.20-30 11Essex, E., Constantine the Great and the Peace of the Church, the irish monthly, Vol XLII, 1913, PP.477-480 Freeman, C., A new history of Early Christianity, (London, 2009), P229 12 Barnes, T, Constantine and Eusebius, (London, 1981), P.25 3 The Emperor Constantine the Great ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Constantine once wrote to Galerius requesting recognition as an Augustus. Galerius did not reject this petition since he did not wish to risk civil war. He compromised by granting Constantine the title and the rank of Caesar. When Constantine married Fausta, her father Maximian returned to the power in Rome, and he recognized Constantine as Caesar then as an Augustus. Constantine lived his entire life within the imperial court. He was not only known as the first Christian Emperor but as the emperor who shaped the future of the Roman world. Constantine received a formal education at Diocletian's court, where he learned Latin literature, Greek, and philosophy.13 Constantine went to Nicomedia in 303 AD, in the beginning of Diocletian's persecutions. In 305 AD Emperor Diocletian resigned as a result of his sickness.14 When Emperor Galerius died in 311 AD the main authority of the emperors had been removed, leaving them in struggle for dominance. In the east Licinius and Maximinus fought for supremacy and in the west Constantine began a war with Maxentius. Maxentius led out his army and had crossed the Tiber River over a pontoon bridge. It was quickly constructed to replace the old Milvian Bridge, which had destroyed as a defensive measure concerning his strategy. The pontoon bridge consisted of two sections held together by chains which could be quickly cut a part to prevent the enemy. Constantine defeated the strong army of Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge 312 AD.15 Lactanius tells us that on the night before the battle a vision appeared to Constantine as he saw the „Chi-Ro‟, the ancient symbol of victory as he see Cross in the sky which was also the emblem of Christ, but it was not a cross 13Potter, D., Constantine, the emperor, (USA, 2013), PP.2-3 Hichelheim., & yeo, History of the Roman People, (USA, 1992), p.422 14Lieu, S., Montserrat, D., Constantine Byzantinus: the anonymous life of Constantine, In From Constantine to Julian: Pagan and Byzantine views, Lieu, S., Montserrat, D.,(eds.), (London, 1996), P.158 Pharr, C., Constantine and the Christians, The Classical Outlook, Vol XVI, 1939, PP.57-58 15Vasiliev, A., History of byzantine empire, (Canada, 1952), P.305 4 Abdallah, A Ismail, S h Mohamed, R ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ that he adopted as the symbol of his divine, it was a monogram consisting of an X with a vertical line drawn through it and ending in a loop to represent the first two Greek letters of Christ‟s name. This symbol was important to Constantine, it appears on his helmet on a coin issued in 315 AD, and it was used throughout his reign. It became a major symbol both for the church and the Christian Empire.16 Eusebius also asserts that Constantine told that before the battle he saw in the sky across and beneath it the Greek words „By this sign you will conquer‟ and by the Latin form: “in hoc Vince or in hoc signo Vinces”.17 Constantine's opponent the Emperor Maxentius together with thousands of his soldiers drowned, Constantine saw this victory related to his vision. With his victory over Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge, Constantine became the dominant figure in the Roman Empire and the two remaining emperors, Licinius and Maximinus II agreed to his demand to be the senior Augustus. Constantine ordered Maximinus II Daia to stop persecution toward the Christians in the Middle East and he obeyed. Then in 313 AD Licinius defeated Maximinus II Daia. In 313 AD Constantine instructed his proconsul in Africa to restore all the confiscated property of the churches. 18 Constantine and Licinius at first they tried to live peacefully beside each
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