ABSTRACT

Throughout the Middle Ages, Emperor Constantine the Great was seen as an ideal ruler. In the Orthodox Church Constantine was venerated as a saint. 1 In the western Church, no official and generally accepted cult developed, but textual source evidence in the medieval West, particularly various types of medieval chronicles, often dealt with Constantine. 2 What I will concentrate on in this contribution is how Constantine was visually represented in the western Middle Ages, particularly the late Middle Ages, and what influence this could have had on how members of different strata of medieval society perceived him. In the images presented in this chapter, I concentrate mainly on examples from Central Europe and Italy.