ABSTRACT
The Edict of Milan of 313 marked the beginning of Christianity’s transformation from a religio non grata into an imperial ideology. As Garth Fowden put it so well, Constantine was the first to connect the “political universalism” of Rome with the “cultural universalism” inherent in Christianity. 1 In the process, Late Antiquity was born, with its “conviction that knowledge of the One God both justifies the exercise of imperial power and makes it more effective.” 2 As Fowden saw it, Constantine’s new vision of empire lay, both chronologically and conceptually, between the ancient empires of Cyrus and Alexander on the one hand, and the early-medieval Caliphates of the Umayyads and Abbasids on the other. While Constantine was the first to test the political potential of a universalist monotheistic religion, neither he nor any of his successors would ever manage to parlay it into a true “world empire” like those of Cyrus and Alexander. Even when, against all odds, Heraclius managed to beat the Persians in 628, Roman hegemony in the East was short-lived. Within a decade the victory that Heraclius had snatched from the jaws of defeat was snatched from him by the followers of Muhammad. In the end it would be Damascus and Baghdad, rather than Constantinople, that would fulfill Constantine’s dream, mutatis mutandis, of a true “political-cultural world empire,” one whose boundaries truly rivaled – in fact exceeded – the empires of old.
