At Rome’s nadir in 260, the Persians captured the emperor (who was forced to drink molten gold, and was then gutted and stuffed with straw) while the entire East, including the unwalled town of Aelia, was lost to a short-lived Palmyran empire led by a young woman, Zenobia. But within twelve years Rome had recovered the East. At the end of the century, the emperor Diocletian successfully restored Roman power and revived the worship of the old gods. But the Christians seemed to be undermining this resurgence. In 299, Diocletian was sacrificing to the gods at a parade in Syria when some Christian soldiers made the sign of the cross, at which the pagan diviners declared that the divination had failed. When Diocletian’s palace burned down, he blamed the Christians and unleashed a vicious persecution, martyring Christians, burning their books, destroying their churches.
When Diocletian abdicated in 305, dividing the empire, Galerius, new emperor of the East, intensified the butchery of Christians by axe, roasting and mutilation. But the emperor of the West was Constantius Chlorus, a sturdy Illyrian soldier, who assumed the purple in York. Already ill, he died soon afterwards but in July 306 the British legions hailed his young son, Constantine, as emperor. It would take him fifteen years to conquer first the West and then the East, but Constantine, like King David, would change the history of the world and the fate of Jerusalem with a single decision.5
PART THREE
CHRISTIANITY
Jerusalem – it is the city of the great King.
Jesus, St Matthew, 5.35
O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets and stonest them which are sent unto thee.
Jesus, St Matthew, 23.37
Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.
Jesus, St John, 2.19
As Judaea is exalted above all other provinces so is this city exalted above all Judaea.
St Jerome, Epistles
Jerusalem is now made a place of resort from all parts of the world, and there is such a throng of pilgrims of both sexes that all temptation is here collected together.
St Jerome, Epistles
THE APOGEE OF BYZANTIUM
312–518 AD
CONSTANTINE THE GREAT: CHRIST, GOD OF VICTORY
In 312, Constantine invaded Italy and attacked his rival Maxentius just outside Rome. The night before battle, Constantine saw before him ‘in the sky the sign of a cross of light’ superimposed on the sun with the slogan: ‘By this sign you will conquer!’ So he emblazoned the shields of his soldiers with the Chi-Rho symbol, the first two letters of ‘Christ’ in Greek. The next day at the Battle of Milvian Bridge, he won the West. In this age of auguries and visions, Constantine believed he owed his power to the Christian ‘Supreme God’.
Constantine was a rough soldier, a holy visionary, a murderous autocrat and a political showman who slashed his way to power but, once at the pinnacle of human supremacy, he envisioned an empire unified under one religion, one emperor. He was a bundle of contradictions – he was bullnecked, aquiline-nosed and his paranoia often exploded in the sudden killing of friends and family. He wore his hair shoulder-length, sported gaudy bracelets and bejewelled robes, and relished the pageantry of power, the debates of philosophers and bishops and schemes of architectural beauty and religious boldness. No one knows why he embraced Christianity at that moment, though, like many brutally confident men, he adored his mother, Helena, and she was an early convert. If his personal conversion was as dramatic as Paul’s on the road to Damascus, his political embrace of Christianity was gradual. Most importantly, Christ had delivered victory in battle, and that was a language that Constantine understood: Christ the Lamb became the god of victory. Not that Constantine was in any way lamb-like himself: he soon presented himself as the Equal of the Apostles. There was nothing remarkable in his promotion of himself as a military commander with divine protection. Roman emperors, like Greek kings, always identified themselves with divine patrons. Constantine’s own father revered the Unconquered Sun, a step towards monotheism. But the choice of the Christ was not inevitable – it depended purely on Constantine’s personal whim. In 312, Manichaeanism and Mithraism were no less popular than Christianity. Constantine could just as easily have chosen one of these – and Europe might today be Mithraistic or Manichaean.*
In 313, Constantine and the Eastern emperor Licinius granted toleration and privileges to the Christians in their Edict of Milan. But it was only in 324 that Constantine, now aged fifty-one, defeated Licinius to unite the empire. He tried to impose Christian chastity across his domains and banned pagan sacrifices, sacred prostitution, religious orgies, and gladiatorial shows, replacing them with chariot-racing. That year, he moved his capital eastwards, founding his Second Rome on the site of a Greek town called Byzantium on the Bosphorus, a gateway between Europe and Asia. This soon became known as Constantinople with its own patriarch, who now joined the bishop of Rome and the patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch as the ruling powers of Christianity. The new faith suited Constantine’s new style of kingship. Christianity had from the earliest days of James, Overseer of Jerusalem, developed a hierarchy of elders (presbyteroi) and overseers / bishops (episkopoi)in charge of regional dioceses. Constantine saw that Christianity, with its hierarchy, paralleled the organization of the Roman empire: there would be one emperor, one state, one faith.
Yet he had no sooner bound his supremacy to his imperial religion than he discovered that Christianity was divided: the Gospels were vague about Jesus’ nature and his relationship to God. Was Jesus a man with some divine characteristics or God inhabiting the body of a man? Now that the Church was established, Christology became paramount, more important than life itself, for the right definition of Christ would decide whether a man would achieve salvation and enter heaven. In our secular era, the debates on nuclear disarmament or global warming are the closest equivalents in their passion and intensity. Christianity now became a mass religion in an age of fanatical faith and these questions were debated in the streets as well as in the palaces of the empire. When Arius, an Alexandrian priest who preached to huge crowds using popular jingles, argued that Jesus was subordinate to God and therefore more human than divine, this upset the many who regarded Christ as more God than man. When the local governor tried to suppress Arius, his followers rioted in Alexandria.
In 325 Constantine, infuriated and bemused by this doctrinal tumult, called the bishops to the Council of Nicaea and tried to impose his solution: that Jesus was divine and human, ‘of one substance’ with the Father. It was at Nicaea (present-day Isnik in Turkey), that Macarius, the Bishop of Aelia Capitolina (once called Jerusalem), brought the fate of his small and neglected town to Constantine’s attention. Constantine knew Aelia, probably having visited it as a boy of eight when he was in Emperor Diocletian’s entourage. Now keen to celebrate his success at Nicaea and project the sacred glory of his empire, he decided to restore the city and create what Eusebius (Bishop of Caesarea and the emperor’s biographer) called ‘The New Jerusalem built over against the one so famous of old’. Constantine commissioned a church that befitted Jerusalem as the cradle of the Good News. But the work was accelerated by the emperor’s murderous domestic troubles.