(upbeat piano music) - How do you do?

It's very good to be with you again today.

You'll remember that we've talked already about the reorganization of the empire by the Emperor Diocletian the Great at the end of the third century after Christ.

Now, Diocletian, in the process of this reorganization, divided the empire for practical administrative purposes into four prefectures, or subdivisions if you like, each one under a junior or a senior emperor.

The two senior emperors were called Augusti, and the two junior emperors were the Caesars.

And a senior emperor, Diocletian himself, sat at Nicomedia here across the Propontis.

A senior emperor sat again at Mediolanum, or modern Milan here in Northern Italy.

A junior emperor had his capital at Sirmium here on the Save River.

And a fourth junior emperor controlled the key area of the West along the Rhine River, Britain, with its open coastline to attack by pirates from the Saxon and the Frisian, and the Frankish coast, with a capital here at Trier, ancient Treveri.

Now, in 274 AD, approximately, one always has to say circa, approximately about these dates, Constantine was born to be the first Christian emperor of the Roman Empire, on his deathbed, by the way.

He was baptized as he lay dying in 337 AD.

The first Christian emperor of the West born to one of the Caesars, later an Augustus, they advanced in rank, whose name was Constantius Chlorus.

Now, Constantius Chlorus was a nobleman from what was called in those days Dardania, what would be today modern central Yugoslavia, Southern Bulgaria, that area just north here of ancient Macedonia and Thrace up in here.

Presumably and traditionally, Constantius Chlorus' mother was the niece of the emperor Claudius Gothicus.

Now whether this is true or not, we're not sure.

It was claimed later by the line of Constantine to give them, shall we say, the social prestige, which went with imperial descent after Constantine became emperor.

But at any rate, we may accept that Constantius Chlorus, one of the four emperors holding the West, was of high birth, an important factor, of course, in the ancient world.

Strangely, Constantine's mother was a woman of very humble birth.

Her name was Helena, and she may, or she may not have been a Christian.

Tradition says she was a Christian.

If so, this, of course, would be very important indeed in the development of Constantine's own consciousness of the Christian church within the empire and its importance.

We don't know this.

It is again, like the niece of Claudius Gothicus, one of the great legends out of the ancient past.

She came from Bithynia, which is this province over here, lying right along your Black Sea coast from a little city called Drepanon in Bithynia.

A mother of humble birth, probably not a wife, a morganatic wife, a perfectly legal and moral position in the ancient world, a concubina, a concubine of Constantius Chlorus.

And Constantine, to be Constantine the Great, was born of this union, as I say, in 274 AD.

Now we know that, as a young man, he was taken to the court of Diocletian at Nicomedia and served on the Persian front against the always-present Persian threat and the ever-present Persian wars during the last years of Diocletian's reign and after Diocletian retired, as he always had planned to do, and was succeeded by Galerius, who became the senior emperor in the East for the capital at Nicomedia.

Now Galerius was profoundly a pagan, a heathen.

It is Galerius who institutes the last Great Persecution, the persecution of 303, and Nicomedia, when they burned the cathedral in Nicomedia.

And one can imagine that the young officer Constantine was standing there with thoughts of his own, watching the burning of the cathedral and the fest of the terrible persecutions.

Obviously, the court of Galerius was no place for a pretender, if you wish, the son of the Augustus in the West, because as soon as Diocletian retired, his wonderful plan of the four empires, the four sections, broke up into a civil war, which was to last until 323 AD, just two years before the great Christian Council of Nicaea.

Constantine fled, fled to the West and took refuge with his father at Trier, and with his father marched north into Britain with headquarters out of Eboracum, York.

And there, they carried out a campaign from Eboracum from the modern city of York.

I cannot tell you how the later Saxons developed York out of Eboracum.

Now this remains a mystery to me, but this is what ancient York was called: Eboracum.

They marched north from Eboracum, north of the wall, in rather a vicious campaign against the Scots and the Picts.

The ancestors of many of us here in South Carolina were raiding down across the wall.

They drove the Scots and Picts back.

And then in 306, Constantius Chlorus died at York of natural causes, and his troops, the legions of Britain by this time chiefly British or German in makeup.

