20th Generation (Continued)
Family of St. Helena\Elaine of Colchester (32) & Aurelius Valerius Constantius Chlorus

36. Flavius Valerius Constantinius "Constantine the Great" Emperor Rome, 51G Grandfather, M. Born on 27 Feb 0280 in Naissus, Moesia. Flavius Valerius Constantinius "Constantine the Great" Emperor died in Ancyrona, near Nicomedia, Bithynia on 22 May 0337, he was 57.

byname CONSTANTINE THE GREAT, Latin in full FLAVIUS VALERIUS CONSTANTINUS the first Roman emperor to profess Christianity. He not only initiated the evolution of the empire into a Christian state but also provided the impulse for a distinctively Christian culture that prepared the way for the growth of Byzantine and Western medieval culture.
Constantine was born probably in the later AD 280s. A typical product of the military governing class of the later 3rd century, he was the son of Flavius Valerius Constantius, an army officer, and his wife (or concubine) Helena. In AD 293 his father was raised to the rank of Caesar, or deputy emperor (as Constantius I Chlorus), and was sent to serve under Augustus (emperor) Maximian in the West. In 289 Constantius had separated from Helena in order to marry a stepdaughter of Maximian, and Constantine was brought up in the Eastern Empire at the court of the senior emperor Diocletian at Nicomedia (modern Izmit, Tur.). Constantine was seen as a youth by his future panegyrist, Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, passing with Diocletian through Palestine on the way to a war in Egypt.

Career and conversion

Constantine's experience as a member of the imperial court--a Latin-speaking institution--in the Eastern provinces left a lasting imprint on him. Educated to less than the highest literary standards of the day, he was always more at home in Latin than in Greek: later in life he had the habit of delivering edifying sermons, which he would compose in Latin and pronounce in Greek from professional translations. Christianity he encountered in court circles as well as in the cities of the East; and from 303, during the great persecution of the Christians that began at the court of Diocletian at Nicomedia and was enforced with particular intensity in the eastern parts of the empire, Christianity was a major issue of public policy. It is even possible that members of Constantine's family were Christians.

In 305 the two emperors, Diocletian and Maximian, abdicated, to be succeeded by their respective deputy emperors, Galerius and Constantius. The latter were replaced by Galerius Valerius Maximinus in the East and Flavius Valerius Severus in the West, Constantine being passed over. Constantius requested his son's presence from Galerius, and Constantine made his way through the territories of the hostile Severus to join his father at Gesoriacum (modern Boulogne, Fr.). They crossed together to Britain and fought a campaign in the north before Constantius' death at Eboracum (modern York) in 306. Immediately acclaimed emperor by the army, Constantine then threw himself into a complex series of civil wars in which Maxentius, the son of Maximian, rebelled at Rome; with his father's help, Maxentius suppressed Severus, who had been proclaimed Western emperor by Galerius and who was then replaced by Licinius. When Maximian was rejected by his son, he joined Constantine in Gaul, only to betray Constantine and to be murdered or forced to commit suicide (310). Constantine, who in 307 had married Maximian's daughter Fausta as his second wife, invaded Italy in 312 and after a lightning campaign defeated his brother-in-law Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge near Rome. He then confirmed an alliance that he had already entered into with Licinius (Galerius having died in 311): Constantine became Western emperor and Licinius shared the East with his rival Maximinus. Licinius defeated Maximinus and became the sole Eastern emperor but lost territory in the Balkans to Constantine in 316. After a further period of tension, Constantine attacked Licinius in 324, routing him at Adrianople and Chrysopolis (respectively, modern Edirne and Üsküdar, Tur.) and becoming sole emperor of East and West.

