Byzantine Logic, Part 4: The Great Persecution?

Many, many moons ago I attempted to start this project off on what could be considered the wrong track because the only way we can learn from history is by explaining in excruciating detail how we got to Point A before we can start our journey towards Point B.  In the process I had this to say about the persecution of Christians:

There was absolutely nothing special about the persecution of Christians.

The Roman authorities saw Christianity as a potentially destabilizing force in exactly the same way it saw criminals and revolutionaries as a destabilizing force.  The only reason we’re lead to believe the stories of the Christian martyrs are special is because we have a lot of them.[1]

Having said that, I find it necessary to visit the place where that was not the case: the Great Persecution under Diocletian.

Now, if we remember the post on the tetrarchy, before Constantine the Great took over the Empire for himself there were four Emperors and, eventually, a massive struggle for dominance.  At the beginning of the Fourth Century, though, things were more or less stable.  Diocletian was based in the East and held sway as the more powerful Augustus, with Galerius holding the title of Caesar under him.  Maximian was Augustus of the West, with Constantius his Caesar.

The story goes that the first persecutions under Diocletian were directed at the Manicheans in 296.   Manichaeanism wasn’t exactly Christianity.  It was a weird combination of Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and Gnostic Christianity that was even more alien to the pagan Romans than the monotheism of Judaism and Christianity.[2]  In 299, then, there was a story that the Emperor took part in a divination ceremony, but the attempts by his haruspices[3] came to naught and the Christians were blamed.  These were, specifically, Manichaeans, who were connected largely to Persia.

In 302, though, there was a massive hubbub.  A church deacon in Caesarea named Romanus had his tongue cut out, then was strangled in one of the few martyr stories of Eusebius that doesn’t have a bunch of dodgy acts of god that save the martyr for some future torture that’s even worse. [4] There are a few different versions of the story, however.  It basically boils down to this, though: Romanus did something that got the personal attention of Diocletian.  It’s possible that Romanus insulted Diocletian personally, it’s also possible that Romanus did something to interrupt the state religious practices.

Diocletian and Galerius then argued about how best to handle things.  They consulted the Oracle at Delphi, who said that the Christians were hindering Apollo’s work.  Galerius jumped on this as an opportunity.  He urged Diocletian to persecute the Christians, which lead to the razing of the new church in Nicomedia.  A general persecution against Christians was then called and maintained by Galerius wherever his influence spread until he repealed it shortly before his death in 311.

Lactantius records that in his Edict of Toleration Galerius said, "wherefore, for this our indulgence, they ought to pray to their God for our safety, for that of the republic, and for their own, that the republic may continue uninjured on every side, and that they may be able to live securely in their homes."  Of course, this was recorded in a book called De Mortibus Persecutorium, or “On the Deaths of the Persecutors, so we can hazard a guess as to what Lactantius’s bias was in the whole thing and, therefore, how trustworthy his appraisal of Galerius was.

This, meanwhile, leads to a series of interesting side discussions.  The main theme is, of course, the question of whether or not the Great Persecution even happened.  I believe we can say it did, as without the Great Persecution the specifics of the Edict of Milan do not make too much sense.  In that document Constantine and Licinius legalized Christianity and declared a general religious tolerance in the Empire.  But it then restored property taken from Christians in a step that would have been unnecessary had they not been singled out for persecution.  Constantine also attempted to make political hay out of his resistance to the persecution when it looks like he basically did nothing to help or halt it.

However, we have to ask the question of how reliable the stories are of the Great Persecution.  There’s the minor problem of its two main chroniclers: Lactantius and Eusebius.  Let’s say for the sake of argument that I don’t trust them.  Browse through The History of the Martyrs in Palestine for a while.  If you manage to stay awake you’ll see an awful lot of torture porn and stories of martyrs surviving increasingly gruesome and sustained beatings and slow, painful deaths at the hands of their persecutors.  It’s really rather tiresome and surreal.

And we know Eusebius’s bias.  I’ve already talked about how he has two totally different stories of Constantine’s conversion to Christianity that don’t line up in any meaningful way with Lactantius’s tale.

But there’s another issue: the role of Galerius in the whole thing.  Let us consider the relationship Constantine and Galerius had for a moment.  They hated each other.  Galerius did everything short of have Constantine assassinated in an attempt to get rid of Constantine early in his career.  Constantine did not take that well.

Galerius was largely out of Constantine’s reach, however.  He was in the East, spending most of his time in Nicomedia, Antioch, or down in Egypt while Constantine was consolidating his power in Gaul and marching on Rome.  Then Galerius died in 311 while Constantine was still dealing with Maxentius.  So the only way for Constantine to possibly get his revenge on Galerius was posthumously.

So let’s say that the Christians in the East managed to make a nuisance of themselves.  Diocletian and Galerius then moved to try to get them to stop, using violence and persecution where they thought necessary.  These persecutions were, ultimately, unsuccessful.  Christianity proved itself resilient.  It’s also entirely possible that the Romans who had to carry out the persecutions weren’t particularly interested in doing so and the lack of a strong, central authority after 305 meant they didn’t have to.

Still, the laws that set off the Great Persecution stayed on the books until Galerius rescinded them in 311.  With the Edict of Milan in 313 the Christians had a struggle, a villain, and a champion.  This dovetailed nicely with Constantine’s own story, wherein he was the champion and Galerius was the villain.  Constantine and Christianity, then, were in accord on the necessity for a good story that makes the bad guys really bad, the good guys really good, and leaves a lot of inconvenient facts on the cutting room floor.

This, again, doesn’t say that there was no Great Persecution.  It does, however, say that the Great Persecution might not have been all it was cracked up to be.  The villains in the story, Diocletian and Galerius, did not have all that much to gain.  But the good guys, well, they had an entire Empire just there for the taking.

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[1]This, in turn, got me a link over at Unreasonable Faith.  That link then ended up at some random Christian apologetics blog.  On that blog, wherein the author quoted the text quoted at Unreasonable Faith without actually bothering to link to my blog, the response was this: “I couldn’t be an atheist. I’m not inconsistent enough with my beliefs. Reference this article by VorJack of Unreasonable Faith fame. He quotes Geds of the Accidental Historian[.]”

His reason?

Okay, then, might I make the same claim about the Crusades and the Inquisitions? “There was absolutely nothing special about the persecution of indigent tribes of nonbelievers, witches, or heretics. The Christian authorities saw them all as potentially destabilizing forces in exactly the same way as it saw criminals and revolutionaries as a destabililizing force. The only reason we’re lead to believe the stories of the nonbelievers, witches, and heretics’ torture and death are special is because critics of Christianity try to use them to argue against the faith.”

