Source: TW
The historiography of Constantine and his dynasty has a sort of mythology about it that he forcefully set the empire on a new path and rejuvenated it, that he was a caudillo who appeared at a time of crisis. But on closer examination a different image comes into focus.
If you were tasked with describing his dynasty in one word, it would have to be “byzantine.” In two words, “eunuch intrigue.” Constantine himself was a very capable man. But a rather un-principled one, and strangely impressionable.
There were two major factors differentiating him from prior rulers: a bloating of the court and bureaucracy, and the integration of christianity’s network of NGO’s into the governing apparatus.
The court bloating is easily explicable, it’s a pattern that repeats in history over and over, always in reaction to the breakdown of trust between the sovereign and intermediary admins like governors or vassals. Happened to late royal france, is happening to america right now. The problem is these systems tend to appear under a strongman who can manage them, but quickly take on a life of their own that strangles future sovereigns in the cradle.+++(5)+++ Louis XIV vs XVI, FDR vs Jimmy Carter.
The network of spies and advisors Constantine set up would go on, as soon as he died, to massacre his entire family save for three sons and two nephews. Those three sons would then dispatch each other over the next decades in a similar paranoia. The sole survivor, Constantius II, would spend his last years tortured with regret, surrounded by predatory flatterers and informers. When civil war finally broke out with his cousin Julian, he simply dropped dead of stress-induced illness before ever meeting Julian in battle.
Constantine completely failed to stop the late roman cycle of suspicion that saw its military hamstrung by the fact that any commander too successful against barbarians put a target on his own back.+++(5)+++ His own family would pay the price.
Julian almost stopped the cycle by dismissing most of Constantius II’s court and executing many of the slimiest of them, attempting to re-institute the more decentralized government seen in the empire’s early days where cities self-administrated and the Imperium was largely restricted to military matters. But when Julian died unexpectedly very early in his process of reforms, Constantine’s other legacy would doom this project.
Constantine patronized Christianity largely because its parallel-state network gave him a velvet glove that could reach directly into the population, not just administration, of every city in the empire.+++(4)+++ It was a brilliant network of informers and opinion-makers, a capacity the Soviet Union would use its orthodox church for much later.+++(4)+++ But just like the bloating of the court created a self-perpetuation institution, the taste of power Constantine gave the church, even if they were only lapdogs, was too much to give up.+++(4)+++ Despite Pagans making up 70% of the empire’s population, including most of its senatorial class, there would never be a single pagan emperor again in the next 1100 years of institutional continuity +++(in Byzantium)+++.
Constantine may have set up the conditions for the empire to survive another millennium, with the strategic location of constantinople being his single greatest contribution, but he did so by acceding to the late empire’s worst tendencies: intrigue, bureaucracy, centralization.+++(4)+++ The Roman system would decrepitly cling to life, swallowing its best minds and leaders, for another thousand years,+++(4)+++ but Roman identity would be slowly scrubbed from the entire Mediterranean until finally “rhomaioi” was nothing more than a word for ottoman dhimmis.
Rome needed decentralization, it needed to let its populations breathe and taste enough self-sufficiency that they would believe themselves to be worth defending. Instead the Roman Syrians and Egyptians would welcome the Muslim expansion because they were sick of Constantinople’s excessive taxation and tactless insistence on nicene christianity over monophysitism +++(“Christ is only divine, not human.”)+++.
Even in Italy itself the Romans would accept German rule simply because the aqueducts kept running and the horse races kept going. They saw no relation between these things and their own sovereignty.+++(4)+++
To me, the Constantinians are sympathetically tragic. They dutifully upheld the Roman system and it swallowed them and spit them out, destroyed their virtue and their family, because it was no longer a system for Roman benefit, rather Rome was a whale carcass to be consumed for the system’s benefit, for the petty ingratiation of the eunuchs and bishops who actually ran it while blustering soldiers fought over figurehead status.