Throughout his life, Constantine ascribed his success to his conversion to Christianity and the support of the Christian God. The triumphal arch erected in his honour at Rome after the defeat of Maxentius ascribed the victory to the "inspiration of the Divinity" as well as to Constantine's own genius. A statue set up at the same time showed Constantine himself holding aloft a cross and the legend "By this saving sign I have delivered your city from the tyrant and restored liberty to the Senate and people of Rome." After his victory over Licinius in 324, Constantine wrote that he had come from the farthest shores of Britain as God's chosen instrument for the suppression of impiety, and in a letter to the Persian king Shapur II he proclaimed that, aided by the divine power of God, he had come to bring peace and prosperity to all lands.

Constantine's adherence to Christianity was closely associated with his rise to power. He fought the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in the name of the Christian God, having received instructions in a dream to paint the Christian monogram () on his troops' shields. This is the account given by the Christian apologist Lactantius; a somewhat different version, offered by Eusebius, tells of a vision seen by Constantine during the campaign against Maxentius, in which the Christian sign appeared in the sky with the legend "In this sign, conquer." Despite the Emperor's own authority for the account, given late in life to Eusebius, it is in general more problematic than the other; but a religious experience on the march from Gaul is suggested also by a pagan orator, who in a speech of 310 referred to a vision of Apollo received by Constantine at a shrine in Gaul.

Yet to suggest that Constantine's conversion was "politically motivated" means little in an age in which every Greek or Roman expected that political success followed from religious piety. The civil war itself fostered religious competition, each side enlisting its divine support, and it would be thought in no way unusual that Constantine should have sought divine help for his claim for power and divine justification for his acquisition of it. What is remarkable is Constantine's subsequent development of his new religious allegiance to a strong personal commitment.

Commitment to Christianity

Shortly after the defeat of Maxentius, Constantine met Licinius at Mediolanum (modern Milan) to confirm a number of political and dynastic arrangements. A product of this meeting has become known as the Edict of Milan, which extended toleration to the Christians and restored any personal and corporate property that had been confiscated during the persecution. The extant copies of this decree are actually those posted by Licinius in the eastern parts of the empire. But Constantine went far beyond the joint policy agreed upon at Mediolanum. By 313 he had already donated to the Bishop of Rome the imperial property of the Lateran, where a new cathedral, the Basilica Constantiniana (now S. Giovanni in Laterano), soon rose. The Church of St. Sebastian was also probably begun at this time, and it was in these early years of his reign that Constantine began issuing laws conveying upon the church and its clergy fiscal and legal privileges and immunities from civic burdens. As he said in a letter of 313 to the proconsul of Africa, the Christian clergy should not be distracted by secular offices from their religious duties ". . . for when they are free to render supreme service to the Divinity, it is evident that they confer great benefit upon the affairs of state." In another such letter, directed to the Bishop of Carthage, Constantine mentioned the Spanish bishop Hosius, who was important later in the reign as his adviser and possibly--since he may well have been with Constantine in Gaul before the campaign against Maxentius--instrumental in the conversion of the Emperor.

Constantine's personal "theology" emerges with particular clarity from a remarkable series of letters, extending from 313 to the early 320s, concerning the Donatist schism in North Africa. The Donatists maintained that those priests and bishops who had once lapsed from the Christian faith could not be readmitted to the church. Constantine's chief concern was that a divided church would offend the Christian God and so bring divine vengeance upon the Roman Empire and Constantine himself. Schism, in Constantine's view, was inspired by Satan. Its partisans were acting in defiance of the clemency of Christ, for which they might expect eternal damnation at the Last Judgment. Meanwhile, it was for the righteous members of the Christian community to show patience and long-suffering. In so doing they would be imitating Christ, and their patience would be rewarded in lieu of martyrdom--for actual martyrdom was no longer open to Christians in a time of peace for the church. Throughout, Constantine had no doubt that to remove error and to propagate the true religion were both his personal duty and a proper use of the imperial position. His claim to be "bishop of those outside the church" may be construed in this light. Other such pronouncements, expressed in letters to imperial officials and to Christian clergy, demonstrate that Constantine's commitment to Christianity was firmer and less ambiguous than some have suggested. Eusebius confirmed what Constantine himself believed: that he had a special and personal relationship with the Christian God.