Remember, this was an international empire.

The troops in Britain, Gallic and British and German troops, proclaimed the young Prince Constantine Emperor Augustus, proclaimed him Augustus in York, the second great cathedral city of England today.

And he marched south through Britain down into Gaul to make his headquarters at Trier, where his father had made his headquarters before him.

I think one of the vignettes out of this time that I find most fascinating is that the general who led the drive, shall we call it, to elevate the young prince to the imperial post was an Alemannic, a German king.

Name was Chrocus.

And Chrocus, a German king become Roman general, is the leading force in the elevation of young Constantine to the purple.

Now remember there were four emperors.

Diocletian had retired, but in Rome was Maxentius, an ardent pagan.

In Sirmium on the Save River was Licinius, or possibly his name was Licinian.

And in Nicomedia and the East was probably one of the most vicious characters the ancient world produced, one Maximin Daza or Maximin Daia.

They had inherited the four sections of the empire.

Constantine and his father before him, Constantius Chlorus, reached across to Sirmium, to Licinian, and Maximin Daia reached across to Maxentius in Rome and Milan.

And Maximin Daia and Maxentius were pagan, and Constantine and Licinius, well, I don't quite know what they were by this time.

Constantius Chlorus apparently was an ethical Monotheist.

He was not a Christian.

He believed in the Summus Deus, the one god above all gods.

This was a beginning movement during that time; this movement taught what might be called henotheism rather than monotheism.

It was one god above all other gods, not one god alone, which is what henotheism is.

And apparently Constantius Chlorus had progressively become an henotheist, an ethical henotheist.

He believed in one supreme god and also believed that all men should have the right to worship the gods whom they wish to worship; that this was the inalienable right of all men to have their own gods.

Now remember his wife Helena might have been a Christian.

We do know that Constantius Chlorus would not obey, or did not obey, the persecution order, the edict which went out from Galerius in 303 to persecute the Christian.

He just didn't do it.

And so one may guess that Constantine himself had been brought up in a household of people tending toward a high ethical henotheism or a monotheism, the worship of one god above all or even one god.

He himself worshiped Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun, as the one god, the symbol of the one god at this time, at any rate.

And so it is as an ethical henotheist or an ethical monotheist that Constantine marches south in 311 to contest the empire.

Now one can hardly call him a Christian even at this time in his personal ethical tendencies or even later, for that matter.

While he was briefly governor in Gaul, for example, he fed captive German chieftains to the beasts in the amphitheaters and sacrificed thousands of their followers.

He even shocked pagan feelings by it.

A very ruthless man.

But remember that Maxentius was a heathen, a pagan.

Maximin Daia, or Daza, was a vicious heathen.

He carried out the last and most terrible of the persecutions.

And it's only in 311 that Galerius, on his deathbed, just before he disappeared from the political scene, issued his famous Edict of Toleration, which gave Christians, presumably through most of the empire, the right to worship their god, even if not the right to be an independent and free religion, as of course they wish to be.

So it's this picture of a confused world, an ethically confused world, a religiously confused world that we see as young Constantine marches down with some 40,000 men, the Gallic, the German, and the British legions.

These are the blue-eyed peoples of the north.

These are not Italian legions.

They were Roman legions, of course.

They're part of the empire.

But by this time their personnel was entirely Northern, not Mediterranean, are probably almost entirely Northern.

We have some slides here, which I think are rather good to show you the sort of troops which Constantine and his opponents had at this time.

Here is a detail, a picture from your Triumphal Arch of Orange in Southern France dated about 25 AD, a battle of Roman soldiers against, in this case, barbarians.

They were fighting the Celtiberians of the south, down across the Pyrenees.

Here is the triumphal column of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius in the second century AD.

That's very good.

That has excellent detail of your legions marching.

You can see the loricated plate, the oblong scuta shields, or scutum if you wish the singular, the pilum, the heavy javelins, the short sword of the legions on the march.

Here is from a sarcophagus of around 175 AD, a cavalry combat probably against, presumably against barbarians, but it shows you Roman cavalry charging with a longer spatha sword against your barbarian forces fighting on foot, which most of your northern barbarians did.