This is spectacularly absurd reasoning.  The persecution of Christians as part of a general overall system of persecution of any destabilizing force in the Roman Empire was not special specifically because the Romans did not single Christians out.  The Inquisition, however, did single Jews out for special treatment.  And the Crusades, well, the Crusades were not what everyone seems to think they were.  This will be a huge part of the later bits of this series, so I should be able to get a long explanation some time in 2013.  But, suffice it to say, the treatment of Christians as criminals by the Roman authorities is different than the Inquisition and the Crusades because they were three completely different things.

Also, notice the projection.  Nowhere in the original quote did I say anything about the Inquisition or the Crusades.  I do not get the impression that the author of the blog post ever bothered to read anything I have ever written.  But he just assumed that I would follow my statement with arguments X and Y and reacted accordingly.  Also, note how he completely missed the possibility that “not special” might not mean the same thing as “justifiable” or “defensible.”

[2]In case you were wondering, in 381 the Manichaeans were stripped of citizenship under Theodosius I as part of a general move against the Arians, specifically, and non-Nicene Christians in general.  At this time, by the by, the First Council at Constantinople finally established the Nicene Creed as the Christian confession of faith in the Empire and more or less established the doctrine of the Trinity, some sixty-five years after the Council of Nicaea.  For those doing the math at home, this was three and a half centuries after the death of Christ, three centuries after the writing of the Pauline Epistles, and between two and a half and three centuries after the earliest dates given for the writing of the Gospels.

[3]Guys who read entrails.

[4]There is, however, a bit where Romanus’s tongue was cut out, after which he continued to praise god and witness.  That’s a bit sketchy.

Byzantine Logic, Part 3: Constantine the Opportunist

Constantine had Rome and would soon have Maximin and Licinius out of his hair.  Maxentius was gone.  According to legend this was a providential moment guided by the appearance of a sign from the Christian God.  Reality does not seem to support the legend.  So what do we make of the data we have available?

First off, we can say without too much doubt that Constantine won the day because he was a superior general with a superior army.  He had already fought victoriously all across the Empire, from Gaul to Iconium.  He had already defeated two of Maxentius’s armies in the process of marching on Rome.  It was actually expected by most that Maxentius would wait in Rome and force Constantine to engage in siege warfare, a successful ploy against both Severus and Galerius.

Maxentius marched out of the city and met Constantine on the Via Flaminia with the Tiber at his back.  Really close to his back, from what we can piece together about the battle.  Like, so close that Constantine’s forces were able to push Maxentius’s in to the Tiber and while that was happening Maxentius’s troops simply could not make the necessary space to regroup.  Bad judgment of the terrain can be far more deadly than a hail of arrows.

Divine intervention was really unnecessary for Constantine to win.  Still, there’s nothing inherently wrong with giving credit to the divine for such things.  Especially when we’re talking about ancient societies that were totally god-crazy.  So I’ll leave that aside for the moment.

We have very little evidence that Constantine directly attributed anything to the Christian God.  This is the inscription from the Arch of Constantine, completely three years after the battle:

To the Emperor Caesar Flavius Constantinus, the greatest, pious, and blessed Augustus: because he, inspired by the divine, and by the greatness of his mind, has delivered the state from the tyrant and all of his followers at the same time, with his army and just force of arms, the Senate and People of Rome have dedicated this arch, decorated with triumphs.[1]

That “inspired by the divine” is not exactly a ringing endorsement of Christianity.

John Julius Norwich seems to have taken the more direct translation and put the “instinctu divinitatis” as “instinct with divinity.”  Still, he says that it “must have been deliberately chosen for its ambiguity.”[2]  I’m prone to agree with this, but not his further assertion that Constantine was “treading warily.”[3]  I suspect the inscription would have been intentionally chosen and intentionally vague, but not to cover any sort of Jesus-related shenanigans.

Constantine was standing at a moment of sea change in European history and all the evidence I see indicates he knew it.  I could, in fact, make an argument that he actually helped bring it about.  In fact, I think I will do exactly that.

Polytheism was drawing to a close in the Roman world.  The ancient Roman pantheon, borrowed wholesale from the Greeks, was falling by the wayside.  In its place had arisen the cult of Helios, better known as Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun, associated alternatively with Apollo or Mithras (of whom Constantine had already had a convenient vision years before, precipitating a switch of patron from Mars to .  Competing with the worshipers of Sol Invictus was another collection of monotheistic Son worshipers: the Christians.[4]

Meanwhile, the idea of the divinity of the Emperor was probably in serious trouble.  When Diocletian and Galerius started handing the title of Augustus out to anyone who happened to be in town they undoubtedly seriously de-valued the idea that there was a single, god-like Emperor.  So the Cult of Emperor might have still been on the books, but I’m prone to believe it was in trouble.

One of the grand traditions of the ancient world involved new rulers telling their subjects, “Hey, I’m in charge, everyone worship this guy now.”  Or, at the very least, they’d mint new coins that identified the god that was their specific patron.  Then they’d dedicate a few temples, throw some games in honor of said god, kiss a few babies, and get on with the business of governing or going to war or going slowly insane or what have you.

When Constantine got to Rome he dedicated a few Christian churches.  While the choice of religion might have been surprising, the action itself was not.  He then proceeded to be extremely ambiguous about what he actually believed and continued having coins minted with dedications to Sol Invictus for at least the next several years.  He also declared that there was to be no religious persecution in the Empire and ordered that any property confiscated from Christians was to be returned.  Eventually, of course, he was to call the first Christian council at Nicaea, which would set the Nicene Creed and take the first steps in deciding once and for all[5] about that whole divinity of Christ thing.

One thing that the Council of Nicaea did not do that everyone seems to think it did was settle the issue of the official Biblical canon.  This is a key point to consider.  The Council of Nicaea was three centuries removed from the life of Christ and two centuries removed from the completion of the final canonical Gospel.  There was already a major controversy (Arianism) and a schism (the Meletian schism).  Every city and church undoubtedly had its own version of Christianity, which shouldn’t be surprising given the situation today.  But there’s an extremely good chance that it was actually worse, due to the whole lack of a set Bible thing.

Oh, and plenty of people were also busy integrating the Christ story in to their own prior pagan beliefs without really worrying too much about the whole monotheism thing.  People make a big deal today about how the Jesus story looks a hell of a lot like the Mithras story (born of a virgin on December 25th, came to save the world, y’know…), then use this as an argument that Christianity absconded with the cult of Mithras.

