With a critical eye aimed at earlier accounts of Constantine's life, the author aims to provide the most comprehensive, authoritative and readable account of the Roman emperor's extraordinary life.

This “knowledgeable account” of the emperor who brought Christianity to Rome “provides valuable insight into Constantine’s era” (Kirkus Reviews). “By this sign conquer.” So began the reign of Constantine. In 312 A.D. a cross appeared in the sky above his army as he marched on Rome. In answer, Constantine bade his soldiers to inscribe the cross on their shield, and so fortified, they drove their rivals into the Tiber and claimed Rome for themselves. Constantine led Christianity and its adherents out of the shadow of persecution. He united the western and eastern halves of the Roman Empire, raising a new city center in the east. When barbarian hordes consumed Rome itself, Constantinople remained as a beacon of Roman Christianity. Constantine is a fascinating survey of the life and enduring legacy of perhaps the greatest and most unjustly ignored of the Roman emperors—written by a richly gifted historian. 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 idea of a unified Christian Europe underpinned by a commitment to religious tolerance. “Successfully combines historical documents, examples of Roman art, sculpture, and coinage with the lessons of geopolitics to produce a complex biography of the Emperor Constantine.” —Publishers Weekly

Eusebius' Life of Constantine is the most important single record of Constantine, the emperor who turned the Roman Empire from prosecuting the Church to supporting it, with huge and lasting consequences for Europe and Christianity. The only English version previously available is based on a seventeenth-century Greek edition, but two new critical editions produced this century make a new English version necessary. The authors of this edition present the results of the recent scholarly debate, as well as their own researches so as to clarify the significance of Eusebius' work and introduce the student to the text and its interpretation, thus opening up the contentious issues. At face value much of what Eusebius wrote is false. This book shows how, once his partisan interpretations and rhetoric are properly understood, both Eusebius' text and the documents it contains give vital historical insights.

This is the first modern language translation of the entire text of the tenth-century Greek Book of Ceremonies (De ceremoniis) , a work compiled and edited by the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII (905-959). It preserves material from the fifth century through to the 960s. Chapters deal with diverse subjects of concern to the emperor including the role of the court, secular and ecclesiastical ceremonies, processions within the Palace and through Constantinople to its churches, the imperial tombs, embassies, banquets and dress, the role of the demes, hippodrome festivals with chariot races, imperial appointments, the hierarchy of the Byzantine administration, the equipping of expeditions, including to recover Crete from the Arabs, and the lists of ecclesiastical provinces and bishoprics.

Here is the fullest available narrative history of the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine, and a new assessment of the part Christianity played in the Roman world of the third and fourth centuries.

Peter Leithart weighs what we've been taught about Constantine and claims that in focusing on these historical mirages we have failed to notice the true significance of Constantine and Rome baptized. He reveals how beneath the surface of this contested story there lies a deeper narrative--a tectonic shift in the political theology of an empire--with far-reaching implications.

An examination of Constantine the Great's legislation and government