The most controversial (and misunderstood) Emperor in history

This is Constantine, the first Christian emperor, one of the most controversial people in all of history. To some, he was God's chosen ruler, the man who brought peace to a fractured empire, ended persecution and united the church. To others, he was the emperor who corrupted the message of Jesus, binding a peaceful faith to banners, armies and imperial power. He's the man who said on his deathbed that his life was transformed when he saw a cross in the sky and called himself the servant of the one true God. And the same man who ordered the execution of his wife and dreamed of conquering the Persian empire by force. He's a figure shrouded in myth, legend and controversy. But who really was he? When and why did he convert? Did he actually believe in Jesus or just find him useful? Was his reign good for the Christian faith or was it the worst thing to ever happen to it? This is the story of Constantine's long reign, the journey from many gods to one, from the battlefield to a deathbed baptism, the story of how the Roman Empire and the Christian church were changed forever. When Constantine was born in the year 270, the Roman Empire was in turmoil. Civil war, economic crisis and every emperor in this century so far had died in battle or been assassinated. It got so bad that when Constantine was in his early 20s, the emperor Diocletian divided the empire into four parts, ruled by four co-emperors and Constantine's father Constantius became the emperor in the West. Meanwhile, Diocletian also unleashed a brutal persecution of Christians hoping that by satisfying the gods, he could restore peace. Constantine would have been a young soldier and would have seen the bloody executions of Christians but he would have also seen that the gods were not answering. But in the West, his father seemed to be ruling with relative peace. He tolerated Christians and most strange of all, had a particular reverence for a single creator god who he called Sol Invictus, the unconquered son. When his father died in the year 306, Constantine was hailed as the new emperor by his soldiers in York but there were other rulers that opposed his rise to power and so Constantine launched a campaign to unite the entire Western Empire under his rule. Around this time, Constantine started talking about mysterious encounters with the divine. We know of one vision he had, not of Jupiter or Mars but of Apollo, the sun god, offering Constantine a crown of glory. His coins began to change too. He removed old figures like Hercules and Jupiter and replaced them with a blazing sun and his official imperial speeches started to reference But who was this god? It's not really clear. Constantine talked about a supreme deity but didn't name him. Was it still the sun or had he begun to suspect that this god might be the god of the Christians who are now everywhere in his empire? Then in the year 312, Constantine decided to do something everyone thought was impossible, conquer Rome. He already held Britain, Gaul and Spain but he needed to take Italy to become the legitimate emperor of the West. And so he marched on Rome. His rival was Maxentius who ruled Italy and North Africa and commanded a much larger army. The two met in battle at the Milvian Bridge on the northern outskirts of Rome and against all the odds, Constantine won. Maxentius' army fell back and many drowned as the bridge collapsed. Eusebius, Constantine's biographer and the first Christian historian even compared it to Pharaoh drowning in the Red Sea while a new Moses led the people. The victory was unprecedented but so was what Constantine did when he entered the city. He created a statue of himself holding a strange symbol writing underneath it by this saving sign I saved your city from the tyrants and set her free. And strangest of all, he created these limited edition medals for some of his officials with a new symbol on it the Cairo, the first two letters of Christos, Christ. Something happened to Constantine at the Milvian Bridge. Lactantius, another important writer on Constantine's life wrote that during the night before the battle Constantine had a dream vision telling him to mark his army's shields with this heavenly sign of God. Eusebius records that Constantine had a vision even before the beginning of his campaign to conquer Rome. He'd seen a cross in the sky with the words by this sign conquer and so Constantine believed he had won because of this God and this God seemed to be associated with Jesus Christ and the Christians. So did Constantine just worship this one God because he was a lucky charm who won him battles? Well, not entirely because it also seems like he had a personal encounter with this God. In a letter he sent to some bishops in 316 he describes an experience he'd had. He says, for there were old things in me that seemed to be lacking in justice nor did I think that the heavenly power could see these secrets that I bore within my chest. The all-powerful God who sits in the watchpost of heaven gave me what I did not deserve. So this God apparently made him aware of his weaknesses and he worshipped a single creator God who was associated with the Christians and his actions as the emperor suggested his loyalty to this God. He legalized Christianity and said that all property seized during the persecutions should be returned and he even commissioned grand purpose-built churches the precursor to cathedrals. This was the first time architecture was associated with Christianity. So Constantine had brought peace to the entire western empire with the blessings of its one true God. But the church was far from united. In North Africa a bitter theological conflict had erupted over the Donatists. During the imperial persecution some Christians had renounced their faith under the pressure and the Donatists were those who refused to accept these Christians back into the community especially priests who had even handed over scripture to be burnt. Could they be allowed back into the church? The debate about their status created division and tore communities apart. Constantine cared a lot about peace and unity in his empire. He wrote to the bishops urging them to reconcile. When they couldn't he convened several councils and offered to enforce the bishop's decision with his authority. This was controversial for people even at the time. It was the first time an emperor got involved directly in theological matters and some Christians were already suspicious of it. Donatists, a bishop and a key figure in the controversy even said what has the emperor to do with the church? Yeah that's a fair question. Right? The council said that people should be let back into fellowship and that decision was the one that Constantine enforced. He exiled dissenters and closed their churches. It's worth remembering that for Constantine of course he was going to get involved in the matters of a major faith movement in his empire. It was part of his responsibility to facilitate peace between divided communities in his domain and so this set a precedent for how a Roman emperor dealt with the church. Meanwhile Constantine was continuing his military campaign to