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that a lot of people just got the two confused.  Roman religious thought was already busy merging Apollo, Helios, and Mithras in to the cult of Sol Invictus.  Why not Jesus?  The average Roman citizen was probably not a sophisticated theological thinker and undoubtedly more than willing to pass on a good story.  And if you’re planning on arguing the point, consider modern America.  George Washington probably didn’t chop down a cherry tree or throw a coin across the Delaware River.  I don’t place too much faith in stories of bigfoot or alien abductions, either.  And don’t get me started on the credulous morons who actually believe Dan Brown was writing real history in the Da Vinci Code.

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Constantine didn’t draw a particularly strong distinction between the two.  He was a brilliant military commander and a damn good politician but there’s no evidence that he was a particularly bright theologian.  There’s plenty of evidence that he was theologically ambivalent, in fact, and saw religion primarily as a means to an end.

So let’s consider, once again, Constantine’s stance on Christianity.  I’d say it’s a strong possibility we can set aside any sort of divine appearance of Jesus at the Milvian Bridge.  Further, let’s set aside for the moment the possibility of a genuine and complete conversion in the modern Christian sense, as we simply have no evidence of such a change in Constantine’s views on religion.  I have three theories about what actually happened.  I also have a fourth, bonus theory about the historical records.

The first possibility is that Constantine saw the cult of Sol Invictus and the cult of Christ as the two big powers moving forward in Roman religious thought.  He decided to try to appease both.  So he kept minting coins with Helios on them while ending the persecution of Christians and giving them official legitimacy in the eyes of the state.  This possibility, however, is a bit too…passive for Constantine.  So on to possibility two.

Constantine saw the demise of the Cult of the Emperor and the end of the old Roman pantheon, either as an actual ongoing thing or a rapidly approaching occurrence.  So he decided that if he was going to rule over a changing Empire he needed to get out ahead of it.  Thus, he conferred upon the Christian church a legitimacy it craved in exchange for Imperial control.  He then called the Council of Nicaea to make sure that this new religious construct would provide the stability the Empire sorely needed following the chaos of the Tetrarchy.[6]  The Emperor would then step aside from the whole god on Earth thing and take the position of God’s Vice-Gerent[7] on Earth.  Of course this makes Constantine out as cynical and manipulative, so let’s give him an option with the benefit of the doubt.

The third possibility is that Constantine did make a genuine commitment to the whole Christianity thing, but told Jesus he was still going to see other deities.  He was young, you know?  He wanted to sow his wild oats, see what was out there.  Besides, it was a different time.  The uptight Third Century was over and it was the wild and crazy Fourth Century.  Free love, man.

I’m prone to go with option two, perhaps with a bit of option three mixed in.  Given the evidence we have, both of the character of Constantine and his actions post-Milvian Bridge it makes the most sense.  In point of fact, we do know that Constantine was baptized in to the faith at the end of his life.  The general thought on this is that it was widely believed at the time that baptism was more of an “after” thing than a “before” and that whole “remission of sins” bit was for all the sins that the baptized person had committed prior would be forgiven while any later ones were not covered.  So the idea of a baptism late in life was a matter of practicality, especially for someone who regularly had to commit sins as part of his job (yeah, chew on that thought for a while…).  Unfortunately, it doesn’t shed any light on when Constantine actually came to believe.  But I think it lends credence to the idea that he did, as I can’t imagine him bothering to be baptized just for the sake of appearances while at death’s door.  Also, he did dedicate an awful large number of churches…

As to Eusebius…well…let’s talk about that crazy vision in the sky for a moment

Let’s assume for the moment that Eusebius didn’t just make everything up whole-cloth about the vision before the Milvian Bridge.  Further, let’s consider the fact that while in Gaul, Constantine claimed to have a vision of Apollo and Victory, which lead to his adoption of the Cult of Sol Invictus.  The vision recorded by Eusebius that’s been passed forward is of the sign of the Cross under the sun, inscribed with the words “Conquer by This.”  In another context that could be seen as a sign given by, oh, I don’t know…Apollo and Victory.  Perhaps Constantine did tell Eusebius about his vision, but conveniently moved it forward in time.  Or perhaps Eusebius knew that Constantine had claimed the earlier vision and tweaked it just a bit.  Hell, maybe he had heard of the earlier vision and genuinely thought it referred to a moment before the Milvian Bridge.

Stranger things have happened, after all.

So that’s Constantine, in all his grand confusion and contradiction.  Next time on the series that will probably never end: the Council of Nicaea.

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[1]Yeah, it’s from Wikipedia, bitches.  It’s the easiest way to get access to the actual text of the arch.  Also, the majority of the sources I’ve found seem to agree on the text, but Wiki is the most easily readable of the bunch.

One of the great things about the internets, meanwhile, is that if you do the right search you can find some crazy stuff.  Like this brilliantly loopy site about how Constantine was the first Pope.  And this other site with a whole bunch of convoluted quotes and replies to replies that is supposed to prove…um…something in response to this other site.  I mean, seriously.  Somebody who gets to the end, please tell me what you think is going on with this, especially since the last line on the page that’s a reply is, “Even those who consider themselves good Christians would be at odds with Britannica’s take on evolution.”

That reminds me: when I was in college I wrote a paper on the Maccabean Revolt.  My last line was, “Even those who consider themselves true Klingons would disagree with Wikipedia’s article about the Model T Ford.”  My professor suggested I take that out of the final version.  True story…

[2]John Julius Norwich, Byzantium: the Early Centuries (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), p 45

[3]Ibid.

[4]It’s actually entirely possible to make the argument that Zoroastrianism was the most important religion of the ancient European and Middle Eastern world.  Mithra was a Zoroastrian deity who was mostly taken whole-cloth in to the whole Sol Invictus thing.  Zoroastrianism also had a massive influence on the development of mystical Judaism and the whole balance of good and evil and spiritual forces thing seems to have made quite the impression on the early Christians.

[5]Snort.  Chuckle.  Guffaw.

[6]Snort.  Chuckle.  Guffaw.

[7]”Vice-Gerent” is a specific title held by the Byzantine Emperors and used in Islam in certain cases.  In the Byzantine sense it indicates that the Emperor is basically god’s representative on Earth and second only to the deity in the chain of command.  All things considered, it’s not exactly a big step down from the Cult of Emperor thing.

