A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

this sign shall ye conquer.’ Constantine went into battle with a spear turned into a cross as his
standard, and conquered. From then on, Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire.
Christianity has naturally been grateful to Constantine ever since, and his biographer Eusebius
explains how Constantine had prayed earnestly for a sign from God, which was given in the form
of the cross. The fact remains that Constantine did not become a Christian until he was on his death
bed. And a life of betrayals, perjuries and murders - including his own son - indicate that he
remained untouched by the spirit of Christianity.
So why did Constantine decide to make Christianity the official religion of the empire? There are
several possible explanations. One is that he did indeed see a cross in some natural cloud formation
which he superstitiously took to be a ‘sign’ - we have seen that the Romans were obsessed by
omens. Another possibility is that he was influenced by his mother Helena, a British princess (or,
according to Gibbon, an innkeeper’s daughter), who at some point became a Christian and later
made a famous pilgrimage to the Holy Land and located the cross on which Jesus was crucified.
This is just possible, except that Constantine saw very little of his mother during his early manhood
- he was too busy struggling for power - and in any case, does not seem to have been the sort of
person who would be influenced by his mother’s ideas. Another possible explanation is that he was
influenced by the death - by disease - of the ‘Caesar’ Galerius, who had persuaded Diocletian to
persecute the Christians and who died believing that his illness was sent by God to punish him.
Finally - and most likely - seems the explanation that Constantine thought it would be appropriately
dramatic for the all-powerful conqueror to raise up the minority religion (only about one-tenth of
his subjects were Christians) to a position of supreme importance.
Whatever the answer, it seems unlikely that Christianity finally conquered because Constantine
became convinced of its truth. The historian Eusebius was being either naive or dishonest when he
wrote: ‘When I gaze in spirit upon this thrice-blessed soul, united with God, free of all mortal
dross, in robes gleaming like lightning and in ever-radiant diadem, speech and reason stand mute.’
For it seems likely that the empress Helena made her pilgrimage to the Holy Land in an attempt to
atone for the crimes committed by her son, while Constantine himself felt no such misgivings.
When, in 326 A.D., Constantine decided to move his capital from Rome to Byzantium, on the
Hellespont, he was, in effect, handing over Rome to the Christians. The city whose name had
become identified with materialism and violence became the city of love and salvation; Caesar
surrendered his crown to the pope. Subsequent history, as we shall see, raised the intriguing
question of which actually conquered the other.
THE END OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
Within a year of achieving respectability, in 313 A.D., the Christians were squabbling like children.
The cause of the quarrel was that one party found it impossible to forgive the other for
compromising with the Roman authorities during Diocletian’s persecutions. The Christians had
been ordered to hand over their sacred books. Some had refused and been martyred. Some had
handed over books that they claimed to be scriptures, secure in the knowledge that the police were
illiterate - one bishop handed over medical textbooks. A few had actually handed over their sacred
books for the duration of the persecution. Now these compromises became the object of rage and
contempt, and the non-compromisers wanted to see them punished and ejected from the church.
The non-compromisers called themselves Donatists (after a Bishop Donatus who held their views).
To Constantine’s mild astonishment, these advocates of love and forgiveness began to assail one
another in public. He was dragged into the quarrel himself when he ordered that confiscated church