Constantine the Great Dies: Rome's Christian Emperor

Constantine the Great died on May 22, 337 AD, at Nicomedia (modern Izmit, Turkey), shortly after being baptized on his deathbed by the Arian bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia. He was approximately 65 years old. He had ruled the Roman Empire for 31 years, longer than any emperor since Augustus, and had transformed both the empire and Christianity in ways that neither would recover from. Born around 272 AD in Naissus (modern Nis, Serbia), Constantine was the son of Constantius Chlorus, a Roman military commander who became co-emperor under Diocletian's tetrarchy, and Helena, a woman of humble birth who later became a saint. He was raised partly as a political hostage at Diocletian's court in the east. After his father's death at York in 306, he spent eighteen years fighting a series of civil wars against rival emperors. The Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312, where he defeated Maxentius outside Rome, was the decisive engagement. Before the battle, he reportedly saw a vision of a cross in the sky with the words "In this sign, conquer." He adopted the Chi-Rho symbol, the first two letters of Christ's name in Greek, as his military standard. The Edict of Milan in 313, issued jointly with his co-emperor Licinius, granted legal toleration to all religions in the empire, ending three centuries of intermittent persecution of Christians. Constantine went further than toleration: he funded church construction, granted clergy exemption from taxes and civic duties, and intervened directly in theological disputes. He convened the Council of Nicaea in 325, the first ecumenical council, to resolve the Arian controversy over the nature of Christ. The Nicene Creed that emerged remains the foundational statement of Christian orthodoxy. He moved the capital from Rome to Byzantium, which he rebuilt and renamed Constantinople. The new capital became the seat of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire for over a thousand years, outlasting the Western Empire by nearly a millennium. Whether his conversion was sincere or politically calculated has been debated for seventeen centuries. The empire he reshaped lasted in one form or another until 1453.