Constantine the Pious
When Theodosius defeated the pretender Eugenius at the Frigidus River in 394, chroniclers hailed it as a repetition of Constantine’s watery victory over Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge.1 At the Council of Chalcedon a half-century later, Marcian and Pulcheria, the emperor and empress, were acclaimed “a new Constantine and a new Helena,”2 to which were added biblical designations, “new Paul” and “new David.”3 Justin II adopted Tiberius under the name “Tiberius Constantinus” in 574, and in the ninth century, the Patriarch Stephen addressed Basil I as a “new Constantine” just before he chided him for not imitating the original.4 Early Christians used the title “Pharaoh” as a code word for every “enemy of the faith,” so when George of Pisidia identified the Persian king as a “new Pharaoh,” he implicitly identified his adversary, the Byzantine Heraklios, as a new Constantine.5 The fact that Heraklios recovered the relic of the true cross enhanced the analogy.6 Heraklios liked the identification so much he passed it on to his son, titling him “New Constantine.”7
In all, eleven Byzantine emperors received the name Constantine, and several others added the name to embellish their given names. Descent from Constantine was considered a basis for authority, but Byzantine political theology sometimes went further, legitimizing the reigning emperor by positing a quasi-mystical identity with the original Constantine.8
New Constantines crowded the West too. Pope Adrian I proclaimed Charlemagne the “new Constantine” after he defeated the Lombards,9 and papal scribes repeated the epithet. Carolingian coins were modeled on the coins of Constantine the Great,10 and it was believed that the crown Pope Stephen V used at the coronation of Charlemagne’s son Louis in 816 was the same used by Pope Sylvester to crown Constantine five hundred years earlier. In an image inspired by the Gelasian two-sword theory, Aelred (Genealogia) paired Constantine with St. Peter himself as twin bearers of divine swords,11 while Charles the Bald was described in a ninth-century manuscript as Constantinus novus.12 As late as the thirteen century, Vincent of Beauvais held up piissimus et Christianissimus Constantinus as a mirror (Speculum) for kings.13
Frankish royal art reinforced the parallel. The triumphal arch of of Leo III in the Lateran is adorned with paintings of three figures on each side. To one side, Peter gives the papal pallium to Leo III and a standard to Charlemagne; on the left is the archetype of which the Frankish trinity is the copy – Christ himself gives keys to Pope Sylvester and bestows the labarum on Constantine.14 In the Carolingian palace at Ingelheim, a series of portraits sets Augustus, Constantine, and Theodosius beside Charles Martel, Pippin III, and Charlemagne.15 Carolingian rulers were aware there was another Christian emperor in Constantinople and took steps to neutralize Byzantine claims and buttress their own. Charlemagne arranged an architectural critique of his rival. His throne at Aachen was on the west wall, opposite the altar, a studied contrast to Byzantine palaces, where emperors reputedly set their thrones in the east, in the place of the altar.16
For a thousand years, the notion that emperors and kings were new Constantines who should model themselves on the first Christian emperor was a recurrent theme of political thought in the Latin West and Greek Byzantium. But what did it mean for a king to be a “new Constantine”? What did clerics intend and what did kings infer? Byzantine canon law urged the emperor to be “most notable in orthodoxy and piety,”17 but what did piety mean in this context? Those questions presuppose another: What did an educated person in ninth-century Byzantium or the Holy Roman Empire know about Constantine?
Many things: Some knew that Constantine was the product of a one-night stand between his horny father Constantius and a fair inn-keeper’s daughter, Helena. They knew that Constantine was the first Christian emperor, and that he converted because of a vision of the cross. They knew Constantine once suffered from elephantiasis and was healed by Pope Sylvester, and afterward baptized. They knew that in gratitude for the miraculous cure, Constantine conferred a portion of Italy to the Pope and, along with it, supremacy over the empire. They knew that Constantine convened the first ecumenical council, and that he established an explicitly Christian military and governing aristocracy, suppressing pagan worship throughout his empire. They knew Constantine as the founder of his eponymous city, they knew that Constantine’s mother Helena journeyed to Jerusalem and recovered the true cross of Jesus, and they knew that Helena made her son a bridle and a crown from the nails of the cross. Those who read Jerome’s Chronica would have learned that Constantine killed his wife Fausta and that the elderly Constantine fell into heresy and revived persecution of the church. For reasons that are not hard to discern, Jerome’s account was not popular.
Today we know that much of this common knowledge was fabricated.