Friends and comrades, these are our ancestral gods, whom we honour because we have received them for worship from our earliest forefathers. The commander of those arrayed against us has broken faith with the ancestral code and adopted godless belief, mistakenly acknowledging some foreign god from somewhere or other; he even shames his own army with this god’s disgraceful emblem. Trusting in him, he advances, taking up arms not against us, but first and foremost against the very gods he has offended. Now is the moment that will prove which one is mistaken in his belief: it will decide between the gods honoured by us and the gods honoured by the other party.45
On 3 July 324, at the first engagement at Hadrianopolis in Thrace (modern-day Edirne in Greece), Licinius’s hopes for that moment to weigh in his favour were royally dashed.
The two armies had taken up positions on opposite sides of the river Hebrus. For days they eyed each other sullenly. Whenever Licinius’s men caught sight of Constantine’s standard brightly bearing the sign of Christ, they broke the stillness with jeers and insults. During this strange hiatus, however, Constantine seized the initiative. He fooled his enemy into thinking that he was trying to build a bridge across the river that separated them. He even went through the charade of asking his soldiers to climb a mountain and bring down timber. Secretly, however, Constantine had worked out an alternative, shorter crossing. When his cavalry charged across it, they caught Licinius’s army completely unawares. Thrown into confusion, huge numbers of the surprised troops were brutally pursued and cut down. Some gave themselves up in surrender, while others were soundly routed. Licinius was among the latter.46
He and his surviving forces quick-marched to the coast, rushed to their ships and tried to flee to safety across the Bosporus. Constantine, however, had prepared for this moment. He ordered his eldest son Crispus to give chase; at just seventeen years old and now in charge of a two-hundred-strong naval fleet, Crispus seized on his father’s instruction. Meanwhile, Licinius’s admiral was instructed to stop the pursuit. The two fleets met in the narrow straits of the Hellespont. With a roll of the dice, Crispus chose to leave behind the bulk of his fleet and attack with his eight fastest ships. It proved to be a stroke of genius. His attack was orderly and clinical. Licinius’s larger fleet, by contrast, simply crowded out the confined waters and had no room to manoeuvre. The forest of sails and the chaos of chopping, clattering oars brought only confusion. With several of Licinius’s ships scuppered, nightfall drew the sea battle to a close. The next day a strong south wind finished off Crispus’s work: Licinius’s fleet was smashed against the rocks and thus subjected to another crushing defeat. Nonetheless, within a matter of weeks, the eastern emperor regrouped his forces. He had recruited another army from Asia. He faced his enemy once more at Chrysopolis. He was not beaten yet.
The final showdown between Licinius and Constantine took place on 18 September 324. The two emperors drew up their massive armies on a plain midway between Chrysopolis (now a suburb of Istanbul) and the town of Chalcedon. Constantine’s army was distinguished once again by its magnificent Christian standard. On the rich tapestry hanging from the crossbar, the sign of Christ (the chi-rho) gleamed with precious stones and glittering streaks of gold. The emperor knew it was vital not to underestimate the importance of this emblem. He ensured that a specially dedicated guard was responsible for it, a group of men who had been selected for their courage and physical strength. Now it was raised proudly above the massed ranks as they waited to launch their attack. Constantine took his time. He was perhaps in his tent, as was his custom, praying quietly to God, waiting and searching for a revelation. When he believed God’s will was expressed to him, so it was said, he would rush out of his tent, rouse his troops and order them to draw their swords.47
Licinius’s army charged first. Perhaps this time, when they spied their enemy’s Christian standard held aloft, they viewed it ominously and were silenced. According to Eusebius, Licinius ordered his men not to get close to it, nor even to lay eyes upon it. Indeed, when Constantine’s ranks advanced on the enemy and came under a streaming volley of javelins many of them were cut down. Miraculously, so Eusebius claimed, the standard-bearers were saved.48 Perhaps the heart and power this moment gave the men was contagious, for the confidence to win now spread like an epidemic through Constantine’s ranks. As the armies clashed on an incredible scale, the wind, the momentum and the impetus for battle were all with the legionaries of Constantine.
In the face of forceful assault, the fighting spirit had simply left Licinius’s men. The battle of Chrysopolis had turned into a massacre on an enormous scale. Over 100,000 of Licinius’s army were said to have been killed. The victory of Constantine, of Christianity, was decisive. However, there was one man who had escaped the bloodbath. Licinius slipped away from the battlefield on horseback in the company of some cavalry; as Constantine surveyed the site of the catastrophic defeat his exhausted, destroyed enemy was heading east to the imperial palace at Nicomedia, to his loyal wife and his nine-year-old child. Constantine now followed in pursuit and laid siege to the town.
If Licinius’s thoughts had drifted to saving his honour in the traditional way, by turning his sword on himself, perhaps it was the sight of his family as he collapsed at his palace that convinced him otherwise. One ancient source reveals how, during the night of his return home, Constantia persuaded her husband that instead of death it would be better to surrender to Constantine. Once she had gained Licinius’s willingness to live on, Constantia slipped out of the palace and entered her brother’s military headquarters.
For the first time in nearly ten years Constantine laid eyes on his sister again. This was the woman whom he had wed to his enemy at eighteen years old; this was the wife of the man whom, over the intervening years, Constantine had tried time and again to eliminate so that he could become sole emperor and reunite the Roman empire. Now here she stood amid dirty, exhausted soldiers and bloodied prisoners of war who were being punished ‘according to the law of war’. Licinius’s commander-in-chief was being held before execution; the captive soldiers were being forced to repent and then acknowledge Constantine’s God as the ‘true and only God’.49 In such grim circumstances it must have been hard for brother and sister to look each other in the eye. Nonetheless, Constantia steeled herself and fell on her brother’s mercy. Appealing to his Christian values of forgiveness, she begged him to spare Licinius’s life. Constantine agreed.
The imperial pageantry of the arraignments contrasted sharply with the miserable ceremony that took place the next day. Constantine, dressed in magnificent robes and now sole ruler of the entire Roman world, sat on a dais in his camp outside the city. He was surrounded by bishops and court officials. Perhaps Lactantius and Ossius were present too, exalting in the victory of their God. Slowly Licinius walked towards Constantine, his former enemies lining the long, humiliating path from the palace to the victor’s camp. It is possible that Constantia and her son had to face the ignominy of accompanying the defeated leader. When he reached Constantine, Licinius knelt before the emperor in abject supplication. He had brought with him the purple robes befitting his former office, and with bowed head he offered them up to Constantine. Perhaps Constantine added salt to the wound and asked the former emperor to convert to the Christian faith. What is more certain is Licinius’s final indignity: he hailed Constantine ‘Lord and Master, begging forgiveness for the events of the past’.50 Licinius and his family were then officially sent to live out their days in Thessaloniki and in peace.