And here is a cavalry parade from the column of the Emperor Antoninus Pius at the end of the second century.

Again, very good detail of the loricated plate.

The stirrupless cavalry.

Remember that stirrups were not invented, or didn't come to the Mediterranean world, before the end of the fourth century after Christ.

They probably originated somewhere up on the steppes in Central Asia or South Russia and slowly were adopted or adapted by Roman cavalry to their use, thus making a true cavalry.

Here is a Roman cavalry soldier, stirrupless, the round parma of the cavalry, the longest sword, the spatha, probably an officer from his breastplate, mounted on your small Roman horse.

The Roman horse had yet to develop into the great war horse of the Persians.

They got stud from the Persian stallions and finally developed the Roman cavalry from that, the true horse cavalry.

And here is an excellent picture of your light horseman, a Parthian horse archer with a recurve bow riding stirrupless again on his little tarpan pony, giving you a picture generally of what your soldiers look like at this time.

So with 40,000 men, Constantine marched south, and somewhere between the Colmar Pocket and Saxa Rubra, the Milvian Bridge on the Tiber River, he saw his famous vision.

Now this is the vision.

We don't quite know what it was actually.

He apparently was in the passes of the Alps, and there he saw a cross in the sky.

Now his troops saw it too.

There is no reason to doubt that Constantine saw something.

Nazarius, a pagan writer, in 321 records that he did.

Lactantius, one of the great patristic fathers, records in 314 that he did; this is in 312.

He himself, Constantine himself, just before his death, told the great church historian and archbishop Eusebius, who wrote the "Vita Constantini," the "Life of Constantine," that he had seen this and that he had a dream before the battle that Christ or an angel appeared to him with this labarum, as it's called: this Chi-Rho Christos, the first two letters of the Greek word for Christ, Chi and Rho, Christos.

And under this, the words Hoc Vince, which later, of course, was developed into In Hoc Signo Vinces, in this sign, you conquer.

He told Eusebius Hoc Vince, apparently, in this sign conquer, the imperative.

He adopted it for his standard.

Now this is the labarum, the great fighting standard, the gold Chi-Rho, possibly with a crown and a cross above it on a purple field, which you see carried into battle by all your Byzantine Eastern Roman emperors from this time on, and by your Western Roman emperors too, while the West still remained part of the empire.

This is the Christian labarum, the Christian standard of the Roman armies, the great fighting battle standard which was carried only when the emperor took the field.

And it starts at this time.

As I say, it could have been a halo.

The British climber Whymper, in 1865, when he climbed the Matterhorn and lost three comrades in the process, on the way down saw three crosses in the sky, one for each one of his dead companions.

This, of course, is the halo.

It's been seen since refracted sun's rays through a snow cloud, ice crystals, an ice crystal cloud.

You see it in Arctic areas; you see it in mountain areas.

And we think probably that's what Constantine saw, but remember this is an ancient man.

And remember that he was highly strung, waiting for the major battle of his career.

He marched down, and he met Maxentius, and Maxentius went and consulted before the battle the Sibylline Books at Rome, the ancient pagan prophecies of Rome.

And Constantine defeated him, outflanked him with an inferior force.

His Gallic cavalry drove the Numidian cavalry, the African cavalry of Maxentius, in flight.

And Maxentius tried to retreat over the Tiber back into Rome across the Milvian Bridge, a narrow bridge, and the bridge collapsed, and Maxentius and most of his army perished.

Well, now Constantine had called upon the god of the Christians, and the god of the Christians had answered.

Instinctu divinitas, by the virtue of god, under the aegis of the Christian god, he'd won the battle.

It is to discipline his life from this time on.

Now the civil war is to last till 321.

Now, steering Constantine's career, the Christianity comes into its own.

Now, steering Constantine's career that he moves his capital, his strategic capital, from Rome over to Byzantium, one of the most important moves in human history, if you wish.

Remember, the great enemies of the empire lay over here to the east and north, and any emperor who guarded his frontiers properly had to guard them from a strategic position.