Also, as a side note, when John Julius Norwich introduced me to the term I assumed it had a similar etymology to “regent,” as the meanings are extremely similar.  Turns out that they come from different Latin roots, with “regent” indicating a ruler and “gerent” indicating a manager.  Chances are they share a closer origin somewhere further in time, but they aren’t quite as closely related as I thought.

Byzantine Logic, Part 2: Politics and Panegyrics

Constantine the Great defined the declining years of the Roman Empire and cast a long shadow over its primary successor in Byzantium.  We cannot discuss Byzantium without him.  We cannot discuss Christianity in the Roman world without him.[1]

And, just in case anyone was wondering if I was aware of this, yes, I have started the last two posts out with basically the same introduction.  The primary difference between this time and last time is that this time I will talk about Constantine the Great.

Constantine is a difficult individual to pin down.  Few rulers in European history have had more influence on the world that followed than he did.  Yet of all the European rulers of grand importance, Constantine arguably has the smallest library of useful and authoritative biography.[2]  The main problem we have with the story of Constantine is that although we have a half-dozen contemporary or near-contemporary biographers, said biographers largely focused on different things and had well-known biases, which clouds any attempt to understand the whole picture of Constantine.  Further, since the different focuses were wide-spread enough, few of the accounts we have produce enough overlap for us to iron out the inconsistencies.

The most maddening point in this, of course,[3] is in that best-known aspect of Constantine’s life: religion.  Specifically his conversion to Christianity.  For this set of stories we must go to Eusebius – which is a lot like going to Glenn Beck to ask what’s going on with gold futures – and Lactantius, a combination that is problematic in its own right.

Between the two we get three separate accounts of Constantine’s vision before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge.

The best-known account of Constantine’s moment of revelation comes from Eusebius’s Life of Constantine, a panegyric to Constantine.[4]  He mentions a vision seen in the sky of a cross above the sun with the inscription “Hoc Vince” (Conquer by This).  According to Eusebius the entire army saw the vision and Constantine swore to him an oath that it had actually happened.

According to Lactantius – who was probably in the best position to get the story from Constantine's own mouth, as he was Constantine’s son’s tutor at the time – the important moment came in a dream, where Constantine was directed to place the chi-rho on the shields of his soldiers.  In the Life of Constantine, Eusebius added that the next day Jesus hisownself showed up and told Constantine to make it in to a banner, and the labarum was created.

In Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History, meanwhile, which also mentions the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, Eusebius doesn’t mention a damn thing about Constantine’s vision.  No cross in the sky.  No dream.  No nothing.

John Julius Norwich is quite a bit kinder to Eusebius than I tend to be on this topic.  After pointing out that it’s quite impossible to believe such an impressive event as the sign Constantine and his entire army witnessed before the battle went unmentioned until Eusebius’s panegyric, Norwich gets down to the business of trying to answer an important question: if it didn’t happen, why did Constantine suddenly switch to Christianity?  More importantly, did he actually make a full conversion?  He comes up with a pretty impressive series of arguments on the topic, so I’m more than willing to allow him to take the floor for a bit.  With commentary, for the record.

There are indications that Constantine had been in a state of grave religious uncertainty since the execution of his father-in-law Maximian two years before, and was increasingly tending towards monotheism: after 310 his coins depict, in place of the old Roman deities, one god only – Helios, or as he was more generally known, Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun – of whom Constantine also claimed to have had a vision some years before, while fighting in Gaul.  Yet this faith too – by now the most popular and widespread in the entire Empire – seems to have left him unsatisfied.[5]

As far as a snapshot of an individual ripe for conversion goes, Norwich takes a pretty good picture.  To that he adds this tidbit:

Eusebius tells how, on his journey in to Italy, knowing that he was shortly to fight the most important battle of his life – that on which is whole future career would depend – he prayed fervently for some form of divine revelation.[6]

In this I’m willing to take Eusebius more-or-less at his word.  It’s one of those weird cases where even if Eusebius had a reason to lie, that which we know happened is goofy and unexplainable enough otherwise that we might as well go with it.  Seeing as how, “He was unsettled and looking desperately for answers,” seems a pretty reasonable lead-in to, “He suddenly decided to go with the whole Jesus thing.”  Of course, Eusebius ended up going with the whole Road to Damascus apologetics theater bit, which is a bit overblown, but we’ll give him his moment of glory.

Robin Lane Fox paints an overall more sordid picture of this moment in Pagans & Christians.  He points out the superstitious armies of the period wouldn’t march without the blessing of a priest and posits that none of the available pagan priests would have been willing to bless Constantine’s rebellion.  An enterprising Christian bishop, according to this theory, then showed up and said, “I’ll do it.”  And thus was history made.[7]  I have several problems with this line of argumentation.  But to explain, well, I have to explain the Tetrarchy.

In 285 the Emperor Diocletian declared Maximian his co-emperor.  This was strictly for pragmatic reasons.  The Empire was huge, unwieldy, and beginning to disintegrate from the pressure of barbarian tribes without and civil difficulties within.  The lack of communication that could move any faster than a boat at sea or horse on land added to these stresses.  Further, Emperors had a tendency to need to be at the point of crisis, which was a tough sell if the Emperor happened to be in Gaul when something bad happened in Iconium.  The solution, quite simply, was to have two emperors.

Even this solution didn’t seem to help, though.  Eight years later Diocletian added two more emperors, dividing the offices in to senior (Augustus) and junior (Caesar).  Maximian’s praetorian prefect, Constantius, was elevated to the level of Caesar and campaigned in Gaul while his son, Constantine, fought in the East under Diocletian, but was considered a prime candidate to follow in his father’s footsteps.[8]  While in Nicomedia Constantine got a first-hand look at Diocletian’s Great Persecution of the Christians.  But I shall leave persecutions and martyrs alone for now.

The main problem Constantine had was the taint of illegitimacy.  Constantius dumped Constantine’s mother Helena (who may or may not have been his wife) for Maximian’s stepdaughter Theodora upon taking his place as Caesar.  Bastard sons of junior emperors don’t have the easiest path to power, and Constantine was no exception.  It didn’t much help that upon his promotion to Augustus the other Caesar, Galerius, did his level-headed best to get Constantine killed in battle.

That’s another fun moment.  Diocletian stepped down and declared Constantius and Galerius the new co-Augusti.  Everyone thought that Constantine and Maxentius (Maximian’s son) would be declared the co-Caesars.  But Galerius managed to convince Diocletian to appoint his supporters to that position.  It was then that Galerius tried to get Constantine to conveniently impale himself on a barbarian spear.

