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Constantine The Great & Byzantium
(Greek History)

The emperor Diocletian (284-305) had thought to take the Roman Empire out of the chaos of the third century by turning its government into something like a family firm: two senior and two junior partners, with the juniors in due course becoming seniors.

The scheme crashed at once; and Constantine, the son of Constantius, a junior elevated to "seniority" after Diocletian died soon after at York in 306, was an agent of its crashing. With the defeat of Licinius, ruler of the east, in 324, Constantine was master of the whole Roman Empire. Constantine gave the Roman Empire a new capital city by turning Byzantium into Constantinople; he gave it a new state religion by adopting Christianity as his own. And he took the decisive steps to both in 324. Where does this careful calculation of a statesman end and the insight of a poet begin with this uneducated soldier who could not speak to Christian bishops in their own language? The historians cannot answer.

Ever since it existed at all, the Roman Empire was more of a juxtaposition than an amalgam of two dominant societies, the Roman and the Greek. Romans despised Greeks for lack of character, Greeks despised Romans for lack of culture-neither, of course, fairly. But in Constantine's time the Greeks had a case; for Roman literature, though not far from a period of revival, was almost dead, while Greek intellectuals were very active indeed. The "Eastern Part" deserved to have the capital of a united empire and would need one if it split and we can credit Constantine with a notion that split was likely. In a way a split was part of Diocletian's scheme. He had chosen the east as his "sphere of influence" and operated his rule from the base of Nicomedia, an attractive town near Byzantium on the Asiatic side.

Constantine is a man to baffle the historians, he chose Byzantium an old Greek city and gave her his name Constantinople (The city of Constantine in Greek). The year when he started rebuilding Constantinople was the year when he summoned the first Ecumenical Council of the Church, the Council of Nicaea, over which he acted as presiding officer. In his opening speech, Constantine explained that he looked forward to a day when (by persuasion rather than persecution as is the case) his whole empire would accept the Christian revelation. He was disappointed rather than disillusioned to discover that Christians might differ on what Christianity was.

Historians have often remarked that Constantine's Christianity was very much a shot in the dark. When he proclaimed his adherence to it, less than ten per cent of the Roman Empire was Christian, and a politically unimportant ten per cent at that Constantinople soon had a quarter of a million inhabitants (with 10,000 beggars). It was not quite a "clean" Christian town, but it was a town in which churches vastly outnumbered temples. A town where men discussed Christianity as they might now discuss the prospects of the local football team. As Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa, put it when visiting Constantinople about 370: "If you desire a man to change a piece of silver, he informs you wherein the Son differs from the Father; if you ask the price of a loaf, you are told by way of reply that the Son is inferior to the Father; and if you inquire whether the bath is ready, the answer is that the Son was made out of nothing."

Constantine's disappointments in 324 were especially aroused by disputes of the Asian faction about the relationship of the Father and the Son; but Theodosius had virtually persecuted it out of existence at the end of the fourth century. In the next century, however, a much more pertinacious dispute arose, on the right mixture of the Human and the Divine in the Person of Jesus Christ. The Nestorians laid stress on the Human, but were soon eliminated, surviving only- to this day- as a refugee minority in Mesopotamia outside the empire; the Monophysites laid stress on the Divine.

The serious theological battles were between them and the Orthodox, who kept - and keep - that middle position defined in the Athanasian Creed as "neither dividing the persons nor confounding the substance". Loyalties were beginning to express themselves in religious sectarianism. The south-eastern parts of the Constantinople Empire-Syria, Palestine and Egypt-tended to be Monophysite, Asia Minor and the Balkans Orthodox, while the Pope with the west behind him was unswervingly Orthodox too. Three Ecumenical Councils set the stage of theological warfare.

Ephesus I in 431 condemned Nestorius, though it was Cyril, patriarch of Alexandria, a near-Monophysite, who delivered the coup de grace. Ephesus II in 449 gave victory to the Monophysites, but in 451 Orthodoxy won in Chalcedon. The emperor in Constantinople was in a perpetual dilemma. If he favored Monophysites, he would keep the "south-east" intimidate the patriarch on the spot and through him hope to keep something of Asia Minor and the Balkans; but he would certainly lose the Pope and the west. If he moved towards the Pope's position, there was a certainly of hostility from the :"south-east".

Theologians, including Justinian searched for a formula which would evade the dilemma, but they never found one. Indeed, an Orthodox government at Constantinople would pass for "colonialist" at Alexandria; and the Monophysite historian, Zachariah of Mytilene, can write of Roman troops intervening in an Alexandrian riot as though they were occupied army in an foreign country. It is not surprising, therefore, that it was Syria, Palestine and Egypt that fell in the seventh century like ripe fruit to the Moslem invaders.

It was not so huge a disaster for Constantinople to lose them. Again the battles were lost, but the war in a sense, was won. For what was left was a compact and viable political unit. Its administration was centralized, perhaps overcentralized, in Constantinople which dwarfs all other towns, the Vienna, one might call it, of the Byzantine Empire. Doctrinal argument did not cease, but doctrinal warfare inside the state was virtually over through fanaticism and persecution. Therefore we can call Constantine in truth the creator of the "Byzantine Empire".

The fall of Constantinople on May 29th 1453 was the tragic close of a long and glorious history. All but a handful of the Christian churches were in time turned into mosques, but the old schism between Greeks and Latins went on and is not healed even today.

Constantine the Great had founded a Christian Empire in which Church and State were but two aspects of one thing, with on the whole the imperial power dominating the ecclesiastical, while still being very sensitive to its influence. It had for centuries nursed and propagated the developing Christian faith. Facing the East, Byzantium had borne the brunt of the Arab and Turkish onslaughts and shielded the rest of Europe

But the most vivid witness today to the greatness of Byzantium is the Christian faith of its Orthodox descendants, which lives on after centuries of oppression to be still an inspiration to the world.