Concerning the establishment of the Roman capital at Constantinople and the administration and nature of Constantine and his successors. As Gibbon would say, we here discuss, “interest,” of the micro-personal and macro-personal kind.
Constantius, father of Constantine, seems to have been a Christian or Christian sympathizer. Like his son he was a soldier and was possibly not literate. As Gibbon points out, the Gospels were a Greek text, studied in Greek, mostly written in Greek. The Latin texts available in the west were not suitable, really, for argument and debate. Although he died in York, in Britain, the fate of the family of Constantius would drift ever east.
This was in large part due to the administrative difficulties running an empire from a camp and requiring some civil order in the cities. Christianity, an almost exclusively urban faith, with its own spy network, own tax base, own behavioral code and punishments [of a spiritual rather than a physical nature, and not interfering with the State monopoly of violence] offered a core of educated ministers. For Christianity, mostly spoken in the west, was a faith of the written word, a faith of debate, of scholarship, a faith, that was in practice, very close to Law. Law spread side by side with religious debates conducted between Christian sectarians. [I make no causal claim, only note a corolary trend.] By being the patron of this young faith Constantine was guaranteed a loyalist core that waxed more numerous the furthest east one went. These loyalists, were also a minority that would be disinclined to make common cause with the majority. Of 1800 Bishops, 800 were Latin and 1000 were Greek, as was the language of the Bible.
Constantine, on taking the purple and receiving Jove and Herculean religious sanction at Rome, issued the Edict of Milan, that guaranteed religious liberty for all Romans. There would, and there had to be, some limits on religious freedom, as under Diocletion, who did not tolerate certain sects, like the Manicheans [from enemy Persia] and for a brief time the Christians who burned his palace in Nicea. The temple of Issus in Phonecia, where prostitution was part of the worship, was shut down.
Constantine appointed Christians to key posts and reestablished the estates of Churches that had been confiscated.
He did the following things to secure the growth of Christianity and its eventual place as State Religion:
>1. He learned at the feet of priests and bishops and monks, seating himself on a stool and saying on one occasion to one who questioned his submission to the clergy, “I am the mere minister, not the judge of these [debating clergy] established as priests and gods upon earth.” That was said in a very pagan way by a man seeking Heaven’s sanction through earthly intermediaries in a world upon which Heaven mostly frowned. [0]
>2. He protected Christian slaves from being circumcised by their Jewish masters, so every gentile slave who did not want his dick trimmed could claim Christ as his foreskin’s savior!
>3. Every person who became Christian was given a white robe and 20 pieces of gold.
>4. Crimes by Christians against pagans were simply ignored.
>5. A friend of Constantine, a Syrian philosopher, Sopater, was with Constantine when contrary winds delayed the Egyptian grain fleet. He had his friend beheaded, saying that the man had power with the old gods enough to cast contrary winds across the sea and that Constantine was now fully a estranged from the old gods, despite raising a brazen image of Helios Apollo in his new city, a city he claimed, was ordained in every way by God taking him by the hand in dream and while awake and showing him the way.
>6. He hedged his bets by declining to actually be baptized and become a Christian on his deathbed. His generation believed that baptism washed away all sins and that a ruler would wait until death was nigh, so that his many necessary crimes against humanity and God would be washed away at the final hour. Common men must be baptized first and then behave like saints.
Like Diocletion before him, Constantine had to continue dividing power among his functionaries to keep conspiracy and civil war at bay. This multiplied the government functionaries, with, for instance, a general requiring for his personal use 178 servants and as many horses. The church was no more exempt from taxation as the pagan temples had been. Some pagan temples were looted for tax revenue by Constantine and his successor, but most were not.
One excellent outcome of the Christian Church as Civil Service, was that the Church had elections, so that the class of voting person who would tend to vote for rebellion, or civil war, could now vote for a bishop instead, a person who had no military function and could not threatened the Emperor.
Legions were reduced in size and multiplied. These were increasingly barbarian legions who tended to like the cross as a war symbol, as it looked like a battle standard, a sword, or the nasal guard on a helmet.
Constantine would murder his eldest son, and his sons and nephews would nearly all share the same fate at each others hands. The empire he reorganized contracted a deathly necrosis at birth, a corrupt and cruel nature, in part because it was reanimated from the corpse of an already dead empire, an empire with no soul, only fear, thirst and hunger.
In the next section I will attempt to summarize the ages of witch burning, tortures and other religious murders ignited by the genius of Constantine. For he placed himself below and besides the religious sphere while igniting and fanning religious strife between Christians in a world of such suffering, that if people did not wax fanatic and kill and damn one another over points of religious doctrine, they might rise against him. It is not accurate to say that Constantine “used the altar as a step stool to the throne.” It is accurate to describe the church as his mechanism for channeling discontent laterally across religious lines, rather than vertically up into his political sphere.
He had Crispus, his son, murdered, even as he invited the 380 bishops and 2,000 odd debate researchers to Nicea, to fight over what doctrines could retain the name Christian. It was a fight he encouraged, even with some sarcasm, even though he admitted he could not fathom the arguments of the fanatic philosophers and priests, often one in the same, as we shall see in the next summary.
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Some Imperial Dimensions
The three highest ranks of government officials were:
> 1. Illustrious
>2. Respectable
>3. Hoorable
There were three unnamed lesser ranks.
Of 13 Diocese, the two largest, in the east, had 600 and 400 vicars each, while the 11 minor diocese had 12 each. The weight of Christianity in the Greek east was hence heavier than the 1000 eastern bishops to 800 Latin bishops indicated.
Of 116 Provinces, 71 were run by “presidents” the rest by other officials of greater rank.
Slaves were reckoned as cattle.
132 legions of 1,000 to 1,500 men.
There were an equal number of cavalry bands.
645,000 soldiers in all.
583 forts
34 arsenal cities
Dukes were military commanders.
Counts were higher ranking commanders considered to be companions of the monarch.
City soldiers were paid 1/3rd more than frontier troops.
There were 10,000 “Eyes of the Monarch” or imperial spies.
Military service was so despised that many freemen cut off their own forefinger to avoid service.
The height standard for service was reduced by 3 inches.
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Some Quotes by Gibbon
“The invitation of a master is indistinguishable from a command.”
Rights are, “Violated by power, perverted by subtlety.”
“Taxation favors the rich, not the poor.”
Constantinople, “...this artificial colony,” “…to feed a lazy and insolent populace at the expense of the industrious husbandmen of a productive province.”
Government functionaries, “…from the titled slaves seated upon the steps of the throne to the meanest instruments of arbitrary power.”
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A Martial Maxim
Men fight in war for the following, with a descending order or effect:
>1. Love of war [barbarian]
>2. Duty [citizen]
>3. Honor [leading citizens]
>4. Payment [mercenary]
>5. Dread [slave]
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Notes
-0. The various heavenly symbols that marked the victories of Constantine and his sons may well have been heavenly events accompanying the world’s descent into a cooling period.