Constantine's second involvement in an ecclesiastical issue followed the defeat of Licinius; but the Arian heresy, with its intricate explorations of the precise nature of the Trinity that were couched in difficult Greek, was as remote from Constantine's educational background as it was from his impatient, urgent temperament. The Council of Nicaea, which opened in the early summer of 325 with an address by the Emperor, had already been preceded by a letter to the chief protagonist, Arius of Alexandria, in which Constantine stated his opinion that the dispute was fostered only by excessive leisure and academic contention, that the point at issue was trivial and could be resolved without difficulty. His optimism was not justified: neither this letter nor the Council of Nicaea itself nor the second letter, in which Constantine urged acceptance of its conclusions, was adequate to solve a dispute in which the participants were as intransigent as the theological issues were subtle. Indeed, for more than 40 years after the death of Constantine, Arianism was actually the official orthodoxy of the Eastern Empire.

The Council of Nicaea coincided almost exactly with the celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the reign of Constantine, at which, returning the compliment paid by the Emperor's attendance at their council, the bishops were honoured participants. But Constantine's visit to the West in 326, to repeat the celebrations at Rome, brought the greatest political crisis of the reign. During his absence from the East, and for reasons that remain obscure, Constantine had his eldest son, the deputy emperor Crispus, and his own wife Fausta, Crispus' stepmother, slain. Nor was the visit to Rome a success. Constantine's refusal to take part in a pagan procession offended the Romans; and when he left after a short visit, it was never to return.

Above all, Constantine's achievement was perhaps greatest in social and cultural history. It was the development, after his example, of a Christianized imperial governing class that, together with his dynastic success, most firmly entrenched the privileged position of Christianity; and it was this movement of fashion, rather than the enforcement of any program of legislation, that was the basis of the Christianization of the Roman Empire. Emerging from it in the course of the 4th century were two developments that contributed fundamentally to the nature of Byzantine and Western medieval culture: the growth of a specifically Christian, biblical culture that took its place beside the traditional Classical culture of the upper classes; and the extension of new forms of religious patronage, between the secular governing classes and bishops, Christian intellectuals and holy men. Constantine left much for his successors to do, but it was his personal choice made in 312 that determined the emergence of the Roman Empire as a Christian state. It is not hard to see why Eusebius regarded Constantine's reign as the fulfillment of divine providence--nor to concede the force of Constantine's assessment of his own role as that of the 13th Apostle.








In 0307 when Flavius Valerius Constantinius "Constantine the Great" Emperor was 26, he married Fausta Maximiana, 51G Grandmother, F, daughter of Marcus Aurelius Valerius Maximianus "Maximian" Emporer of Rome, M (-0310). Born in 0289. Fausta died in 0326, she was 37.

They had the following children:
40 i. Constantine II Emperor of, M (0317-0340)
ii. Flavius Julius Constans "Constans I" Emporer of, 51G Uncle, M. Born in 0323. Flavius Julius Constans "Constans I" Emporer of died in Gaul in 0350, he was 27.

original name FLAVIUS JULIUS CONSTANS, Roman emperor from 337 to 350.
The fourth or fifth son of Constantine the Great (reigned 306-337), Constans was proclaimed caesar by his father in 333. When Constantine died in 337, Constans and his two brothers, Constantius II and Constantine II, each adopted the title of augustus and divided the empire among themselves. Constans took control of Italy, Africa, and Illyricum (in the northwestern Balkans). In 340 Constantine II--ruler of Spain, Gaul, and Britain--invaded northern Italy but was defeated and killed by Constans' army at Aquileia. This victory gave Constans, who at the time of the battle was at Naissus, control over the entire western half of the empire. He defended his realm successfully against the Franks in 341 and two years later visited Britain. In 350 he was overthrown and killed in Gaul by the usurper Magnus Magnentius.

An ardent orthodox Christian, Constans was known as a vigorous opponent of Arianism (a doctrine that affirmed the created, finite nature of Christ) and paganism.





iii. Constantius II, 51G Uncle, M.

REFN41394

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