Constantine instead managed to get leave to head West.  Constantius died in Britain, but not before declaring his son to be his successor as Augustus.  Galerius instead promoted Severus, the current Caesar, to Augustus and made Constantine Caesar.

At this point Maxentius revolted.  Maximian traveled to Gaul and offered Constantine his daughter’s hand and the title of Augustus in return for support.  Galerius, meanwhile, sent Severus against Maxentius…with an army comprised mainly of Maximian’s old troops.  This did not end well for Severus.

Galerius finally intervened fully and attempted to put an end to the whole thing.  Somehow or other it resulted in Galerius calling both Constantine and Maximian “Augustus” even after promoting Licinius to the position of Augustus of the West.  Maxentius, meanwhile, was in charge of a good chunk of Italy, including Rome itself, but had no official standing amongst the chorus of emperors.

Eventually Galerius died.  The East was unstable, Maxentius still held Rome, and the most powerful and popular individual in the Empire was Constantine, who held Gaul, Britain, and Spain.

Maxentius, meanwhile, had been making himself extremely unpopular in Italy.  One of the actions he took in an attempt to get a small but growing section of the population of Rome was to allow the Christians to elect a new leader: Eusebius.[9]  This later backfired, Maxentius kicked him out, and the Christians ended up being just as pissed at Maxentius as everyone else was.

Still, Constantine’s advisors and his people in charge of reading the signs told him that moving against Maxentius was a bad idea.  Maxentius was entrenched, controlled a much larger army than Constantine could muster, and had already held off Severus and Galerius.  Constantine decided to move anyway.

It is in this context that we can now go back to Constantine’s Damascus Road moment before the Milvian Bridge.  Norwich seems to largely ignore this larger context of Constantine’s campaign and focus on the man’s internal conflict.  Lane Fox (at least, from the most comprehensive review I’ve read, which is not the best way of interpreting an idea…but I’m going to go with it) seems to have well underestimated Constantine’s popularity and flat-out misrepresented the relative levels of legitimacy enjoyed by Constantine and Maxentius.  So I’ll propose a third path.

Constantine was an opportunist and a shameless manipulator.  His use of religion (which I’ll hit in great detail in the next post) shows that he was willing to use belief as a tool for manipulation time and time again.  He had already discarded Mars as a patron in favor of Sol Invictus for reasons that can only be seen as selfishly manipulative.  It’s not hard to imagine that he would be willing to discard Sol Invictus for Jesus if he thought that would give him an advantage.

What that advantage is, though, is open to interpretation.  When he decided to take advantage is an even bigger mystery.  Eusebius’s own Ecclesiastical History mentions nothing about a conversion moment at the Milvian Bridge.  Lactantius does, but he didn’t make his record until a couple years later.

Meanwhile, Constantine’s own actions after winning at the Milvian Bridge and taking Rome leave open to interpretation just how serious his conversion really was.  And now that I have handled the political reality, I shall leave the religious aspect for next time.  Hopefully in doing so I’ll be able to paint as complete a picture as possible.

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[1]Byzantium was, in fact, a story with much symmetry.  The first Roman Emperor to rule in Constantinople was a Constantine born of Helena.  The last Roman Emperor to rule in Constantinople was a Constantine born of Helena.  This actually freaked a lot of Byzantines out during that final siege of Mehmet.  It would end the way it began, they said.  Constantly looking for omens, the Byzantines were.  Religion and superstition go hand-in-hand more often than not, after all.

[2]The race to the bottom of that category is basically between Constantine and Alexander the Great.  The Alexandrian vulgate is slightly smaller and slightly farther removed in time, but it also comes across as being somewhat more reliable and comprehensive for reasons that I will be covering in places that are not this footnote.  Let’s just say for the sake of argument that I trust Plutarch or Arrian to have more faithfully attested to things that happened four centuries before they were born than Eusebius to tell the truth about what he ate for breakfast.

[3]And I say “of course” in a weary, “Of course it would be here,” sense, not in an, “Of course you already know this,” sense.

[4]This, in and of itself, is problematic.  Panegyrics are basically formalized eulogies, meant to be effusive in praise and not necessarily truthful.

[5]John Julius Norwich, Byzantium: the Early Centuries (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2007), p 42

[6]Ibid.

[7]At least this is what I’ve been told.  Again, I didn’t actually read much of the book.  (Fixed.  Thanks, Colleen.)

[8]There’s a weird interplay between meritocracy and hereditary rule in Rome and Byzantium.  Hopefully I’ll be able to get in to it more fully later.  Suffice it to say that the Empire was a hereditary dictatorship when a family was established and a meritocracy based on acclamation by the army when one wasn’t.  And sometimes it was just a place where the army got worked up in to a lather and put someone on the throne for the hell of it.  Honestly, it’s a wonder Rome and Byzantium survived as long as they did…

[9]Not the historian.

Byzantine Logic, Part 1: Already Off Track

It is impossible to open up a discussion about the Byzantine Empire without talking about Constantinople.  It’s impossible to discuss Constantinople without talking about Constantine the Great.  And, of course, it’s impossible to discuss Constantine the Great without talking about Christianity.

Here are, in no particular order, the five things best known about Constantine the Great:

1.  He founded Constantinople.
2.  He was the first Christian Emperor.
3.  He ended the persecution of Christians.
4.  He started his move for control of the Roman Empire as the lowest of the four Emperors.
5.  He won the Battle of the Milvian Bridge after being told he’d win under the sign of the cross.

In order to properly understand these five things, though, we need to go back quite a bit farther.  Specifically to Alexander the Great’s invasion of the Levant.  But, since this is me, I’m actually going to go back to the very beginning of civilization.

Standard operating procedure for invasion and conquest in the ancient world was to assimilate a conquered culture in to an empire.  This was by no means simple, but it was still reasonably easy.  Armies were usually small and comprised of society’s elite, due to the fact that only those with money could afford the necessary equipment.  For most people, then, a foreign invasion and occupation didn’t actually change much of anything.  They were simply paying their taxes to a different ruler.

Moreover, cultural assimilation was a fairly simple thing.  If you consider ancient Mesopotamia, the various cultures in the area largely grew from a common stock.  Successive waves of imperial change didn’t really mean much at all when it came to cultural shifts.  It’s not until we see empires from different areas clashing that we really begin to see massive shifts.

By this I basically mean the Persians.[1]  The Babylonians did it to a certain extent, and Cyrus the Great probably learned a few things from them, but the Babylonians had nothing on their conquerors.

