Book description
p>
Paul Stephenson offers a nuanced and deeply satisfying account of a
man whose cultural and spiritual renewal of the Roman Empire gave
birth to the historically crucial idea of a unified Christian Europe.
In Constantine, a seminal figure in the political and cultural history
of the West has at last found the biographer he deserves.
p>
In 312, Constantine one of four Roman emperors ruling a divided
empire marched on Rome to establish his sole control of its western
half. Having claimed the imperial capital for himself, he then
converted to Christianity and led its emergence from the shadows, its
adherents no longer persecuted. Constantine founded Constantinople on
the site of the ancient trading colony of Byzantium, a new Christian
capital set apart from Rome's pagan past. Thereafter the Christian
Roman Empire endured in the East as Byzantium, while Rome itself fell
to the barbarian hordes in AD 476. <
Constantine is a masterly survey of the life and enduring legacy of
the greatest and most unjustly ignored of the later Roman emperors
from a richly gifted young British historian.<
p>
Paul Stephenson offers a nuanced and deeply satisfying account of a
man whose cultural and spiritual renewal of the Roman Empire gave
birth to the historically crucial idea of a unified Christian Europe.
In Constantine, a seminal figure in the political and cultural history
of the West has at last found the biographer he deserves.
p>
In 312, Constantine one of four Roman emperors ruling a divided
empire marched on Rome to establish his sole control of its western
half. Having claimed the imperial capital for himself, he then
converted to Christianity and led its emergence from the shadows, its
adherents no longer persecuted. Constantine founded Constantinople on
the site of the ancient trading colony of Byzantium, a new Christian
capital set apart from Rome's pagan past. Thereafter the Christian
Roman Empire endured in the East as Byzantium, while Rome itself fell
to the barbarian hordes in AD 476. <
Constantine is a masterly survey of the life and enduring legacy of
the greatest and most unjustly ignored of the later Roman emperors
from a richly gifted young British historian.<