unite the rest of the Roman empire. By 324 he was ruling from Britain all the way to Egypt. For the first time in 30 years the empire was united and at peace under a sole ruler. World peace. Yeah Eusebius who had experienced violent persecution throughout his life thought this was the best thing that could have happened. He wrote that light was everywhere. Dancing and singing broke out everywhere and all troubles were forgotten. A whole new world order had begun. An emperor had submitted to Jesus Christ. And at this time Constantine seemed to have gone more public with his belief in Christianity. In letters circulated throughout the empire he started publicly calling himself the servant of the mighty holy god revealed as pure light by his son the testimony of himself. This was the happy end of history and everyone lived happily ever after. Well not really. Soon after the conquest of the eastern empire Constantine discovered that the church there was also in turmoil. Yeah there was a fallout in Alexandria where all the most complicated Christian theology happened. A priest named Arius was teaching that Jesus the son of God was not equal to God the father and this idea had spread quickly and begun to divide congregations and leaders. Constantine didn't really understand what the debate was about. For him these were insignificant academic questions but they destroyed unity. It was embarrassing. So first he wrote a letter to both Arius and the other leaders demanding peace between them. When that failed Constantine did something no emperor had ever done before. He summoned Christian leaders from across the known world to meet for the first time in history to hold a council at Nicaea in 325. Around 250 bishops gathered in the great hall of the palace. Constantine rose and gave a speech urging the leaders to embrace the principles of peace. But what followed were weeks of fierce and sometimes bitter debates. The council did eventually reach two main decisions. Firstly the bishops agreed on a shared date for Easter so everyone could celebrate on the same day. Secondly they drafted the Nicaean creed affirming that Jesus was fully God and fully human. At the end only Arius and two other bishops refused to sign it and Constantine banished them to the other side of the empire. So Nicaea wasn't inventing Christianity or deciding what books were in the bible. In fact they all already agreed on that. Nicaea was about clarifying what almost all Christians already believed. Namely what they meant when they said that Jesus is God. In fact despite the bishops coming from all around the world it was shocking how much agreement there actually was. Constantine not only united the empire but also presided over the unification of the church. It seemed that by this point he completed his life's work. But then one year later things began to really go wrong in his life. In 326 Constantine's eldest son Crispus was tried in court and executed. Soon after Constantine's wife Fausta also died under mysterious circumstances. Her death maybe having been ordered by Constantine himself. These events are shrouded in mystery. Eusebius completely leaves these stories out of his biography of Constantine and many of the inscriptions mentioning their names were removed. We'll never really know what happened. But Constantine never remarried. The death seemed to have left a permanent scar. And meanwhile the unity Constantine hoped Nicaea would bring was already unravelling. More debates raged in Alexandria. Constantine exiled a young bishop named Athanasius who agreed with Nicaea for being a troublemaker who endangered church unity. But we'll hear more about him another time. Nicaea settled some issues but it raised others And yet even amid the tragedies Constantine's faith was leading him to make social reforms. He outlawed crucifixion and tried to end the gladiatorial games. He banned keeping prisoners in total darkness or branding them on the face declaring that humans were formed in the likeness of heavenly beauty and shall not be dishonoured. He made Sundays a day of rest and continued building churches in And most shockingly to the Romans he even banned sacrifices made in his own name. This was the beginning of the end of the imperial cult. Towards the end of his life he dreamed of one more conquest, the Persian Empire, but he would never fulfil this dream. In 337, before he could launch his campaign, Constantine fell sick in Nicaea. He called for the local bishops, was baptised and then died in his 60s. Constantine left the world transformed. Christianity went from being a fringe faith of martyrs and slaves to the emperor's faith. The sign of Jesus which symbolised a spiritual victory over death now became the sign of the emperor's military victory over Rome's enemies. Constantine's legacy is something people argue about to this day. On the one hand, he united the church, brought positive social change, commissioned church buildings and laid the groundwork for more and more people to become Christian. So some people see in his life God working through mysterious and unexpected ways, even through a Roman emperor. But on the other hand, he united the church by state enforcement. Christians began to get wrapped up in elaborate church building projects modelled on imperial palaces. And maybe worst of all, Jesus became associated with imperial banners and the military power of the empire. So others see him as the worst compromise the church has ever committed. This is when it all went wrong. His own faith is also something people have argued about. Was he really sincere about his faith? Well, the truth is no one can ever really know what's going on in someone's heart, so we'll never know for sure. But what we do know is that Constantine really did seem to wrestle with his experience of God, and he sincerely championed the Christian faith when he had no real reason to. If he was a Christian, then he was an imperfect one, like everyone else. Whatever the case, Constantine fundamentally changed the relationship between the Christian faith and political power. Every debate about faith and politics, worship and power, church and state can be traced back to him. He probably wasn't the saint Eusebius imagined, but he probably wasn't the villain his critics claimed either. He was a man, a Roman emperor, who was ambitious, conflicted and complicated, and through him Christianity entered a new age. But from this moment, Christians would never again agree on what it meant to live with power. And these questions would define the next chapter of Christian history. While Christians in the Roman Empire were wrestling with these questions, there were countless Christians living under a different empire, which was still hostile towards them, the Persian Empire. From this point onwards, their stories were incredibly different to their Roman counterparts. How did these Christians respond to the new Christian Roman Empire? Don't worry, we'll get to that. Thank you so much for watching this episode of Christian Story. If you want to go deeper into the ideas and research behind this video, download our Deep Dive PDF for free. 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