How long did constantine the great rule

Constantine was the son of Flavius Valerius Constantius, a Roman army officer, and his consort, Helena. His father became Caesar, the deputy emperor in the west, in CE. Constantine was sent east, where he rose through the ranks to become a military tribune under the emperors Diocletian and Galerius. In , Constantius was raised to the rank of Augustus, senior western emperor, and Constantine was recalled west to campaign under his father in Britannia modern Great Britain.

As emperor, Constantine enacted many administrative, financial, social, and military reforms to strengthen the empire. The government was restructured and civil and military authority separated.

A new gold coin, the solidus, was introduced to combat inflation. Constantine was the first emperor to allow Christians to worship freely, helping to unite and promote the faith. He went on to instigate the celebration of the birth of Christ we call Christmas. However his place in York's history was already very firmly sealed.

Search Search. He defeated one rival, his brother-in-law Maxentius , and gained the mantle of western Roman emperor. But of far greater import was a revelation he experienced before the battle. When he triumphed at Milvian Bridge, he attributed the victory to the god of the Christians. Regardless, in A.

Christianity emerged in the far reaches of the Roman Empire sometime around A. Attracting large crowds throughout his native Galilee in modern-day Israel , he preached a message of forgiveness, love, and renewal. Jesus was arrested on charges of blasphemy and crucified around A. The Bible tells that Jesus rose from the dead three days after his Crucifixion. Constantine assumed sole control over the empire in A.

Rome, however, was losing its luster for him. Moreover, from a military standpoint, Constantine realized it would be easier to fend off threats from the east and to protect valuable territory—and granaries—in Egypt if he moved his capital to a more defensible eastern location. He left Rome for good to build an imperial city that would glorify both his power and his faith.

Constantinople modern-day Istanbul , his capital , was dedicated in A. Previously known as Byzantium, it had been under Roman control for well over a century, but Constantine rebuilt and expanded it on a monumental scale. He tripled the size of the existing city and offered full citizenship and free bread to encourage men of rank to move there with their families.

Churches began to punctuate the skyline; Christians were welcomed, and other faiths were generally tolerated. In AD , Constantius became co-emperor with a man called Galerius. Constantine went on to legitimise his standing in the eyes of his army by defeating a Frankish invasion of Gaul.

The Frankish leaders were captured and, in an unprecedented display of savagery, their two kings were thrown to the beasts in the arena. The coup failed and Maximian committed suicide. By AD , Constantine was in control of the west and a new emperor called Licinius ruled the east.

In the meantime, Maxentius had seized control of Italy. While his advisers — and even his soothsayers — felt that Maxentius was too strongly entrenched, Constantine marched against him anyway. Maxentius had the larger army and came out of Rome to challenge Constantine at the Milvian bridge. In this system there were to be two senior emperors — Augusti — who commanded the eastern and western parts of the empire.

Each Augustus had an understudy called a Caesar, who replaced him when he died or retired. Here, for the first time, the army of Constantine carried the labarum, a banner inscribed with the superimposed Greek letters X chi and P rho. According to later texts, the Saviour himself told Constantine in a dream to construct this banner and to place the chi-rho emblem on the shields of his soldiers.

Either divine intervention or bad generalship by Maxentius gave a quick victory to Constantine. However, that monument was commissioned by the resolutely pagan senate — and is constructed mostly of materials recycled from the reigns of Hadrian and Trajan. Supreme in the west, Constantine turned his malevolent attention upon his co-emperor in the east. The two emperors had previously co-operated amiably.

That said, Constantine was now a promoter of Christianity he had earlier been a worshipper of Sol, the Unconquered Sun. As relations between the two emperors deteriorated, Licinius allegedly began to discriminate against Christians. This was either deliberate provocation, or largely fake news propagated by Constantine to legitimise his aggression in the civil war, which began in AD Both sides considered the war a struggle between the old pagan values and upsurgent Christianity. In battle after battle, though often outnumbered, the Christians carried their sacred labarum to victory.

Eventually Licinius surrendered on condition that his life be spared. Constantine agreed, but once Licinius had become a private citizen, Constantine had him arrested and executed. Constantine was now free to shape the empire however he wanted. There was much to be done.

Violent religious disagreements — often the visible face of deeper social rifts — convulsed Roman society.