God Against the Gods (17 page)

One intriguing clue to Constantine’s status in imperial circles can be found in his own early choice of a mate. Constantine, as we have seen, was betrothed when he was still an adolescent to Fausta, daughter of Maximian, the emperor under whom his father had served as Caesar. Still, as late as 305, Constantine had not yet actually married Fausta. Rather, he had followed his father’s example yet again by first taking up with a lowborn woman called Minervina, who is described by Christian sources as his wife and by pagan sources as his concubine. Her name means “household slave of Minerva,” the Roman goddess of art and war, and some sources suggest that she was a barbarian woman who was born into slavery or taken as a prize of war in one of the campaigns against the frontier tribes. Thus, again like his own father, Constantine’s first love may have been an illicit one.

Constantine could not have endeared himself to the emperor Maximian by spurning Fausta and choosing Minervina as his mate. Even after Maximian was replaced as Augustus in the western empire by Constantius the Pale, his own father, the upwardly mobile Constantine found himself stalled in his imperial career at the very moment when a seat in the Tetrarchy seemed to open up. The point is made in a tale told by Lactantius, who dresses up Constantine as a figure of courage and daring that, once again, may be intended to remind his readers of how the intrepid young David put himself beyond the reach of a murderous King Saul.

As an officer attached to the imperial court of Galerius, the successor of Diocletian as Augustus in the eastern empire, so the story goes, Constantine required the formal permission to leave the palace at Nicomedia and join his father, the western Augustus. Constantine was anxious to do so, and Galerius was just as anxious to keep him within the earshot of his own spies and informers. Petitions from both Constantine and his father were repeatedly refused or ignored until one evening when Galerius, his mood elevated and his senses blunted by a sumptuous banquet and an abundance of wine, finally relented.

Galerius signed the order that permitted Constantine and his entourage to leave the palace and join Constantius the Pale on a voyage to the distant Roman colony of Britain. Galerius was in such an expansive mood that he permitted Constantine to travel at imperial expense on one of the mail coaches that crisscrossed the empire on those storied Roman roads. When Galerius awoke the next morning, perhaps a bit hung over but thinking more clearly about the threat that Constantine represented, he revoked the travel orders, issued a warrant for his arrest and sent a search party on horseback in hot pursuit.

But Constantine, a canny and decisive player of imperial politics, had not tarried at the palace—he was already on his way to join his father when Galerius changed his mind. A detachment of imperial cavalry was sent after him, but when they arrived at the first way station, they discovered that Constantine and his men had taken fresh horses for themselves and hobbled the rest of the mounts to prevent any pursuers from following them too closely. Thus did Constantine make his getaway from the court of Galerius, join his father at the port of Gesoriacum in Gaul (now the French city of Boulogne) and voyage with him to the westernmost outpost of the western empire.

Bastard Son

When father and son reached Britain, they promptly set out on a campaign against the Picts, one of the troublesome tribes that threatened Roman sovereignty in the settled areas of the British Isles. The emperor Hadrian had built the famous wall that still bears his name in order to keep these tribes at bay a couple of centuries earlier, but the mighty Roman legions were never able to fully suppress the barbarians on the vast and far-flung frontiers. Now Constantius and Constantine rode out at the head of an army to push the Picts back beyond the wall, and they returned in triumph to the western emperor’s base of operations at York. The expedition against the Picts was the last victory on the battlefield for Constantius, who sickened shortly after their return to base. On July 25, 306, barely fourteen months after being raised from Caesar to Augustus, Constantius the Pale was dead.

No sooner had Constantius passed his last breath than an urgent question presented itself: Who would succeed Constantius as Augustus in the west? According to the elaborate mechanism of the Tetrarchy as designed by Diocletian, the title of Augustus should have passed to a man called Severus, who served as Caesar under Constantius. A rival claim might have been expected by one of the legitimate sons of Constantius by his wife, Theodora. But it was the dead emperor’s illegitimate son, the rough-and-ready Constantine, who enjoyed the decisive advantage—he was hardened in battle, savvy in politics, driven by his own urgent ambition and, above all, he found himself at the head of his father’s own army, fresh from victory on the field of battle and far from the reach of the senior emperor, Galerius.