Then, of course, we have the whirlwind world tour of Alexander the Great.  He didn’t just bring conquest, he brought culture.  The post-Alexander world was Hellenized.  Alexander founded cities and colonies and convinced his new subjects that they were better off taking on a new culture.  This was largely done through religion, of all things.

Polytheistic societies are largely accepting of external gods.  If you can handle your own massive pantheon, the idea of some other pantheon is that much easier to accept.  Moreover, pantheons are largely separated in to the same categories.  There’s the chief, the one who handles war, the one who handles the hearth, the trickster, etc.  So the Greeks showed up and said, “Hey, you’ve got these gods.  They look a lot like our gods.  How’s about we combine them?”

It worked.  In most cases.

The big exception, we discover without much surprise, was ancient Israel.  The independent, monotheistic Jewish residents of that land had no truck with polytheism.  They caused a lot of trouble.  Not really for Alexander, but certainly for the Seleucids and the Ptolemys.

When the Romans came to the Levant, in fact, Israel was independent.  The Maccabean Revolt had allowed the Jewish people to cast off foreign occupation and no one really wanted to mess around with them any more.  It wasn’t until the Romans showed up that anyone could.  And even the Romans were careful with Israel.  Rome basically claimed suzerainty over Israel without claiming full sovereignty.[2]  Rome wasn’t really making that arrangement any more by the time they put Herod the Great in charge.  But there were some thorny issues with Israel.

Basically, Rome asked its subjects to do three things: pay taxes, accept the Roman pantheon, and worship the Emperor.  The Jews weren’t big fans of the first one and refused to do either of the other two.  The Roman authorities had very few options to deal with that.  They could withdraw, but that would be a major black eye.  They could try to force it, but that would require tying up a lot of resources in a tiny corner of the Empire.  So the best option was to make the Jews an exception, play up the suzerain theater aspect of the whole thing, and go on about their business.  This worked for a bit over a century.

Then two things happened: the Bar Kochba Revolt and the emergence of Christianity.

The Bar Kochba Revolt is basically completely outside of the scope of this particular project.  The emergence of Christianity, however, is kind of important.  So we shall speak no more about the former and go in to great detail about the latter.

The issue of Christianity as an offshoot of Judaism is a complicated topic at best.[3]  The Jewish folk, as we all know, wanted none of it.  Some Christian factions[4] would have been plenty happy getting rid of the Jews.  But they still wanted the deal that the Jews had with the Romans where they didn’t have to do the whole worshiping the Emperor thing.  The Romans, meanwhile, looked at the whole god the father and god the son and random indwelling spirit thing and said, “You know what this looks a lot like?  Polytheism.”[5]

And, at the very least, the Romans realized that the Christian thing didn’t have a whole hell of a lot to do with Judaism.  So they considered Christians to fall under the same set of rules that all the non-Jewish Roman subjects did.  This was a major bone of contention, since the Christians didn’t want to and the Romans didn’t give a rat’s ass what the Christians thought either way.  There was a dangerous precedence forming, after all.

Now, there is a certain amount of wild speculation here.  Quite frankly, I’m simply seeing some threads coming together, but to the best of my knowledge there is very little to no scholarship on this particular subject.  I strongly suspect that it would be rather difficult to study, as we don’t have much in the way of original source documents on the expansion of Christianity.  The most famous documents, of course, are the Pauline Epistles, but Paul’s mention of rival factions is always for the purpose of winning people over to his version of orthodoxy[6] and not for the benefit of the historian many generations removed.

The closest thing I can think of to a work that would have considered this is Robin Lane Fox’s Pagans & Christians.  Unfortunately, my knowledge of that particular book is limited to a review, an abstract, and that time I started reading it because I was fascinated by said review and abstract, but found it so tedious and boring that I could barely pick it up.  I keep thinking I should go back and try again, but then I realize that my paint hasn’t peeled yet and I should really keep an eye on that.  Also, lest any doubt remains in your mind, I harbor no intention of submitting this series as a thesis in an accredited Masters’ program…

Anyway, there’s a certain significance to the idea of getting the get out of worshiping the Emperor free card.  It has surprisingly little to do with integrity and everything to do with persecution.

Ancient religion was communal (which isn’t to say that modern religion isn’t, but the idea of having a personal relationship with Jupiter is significantly more laughable than the idea that I have a personal relationship with Barack Obama.  It’s not just that things don’t work like that, it’s that the world wasn’t designed to work that way) to an extreme.  Every city had its patron deity, every nation its pantheon, every season its particular gods.  If there was feast it meant the gods were pleased.  If there was famine it meant they were pissed.  Armies refused to march if they believed the portents indicated the gods were against them.  Religion was, in short, a big deal.

Since religion was communal, that meant that pleasing the gods was the responsibility of all people in the community.  Those who didn’t pull their own weight were asking the gods to reign down destruction on everyone.[7]  They were, by definition, enemies of the people and the state.  Those who did not participate were justifiably (given the parameters) hated by the rest of society.  They also created instability, so it was in the government’s interest to do something about it.

With the Jews it was largely possible to let them have their special dispensation and look the other way.  Israel was a tiny corner of the Empire.  Even though the Jewish people had spread, there weren’t that many of them and they weren’t interested in expansion so much as maintaining their purity as the Chosen People.  They could be left to their weird rituals, as they’d already proven themselves an adamant, troublesome lot even in the best of times, but they were a tiny and insular troublesome lot.

Christianity, however, was not interested in staying isolated.  In its expansionism, coupled with its insistence on getting preferential treatment, Christianity presented itself as a clear threat to the stability of the Roman Empire.  So the Empire treated Christians as it would any dissenting, potentially destabilizing force.  I speak, of course, of the persecution of Christians.

I’ve already gone way farther than I want to without actually getting to the starting line, so I’ll have to leave most of this until next time, especially since I’ll actually get to Constantine the Great, which will allow me to explain in excruciating detail how much I absolutely despise Eusebius.  But I can’t leave on a complete cliffhanger, so I’ll say this:

There was absolutely nothing special about the persecution of Christians.

The Roman authorities saw Christianity as a potentially destabilizing force in exactly the same way it saw criminals and revolutionaries as a destabilizing force.  The only reason we’re lead to believe the stories of the Christian martyrs are special is because we have a lot of them.  And they’re mostly torture porn, which is always a popular genre for reasons I do not and never will understand.[8]

Consider, however, the most famous story of Roman brutality that didn’t make the Bible: the story of Spartacus.  His revolt seriously threatened the stability of the Roman Republic.  When the rebels were finally brought to heel the 6000 survivors were crucified along the Appian Way in a line stretching from Rome to Capua.  The Romans did not mess around.[9]  And they really didn’t like dissent.

