Constantine and Christian Rome
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Constantine I, the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity, changed the legal and physical shape of the western world in little more than a decade. Raised as the son of the junior emperor Constantius Chlorus, he emerged from the civil wars of the Tetrarchy after defeating Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge in 312, a victory his supporters described with a vision of a cross in the sky. In 313 he and his eastern colleague Licinius issued the edict of Milan, which ended the persecution of Christians and restored confiscated property, only ten years after the persecution of Diocletian had begun. Constantine granted the church privileges, funded basilicas and intervened in doctrine, presiding at the council of Nicaea in 325, which defined the creed against the Arians. In 330 he refounded Byzantion as Constantinople, a new capital on the Bosphorus endowed with a senate, a hippodrome and churches, and he moved the imperial court there. Old temples continued in use for a generation and paganism remained legal, but the centre of gravity had shifted. The emperor became patron and legislator of the faith, and the pattern of a Christian empire, with emperors calling councils and bishops advising courts, was set for the next eight hundred years.