This is a strategic position.

It also strangely becomes a Christian decision for the simple reason that when Constantinople replaced Byzantium, when they renamed Byzantium Constantinople, the city of Constantine, it comes into the Roman Empire really as a Christian city.

Ancient Rome is still a pagan city.

It remains a pagan city into the next 200 years.

Although the Bishop of Rome sits there, Rome and Athens, Antioch remain strongholds of heathenism.

After all, the old heathen gods had brought about the conquest of the world at the hands of Rome.

And so this city remains a heathen city down for the next 100 years, certainly one of the centers of heathenism in the empire.

Also, it is not strategic.

From Rome, without a decent port, you cannot watch the Alpine passes.

You can't watch the Danube Frontier.

You cannot watch the key Black Sea, the ever-present threat progressively present as your Russian peoples develop of raiders down from the north.

And you cannot watch, chief of all, your great civilized enemy to the East; the Persians were always pressing on your frontiers out here.

It was an absolute necessity for Constantine to move his capital to Constantinople, to Byzantium.

And this is one of the most strategic and great and glorious cities ever developed, which soon became a city of over a million people.

Now remember that it's about 1,000 miles from the Crimea down the Black Sea to Crete.

And for 200 miles, you can see the coast of Asia and Europe until you get here to the Dardanelles wherefore 60 miles.

That's the Hellespont, which Leander swam.

It really wasn't very much of a swim in spite of ancient mythology.

It's only three miles.

But here is the Hellespont, or the Dardanelles, all the way up here to your Propontis, the Sea of Marmara, for 140 more miles to your Bosporus, which is 16 miles long and about three-quarters of a mile across.

And the city sits on this magnificent promontory to be the great city of Constantinople, which, with its navies and its armies, watches and guards, becomes the entrepot for the culture of the East.

And if you wish the stopper in the bottle, the wall against Eastern invasion, down until its final destruction in 1453 by the Ottoman Turks, we talk about the fall of the Roman Empire, forgetting that the Eastern Roman Empire persisted until just a few years before Columbus discovered America and in its heyday had the finest armies and navies and university in the world.

Here is the Constantinople of Constantine.

He went to the ancient city of Byzantium, and about two and three-quarters miles from the Bosporus here, he threw his first wall.

That is the ancient wall of Constantine the Great, to be expanded by Theodosius the Great, later by Anastasius out to the long walls, 40 miles west of the city.

But this is the city of Constantine, built around five hills, something like the seven hills of Rome; they finally took in two more hills just to have seven hills, and it becomes the new Rome.

Traditionally, of course, the Christian church is founded by St.

Mark, apostolic foundation in, sorry, St.

Andrew in Constantinople.

We're not sure that that's true.

It's one of these legends, again, great legends of the past, that St.

Andrew founded the church in Constantinople.

He may very well have done so, but we don't know this.

But here is the city with later the great cathedral of Sancta Sophia built by Justinian, the imperial palaces, the hippodrome, the great dockyards with the dromon fleets, the great warships of the Eastern Roman Empire moved out to watch the entire Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

This is the city of Constantine, with its wall that ran all the way around the city off to the sea and eventually its wall that went here, its triple wall that guarded the city against all invaders.

The city was only taken twice: once, I'm sorry to say, by the crusaders, the so-called perverted crusade, the Fourth Crusade that took Constantinople in 1204, and again and lastly, of course, by the Ottoman Turks in 1453.

Behind its walls it sat, and as long as its walls lasted, as long as the city remained, the empire remained intact.

So Constantine is the first emperor to move the capital, the first emperor to develop the great metropolis, the great Christian metropolis of Constantinople, though he himself was christened on his deathbed.

Throughout his reign, the Christians were given greater and greater toleration.

Under his reign, the great councils were held of Arles and Nicaea, and on his deathbed, he asked for baptism, said, "Let there be no more ambiguity," dressed in the white robes of a neophyte, died after his baptism, and was buried in the church of the 12 apostles as the 13th apostle Isapostolos, Equal to the Apostles.

Thank you very much.

(upbeat piano music)