Now if y'all don't mind, I'm going to wrap this up and head out.  I hear The Criminal Kind is doing a show in Dallas.

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[1]Interestingly enough, although the great centers of civilization are Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus River Valley, and China, we really only see civilizations clashing on epic scales in the Middle East.  China and India were simply too isolated, and managed to develop without too much outside pressure.

Egypt, too, was protected by the Sinai Peninsula on one side and the Sahara on the other. During the early stages of empire development no one messed with Egypt, so it was able to develop fairly peacefully.  By the time there was a sufficient external pressure, Egypt’s reputation was enough to scare off most enemies.  The Hittites were the first to really threaten Egypt, but it wasn’t until the Pesians that an external force could bring Egypt to heel.  Of course, the Archaemenids swept all before them over the course of about fifty years and held their borders for over two centuries.

This makes it all the more impressive that a twenty-something general from an upstart Greek city-state managed to humiliate the Persian Empire over the course of just a few years.

[2]New word time, everyone.  Gather round!

A sovereign, as we all know (hopefully), is a ruler who has complete control over a given society.  A suzerain is an external ruler who has control over a client state’s external relations and to whom is owed a tribute and troops when necessary.  The suzerain’s client state still has theoretical autonomy within its own borders.

In the case of Israel and Rome, the Roman Empire ruled Israel as a client state, which was a fairly common arrangement in the early going for the Roman Republic, but didn’t so much happen later.  There was a Roman governmental body that, theoretically, ruled alongside a self-governing Jewish state apparatus.  That particular Jewish ruler, however, was basically a puppet.  The first Jewish king to rule in this way was Herod the Great.  The Roman Senate declared him the “King of the Jews.”

And suddenly a bunch of details in the Gospels make a hell of a lot more sense.  There’s nothing particularly earth-shattering, just a lot of stuff where it’s like, “Oh, hey, I get it now…”

[3]In case anyone’s wondering, right before I wrote that particular sentence I paused, then took a deep breath while my brain let out a long, “Fuuuuuuuuck.”  This is not an easy topic to handle quickly.

[4]They weren’t, of course, referred to as “Christians” right off the bat.  But for the sake of simplicity…

[5]This, by the by, puts a whole different spin on a lot of the early arguments over the nature of Jesus and the emerging doctrine of the Trinity.  If the focal point of the issue stops being, “How do we properly understand the nature of god?” and starts being, “How do we get around those pesky Roman laws and not get our heads chopped off?” a lot of rather esoteric arguments begin to make perfect sense.  For instance, the arguments over whether it’s necessary to adopt Jewish customs to be a proper follower of Jesus become purely secular.  And the debates over whether Jesus was a god or a man or a man-god become about trying to maintain the sheen of monotheism in the face of skeptical outside observers.

So consider this possibility for the moment.  The earliest doctrines of Christianity were formed in an attempt to do one thing: convince Rome to allow them to have the same deal as the Jews where they didn’t have to worship the Emperor.  This doesn’t negate Christianity, but it certainly makes the story more complicated.

[6]I actually owe a debt to a Presbyterian minister for this particular insight.  It basically goes like this: there were a bunch of different people with a bunch of different attitudes about what the whole Jesus thing meant.  In the early years of Christianity there was no written account and the word spread in irregular waves through various people with their own interpretations, motivations, and motivations.  Paul was the most persuasive of these and the best at arguing down dissent.

This, of course, doesn’t mean he was right.  Consider Glenn Beck’s confusingly large following…

[7]This, again, operates in contrast to modern American Christianity.  If I don’t buy in the damnation be on my own head.  Although there are times we still get the flavor of that old time religion…

[8]Seriously.  What are we up to now, Saw XIII?

[9]Crucifixion, of course, being a truly horrific form of capital punishment, the entire purpose of which was to be brutal and highly public so as to send a simple message: “Do not fuck with us.  You will not like the results."

Although the most extreme example of this probably came in the 15th Century with Vlad Tepes, better known as Vlad the Impaler, and with good cause.  In 1462 the Ottomans invaded Wallachia as part of a long-term conflict with Hungary (which, yes, I could go on at length about), only to find thousands of bodies, most of which were probably Turkish POWs, impaled on stakes along around Targoviste.  It’s said that Mehmet II was so sickened that he turned back and left the invasion to a subordinate.

This is actually somewhat hard to believe, as just nine years earlier Mehmet had conquered Constantinople and seen any number of atrocities during that invasion.  Whether the Sultan could handle it or not, the sight apparently freaked his army out and Vlad was able to win against stiff odds.

Byzantine Logic, an Introduction

So the casual observer of this blog (you know who you are) might have noticed that I’m not really posting much these days.  I’ve encountered a weird form of writer’s block.  The problem isn’t writing.  I can sit down and write a bunch of stuff, but it’s all formless crap, mostly because I find myself devolving in to random tangents and rants about stuff that I’m 99% sure no one else gives a crap about.

There’s really only one solution to this issue.  I’m shutting this blog down.

I mean, when you run out of gas you buy a new car, right?  That’s what I do.

Actually, I’ve decided to stop delaying the inevitable and start in on my multi-billion-part series on religious infighting in Byzantium.

The problem I’ve had with this project, as I’ve mentioned repeatedly, is scope.  It needs to go from Constantine I hisownself to Constantine XI Palaialogos.[1]  This period of time stretches across a period of more than 1100 years.  In their own ways, the differences between Constantine the Great’s world and Constantine XI’s world are at least as legion as the differences between Constantine XI’s world and ours.

I’m only looking at a sub-set of Byzantine life, but that sub-set is religion.  It is, quite literally, inextricable from the larger scope of Byzantine life, precisely because there has probably never in history been a more theologically-minded society.  And there has never been more focus on more subtle and nuanced[2] theological points than there was in Constantinople.  There were dozens of times in Byzantium’s history where Empire was crumbling around their heads while the people squabbled over whether Jesus was wholly god or wholly man.

It’s telling, I think, that Mehmet II took the city 557 years ago and the issue of Jesus’s divinity still hasn’t been fully settled.[3]

But in order to discuss the religious kerfuffles that ripped Byzantium apart, we must discuss the kerfuffles themselves.  That means we need to talk about monthelitism and the Monophysites.  We probably need to touch on the Nestorians.[4]  I have to talk about the iconoclasts and the iconodules.

