The World

In 326, Constantine arrested his eldest son, Caesar Crispus, and ordered his killing by poison. Somehow his wife Fausta – mother of three of the emperor’s sons and two daughters – was implicated. Either Crispus had conspired with his glamorous stepmother or he had had an affair with her. She seems to have denounced him to Constantine. She had given birth to a child just three years earlier, so her marriage to Constantine was at least active. But Constantine had killed her father and brother, a record that might cast a shadow over any marriage.

A year after Crispus’ execution, he ordered Fausta’s arrest. Constantine’s mother Helena (now aged seventy-five) made a sinister intervention: she criticized his killing of Crispus and convinced him the boy had been seduced then framed by Fausta. As a result Fausta was boiled to death in the steam baths. It is ironic that this murderous mother-in-law would become a Christian saint. Helena, promoted to Augusta, was dispatched on an imperial mission to rediscover relics of Jesus in Aelia Capitolina, once known as Jerusalem.

The most successful archaeologist of all time, Helena swiftly identified the location of Jesus’ crucifixion and tomb, beneath Hadrian’s Temple of Venus, then uncovered pieces of the True Cross itself, and finally commissioned the transformation of Aelia into the Christianized Holy City, centrepiece of a new Christian Holy Land in which splendid churches marked the vital events of Jesus’ life, grafted on top of its discredited Jewish sanctity.^*

Helena brandished a letter from her son – one of the many through which we can hear his emphatic, magniloquent voice: ‘I have no greater care than how I may best adorn with a splendid structure that sacred spot, which, under Divine direction, I have disencumbered of the heavy weight of foul idol worship.’ The Temple of Venus was demolished, replaced by a basilica to mark the Holy Sepulchre and Golgotha, with another church on the site of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem. Afterwards, Helena delivered her splinters of the True Cross and the nails of the crucifixion to Constantine: she set the nails in his helmet and bridle.

As she died in Constantine’s arms, he had already decided to found a new capital in the east. After reviewing and rejecting Troy, Chalcedon and Thessalonica, in May 330 he dedicated a new city on the European side of the Bosphoros at Byzantion, with its superb harbour and defensible peninsula – just across from the site of his victory over Licinius. Declaring that God had told him to name it after himself – Constantinople – he planned a New Rome, with its own senate, but also an imperial–Christian capital. His palace stood on its acropolis. Hulking Christian basilicas vied with a huge hippodrome and a forum featuring a porphyry pillar with the pagan-style naked emperor, himself, on top, radiating sunrays.

His conversion made Christianity as attractive and powerful as the Roman empire itself: power is always the lodestar of faith. Three centuries after Jesus’ obscure death, Christ now became the central moral figure of western civilization: millions converted. In 319, Constantine’s neighbour Iberia (Georgia) followed suit,^* while in Africa, Ezana, king of Aksum in Eritrea and Ethiopia, who had finished off Kush and expanded into Yemen, had long interacted with merchants and missionaries from Alexandria. Around 350, he converted too. But Constantine’s conversion led to new tension with Persia, where the Sasanians were coalescing around the belly of a pregnant queen.

THE CROWNED EMBRYO AND THE PAGAN EMPEROR

In 309, Persian grandees murdered their king, then crowned the unborn foetus – the embryo king – within the belly of the queen without knowing if the baby would turn out to be male.

They got lucky: the baby was Shapur II, who by the time Constantine had founded Constantinople, had emerged as a forceful autocrat. Shapur spent his first years chastising the Lakhm Arab tribes of Iraq, whom he recruited as allies under Amr, the self-styled king of all the Arabs,^* and then, still barely out of his teens, managed to fight off the Huns. Constantine’s Christianity made Shapur question the loyalty of his many Christians. Armenia, itself Christianized, appealed for Constantine’s help and he prepared for war. He had already named his three sons by Fausta as Caesars, along with his half-brother’s sons, while a nephew Hannibalianus became king of kings, prospective ruler of Persia. But as he moved east Constantine, now sixty-five, fell ill, so he sent Constantius, his middle, favourite son, ahead to repel Shapur. When Constantius, still in his teens, heard that his father was dying, he rushed back. Constantine was baptized on his deathbed, as Constantius organized a family massacre of the late emperor’s half-brothers and six nephews.