The Roman legions and the assorted allies and mercenaries who served with them had been the makers and breakers of Roman emperors for centuries, which explains why commoners and outsiders like Constantius and Diocletian had risen to imperial rank in the first place. Now it was the king of a barbarian tribe who played a crucial role in elevating Constantine to the imperial throne. King Crocus commanded a detachment of cavalry in the Roman campaign against the Picts, and he roused his own soldiers into declaring Constantine as the new Augustus.

The tale was spun by later chroniclers to show Constantine as an unassuming and an even unwilling object of the spontaneous acclaim of his late father’s barbarian allies. Constantine “put spurs to his horse” to put himself at a distance from the soldiers who were, in fact, carrying out a coup d’état, according to an ancient panegyrist who composed the account in honor of the new emperor. But they rode after him, gently but insistently escorted him back to camp and compelled him to accept the purple mantle that signified his new imperial rank.
¹⁶

The reality is that Constantine was an active participant in “a deliberate act of open rebellion,” as historian John Holland Smith puts it.
¹⁷
Indeed, Constantine demonstrated his own willfulness and sheer impudence in the official communiqué that he sent back to Galerius. The courier carried news of the death of Constantius and a gift from Constantine to Galerius—an official portrait of Constantine in the garb of his new rank as Augustus, hung with a wreath of bay leaves that signified his imperial rank. The very sight of the portrait reduced Galerius to a state of sputtering rage, according to one ancient historian; he ordered the wreath and the portrait to be burned and spent the rest of the day in bed.

Pretenders and Usurpers

When he finally rose from his sickbed, Galerius was prepared to grant Constantine a place in the Tetrarchy, although he recognized Constantine only as a Caesar, not an Augustus, and the lowest-ranking of the four tetrarchs. And, at least for the moment, Constantine decided not to insist on the higher rank. After all, the man whom Galerius recognized as the legitimate successor to Constantine’s father, Severus, did not enjoy much real authority in the land over which he supposedly reigned as Augustus. Constantine was the
de facto
ruler of the western reaches of Roman empire from the Alps all the way to Hadrian’s Wall.

But the deadly game of imperial politics was still very much in play. Maximian, who had been forced into retirement along with Diocletian, now sought to reclaim the title of Augustus from Severus, the man who had lawfully succeeded him. A whole gang of pretenders and usurpers, including Maximian’s own son, put themselves in contention for the crown. Amid the clamor for the imperial crown, Constantine showed exactly how cunning and cruel he could be.

At first, Constantine and Maximian entered into an uneasy alliance in support of each other’s claim to imperial rank. Constantine had been betrothed to Maximian’s daughter for more than a decade without bothering to actually marry her, but now he decided to put politics ahead of love. Minervina may have been Constantine’s lawful wife, but no divorce is recorded, and so it is possible that Constantine simply “put away” Minervina in the same way that Constantius the Pale had once “dismissed” Constantine’s mother. Once free of Minervina, Constantine promptly married Fausta—the wedding, an occasion for a public display of martial splendor, took place at the town of Augusta Treverorum (now Trier, Germany) on March 31, 307. Constantine recognized his father-in-law’s claim to the rank of senior Augustus, and Maximian returned the favor by elevating his son-in-law to the rank of junior Augustus.

But his marriage to Maximian’s daughter and his alliance with Maximian did nothing to blunt Constantine’s own ambition. The whole arrangement, in fact, can be seen as a cunning and even cynical ploy by a master strategist who aspired not to be one of four emperors but rather the one and only emperor. Constantine waited and watched, for example, while his father-in-law fought to defend his claim to the title of Augustus against Severus, the lawful western emperor.

Severus marched on Rome, but his army was bribed into defecting
en masse
to Maximian, and he surrendered on the promise of a safe refuge. When Maximian broke his promise and put Severus under house arrest, the defeated emperor begged for an honorable death by execution. Maximian refused, apparently concluding that Severus was far more valuable as a hostage than as a corpse. Severus, however, ultimately won the battle of will by taking his own life.

