Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization

There in the dust of an army camp, with the bustle of military life swirling around him, Constantine knelt down and said a prayer that would change the course of history. As he himself would tell the story years later, he looked up at the sky and begged that a true God would reveal himself. Before his astonished eyes, a great cross of light appeared, superimposed over the sun that he had previously worshipped, bearing the inscription IN HOC SIGNO VINCES—“conquer by this sign.” Stunned by this vision, the emperor wasn’t quite sure of how to proceed, but when night fell, it was all helpfully explained in a dream. Christ himself appeared, showing the same sign, and instructed the emperor to carry it before him as divine protection. When he woke up, Constantine dutifully created new banners, replacing the traditional pagan standards with ones displaying a cross, topped with a wreath and the first two letters of Christ’s name. Carrying them confidently before them, his outnumbered troops smashed their way to a complete victory. Maxentius’s army fled back to Rome, but most of them drowned while trying to cross the old Milvian Bridge. Somewhere in the chaos, Maxentius, weighed down with armor, met a similar fate, falling into a river already choked with the dead and dying. His corpse was found the next day washed up on the shore, and Constantine proudly entered the city carrying his rival’s head on a spear. Hailed by the Senate when he entered the Forum, the emperor conspicuously refused to offer the traditional sacrifice to the pagan god of victory. The tyrant was dead, he proclaimed, and a new age had begun.

The boast was more sagacious than Constantine realized. Though it would only become apparent later, the battle of the Milvian Bridge was a major turning point in history. By wielding the cross and sword, Constantine had done more than defeat a rival—he had fused the church and the state together. It would be both a blessing and a curse to both institutions, and neither the Christian church nor the Roman Empire would ever be the same again.

Oddly enough, despite the tremendous impact he would have on Christendom, Constantine never really made a convincing Christian. He certainly never really understood his adopted religion, and it seemed at first as if he had merely admitted Christ into the pantheon of Roman gods. The images of Sol Invictus and the war god Mars Convervator continued to appear on his coins for years, and he never gave up his title of Ponttfex Maximus—chief priest of the old pagan religion. Gallons of scholarly ink have been spilled debating whether his conversion was genuine, but such speculation is beside the point. The genius of Constantine was that he saw Christianity not as the threat that Diocletian did, but rather as a means to unify, and the result of his vision that fateful day—whether genuine conversion or political opportunism—was a great sea change for the empire and the church. Christianity’s great persecution was over. From now on, the once-oppressed faith would be in the ascendancy.

The pagan Senate didn’t quite know what to make of their new conqueror. He was clearly a monotheist, but which kind was not exactly certain, so, like politicians of any era, they decided to play it safe and erect him a victory arch complete with an inscription vaguely referring to “divinity” aiding him in his just war. Perfectly pleased with this ambiguity, Constantine issued an edict of toleration in 313, legalizing Christianity, but stopping short of making it the exclusive religion of the empire. Though Christianity was an easy fit for him—his mother, Helena, was a Christian, and his own worship of the sun reserved Sunday as a holy day—he had no interest in being a missionary. The majority of his subjects were still pagan, and the last thing he wanted to do was to alienate them by forcing a strange new religion on them. Instead, he wanted to use Christianity to support his regime the way that Diocletian had used paganism. The main goal was to unite the empire under his benevolent leadership, and he wasn’t about to jeopardize that for the sake of religious zeal.