And, of course, I have to talk about the Great Schism.  The East-West split in the Christian Church did far, far more damage to Byzantium, and the West as a whole, than even that most disastrous battle at Manzikert.  In the end, too, the entire conflict was about three things: priestly celibacy, the use of unleavened bread, and the Filioque, a single word inserted in to the Nicene Creed by the Western faction of the church.

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Certain parts of this particular series of posts worry me in ways that extend far beyond questions of scope.  The big one is that the question of Byzantium necessitates a discussion that basically boils down to East v. West in general and Muslim v. Christian in specific.  Such is the nature of the struggle to keep Constantinople in Christian hands.

To many modern American eyes this question is, sadly, cut and dry.  To most, Muslims are seen as a rapacious horde bent on the destruction of all that is good and noble and true.  There are others, who generally constitute a small but extremely vocal minority, who would like to paint this issue as being just as black-and-white, but in the opposite direction, with an evil horde of Christian Crusaders descending on a formerly peaceful Middle Eastern world and setting off the ensuing wars that have lasted a thousand years.

Both of these views are wrong.  Period.  Full stop.

The Medieval world was both more tolerant and more brutal than we can imagine.  That description applies equally to both sides.  Plunder, pillage, and rape after a successful siege were a fact of life and the religious affiliations of the people who were on the inside of the walls mattered not a whit to those on the outside.  Christians and Muslims often lived cheek to jowl, peacefully coexisting at some points and fighting violently at others, especially in place like Anatolia, Greece, and the Levant.

As the noose around Constantinople tightened the final few Emperors desperately looked for help from the West.  The math was quite simple.  The only help they could receive would come from the Catholic nations.  The only way to get that help was to heal the Schism.  Yet there were many in Constantinople who said that they would prefer submission to the lordship of a Sultan to that of a Pope.

In all honesty, I find myself hard-pressed to disagree.  But I am not here to discuss whether Constantinople was better off as part of the Christian West or Muslim East.  I am here to discuss why it fell.  And in discussing why it fell the default assumption must be that the Byzantine Empire was better off as an independent Christian Empire than as a vassal and eventual conquered territory of the Ottoman Empire.

Furthermore, I am specifically looking at what the Byzantines were talking about when they should have been shoring up their frontiers and maintaining a strong command structure.  This is the second big problem.  We know what happened because history has already been written.  We can also make judgment calls on whether something was worthwhile or not because we know that history and we can extrapolate cause and effect.

But those extrapolations and judgment calls are not the ironclad truth of the universe.  We cannot reset history to the Council of Constantinople, remove the Filioque, and say, “Okay, now what would happen?”  We cannot remove a certain treacherous Doge from the planning for the Fourth Crusade and then see how long the Byzantines manage to hold out with a unified front and an Anatolian heartland occupied by bickering, weakened Turkish tribes.  We just have to guess.

That’s what makes history so frustrating.  But it’s also what makes history so damn much fun.  There are as many what ifs in history as there are empires, people, and days in the calendar.

And the bigger the project, the more those what ifs pile atop one another.  It’s daunting, but it’s exciting.

At the very least, it’s a damn good cure for writer’s block…

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Oh, I totally forgot about part three.

What, precisely, is my goal in doing all of this?

Whenever this sort of thing gets on to the internet the concern trolls get extremely concerned.  I'm generally insulated from this sort of thing due to the fact that I have a small circulation of readers who aren't, y'know, idiots.  But I still need a thesis statement for this project.  My desire to write a proper thesis statement is exceedingly low and I feel the need to be direct.  So here we go.

The concern trolls generally pop up with one of two objections.

1.  "You're trying to destroy Christianity by pointing stuff out!  Stop offending me!"

or

2.  "Just because Christians argue about things, that doesn't mean Christianity is wrong.  And you'd see this if you just interpreted Christianity my way."

To be clear, I'm not trying to destroy Christianity.  I don't possess that kind of influence and never, ever will.  The scope of this project is actually quite limited.

There are a lot of people out there who believe that religion is an inherent force for good in the world.  The argument basically goes that religion ties us all together and, therefore, if there was no religion the world would fall apart.  If the person making that argument is doing so in favor of a wishy-washy "spirituality" and has the attitude that all religions are basically the same then it stops there.  But there are those who take it to the next step, which is to say that if everyone adopted my particular religion, then there wouldn't be any fighting, because it's all the damn infidels that are the problem.

Religion is, however, inherently entrophic.  The longer a holy book sticks around the more people pile on their own correct interpretations of it.  The more interpretations there are, the more likely people are to fight each other over them.

The story of the Byzantine Empire illustrates that beautifully.  From the Great Schism over a single word and a question of yeast to a century worth of infighting over whether or not religious icons were a good idea, the Empire illustrates time and time again that religion can be a tremendously fractious force in society.  My goal is to point that out.

Further, since the idea for this project has come about because of modern arguments about the validity of religion, that means that I have to draw parallels.  So if I see something a Byzantine Emperor, Catholic Pope, or Ottoman Sultan did that looks a lot like something that's happening today, I'll point it out.  History repeats itself, after all.  We're terrible at learning from it and correcting our actions, mostly because we either don't learn or learn the wrong lessons.

So will Christianity still stand when I'm done with this?  Almost certainly.  Will the people who most need to learn from the lessons history can offer learn anything?  Probably not.

Do I care?  Not really.

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[1]This is my least-favorite family name ever.  There are two versions: the Greek and Latin.  Neither one is particularly easy to spell and both are commonly used.  The one I use above is the Greek spelling, but I’ve tended to use the Latinized version.  Technically speaking, I should use the Greek…

[2]I originally wrote “piddling, esoteric.”  The point stands, but I decided to be charitable.

[3]Of course, growing up in Evangelical Christian circles I knew the answer: Jesus was wholly god and wholly man.  It was so very simple and obvious.  But not everyone agrees with the Evangelicals.  And since they’re using the exact same text the Byzantines were (and are, as a whole, significantly lower-quality theological thinkers), the fact is that we can have the same arguments today.  And some do.

[4]Maybe.  I’m not sure.  The Nestorians actually rose under Sassanid Persia, but the Roman Church did attempt to tell them what to do.  This was post-Constantinople but pre-Schism.  And, again, this is where this particular issue gets so damn confusing.  It was a theological conflict during the Byzantine period that had a far-reaching effect on Byzantium, but wasn’t a particular issue in Constantinople itself.  So how do I handle it, if at all?