Maximian now decided to make a preemptive move against his son-in-law. Lactantius, who delighted in decorating the life of Constantine with dramatic but surely legendary exploits, reports that Maximian asked his daughter to assassinate her husband by stabbing him to death in bed. When Fausta refused, or so the story goes, Maximian resolved to strike the blow with his own hand.

He presented himself at Constantine’s palace in the middle of the night, persuaded the bodyguard to let him into the imperial bedchamber by insisting that he had a strange and perplexing dream to share with his son-in-law and then plunged a dagger into the sleeping figure that lay in the bed. At that moment, we are asked to believe, Constantine stepped out from the curtain behind which he had concealed himself—Fausta had warned him of her father’s plot, and he had arranged for one of the eunuchs to take his place in bed. Then and there, Constantine ordered that the neck of the would-be assassin be broken.

Another ancient source offers an account that is more restrained but not entirely lacking in drama. While Constantine was away from his palace on yet another punitive expedition against an unruly barbarian tribe, Maximian circulated the false rumor that he had fallen in battle and offered the troops that remained behind a rich gift in exchange for putting themselves in his own service. Constantine’s troops, however, remained loyal to their beloved emperor, and they set out on a fast march across Gaul toward Marseilles, where Maximian was besieged, defeated and captured. Constantine either permitted or compelled Maximian to take his own life, depending on what version one chooses to credit with historical truth.

The death of Maximian in 310 put Constantine in a commanding position in the struggle among the rival emperors. Galerius died of a wasting disease in 311—Christian historians delighted in the gruesome details of his final illness and saw it as a particularly satisfying form of divine vengeance against a persecutor of Christians. Constantine now sought to consolidate his imperial power by moving against yet another rival—Maxentius, the son of Maximian, who had been acclaimed as emperor by the praetorian guard in Rome.

At the head of an army that had repeatedly proved both its ferocity and its loyalty in battle against Romans as well as barbarians, Constantine marched south from Gaul, taking town after town in what he saw as a war of liberation rather than conquest. As he approached Rome, Maxentius and his army hunkered down behind the fortified walls of the ancient capital, a seemingly impregnable position in which they could have comfortably waited out a siege by Constantine’s much smaller expeditionary force.

Maxentius, like all pagan emperors and generals, consulted the gods for advice on his military operations. One characteristically vague line of text from one of the Sibylline books predicted that “an enemy of the Roman people” would meet his destruction on October 28, the same date on which Maxentius had been first declared emperor of Rome six years earlier. Whether it was Constantine or Maxentius whom the gods regarded as the enemy was not clear, but Maxentius chose to regard the oracle as a good omen. And so, on October 28, 312, the gates of Rome were opened, and Maxentius marched out to fight his brother-in-law, thus staking the imperial crown on a single clash of arms.

“In This Sign, Conquer”

Constantine, too, yearned for divine favor in the battle to come. He was driven by the sure conviction that skill, strength and daring ultimately mattered less than the will of the powers on high—a notion that lay at the very heart of pagan rituals of worship and sacrifice. If a mortal caught the attention of the right deity with a proper display of piety—and, crucially, if he earned the goodwill of the god with a generous sacrifice—then he would surely prevail against his enemies. If he forfeited the divine favor, then he was doomed to defeat. The whole enterprise depended on picking the right god.

Until now, Constantine had courted the same gods and goddesses as every other contender for imperial rank in the Roman empire. Following his father’s example in matters of faith as he did in matters of love, he sought the special patronage of the high god known as King Helios or
Sol Invictus
, the Unconquered Sun. Constantine, according to a panegyric delivered in his imperial court, had been granted a divine vision during a visit to a shrine of Apollo, the Greek god who had long been associated with the sun in the iconography of pagan Rome. The god manifested himself in Constantine’s presence, accompanied by the Goddess of Victory, and they presented him with a crown on which the Roman numerals XXX were etched—the figure was understood to represent the divine assurance of a long life and a long reign.