The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade by Susan Wise Bauer Read Free Book Online Page A

personality was so foul that even the church historians, normally fulsome about any Christian emperor, disliked him. He managed to survive for another ten years, but in 350, at age twenty-seven, he was murdered by his own generals. 12
    Rather than throwing their support behind the remaining brother, Constantius, the generals then acclaimed a new co-emperor: an officer named Magnentius. Constantius marched west to get rid of the usurper, but it took two years of fighting before Magnentius was defeated. He killed himself rather than fall into Constantius’s hands. By 352, Constantius (like his father) was ruler of the entire empire.
    Meanwhile, of course, Constantius had been away from his eastern border; and Shapur had taken advantage of his absence to reclaim Armenia yet again. The son of Khosrov the Short had been ruling as a Roman ally; Shapur invaded, captured the king, put out his eyes, and allowed his son to ascend the throne only on the condition that he remain subject to Persian wishes. 13
    Constantius did not immediately answer this challenge. He had problems to solve, the most pressing of which was finding an heir. He had no son, so in 355 he appointed his surviving cousin Julian to be Caesar and heir. Julian, now twenty-three, had been squirreled away in Asia Minor, being carefully trained in Christianity by the tutor Mardonius.
    Constantius preferred to reside in Constantinople, so he put Julian in charge of affairs on the western side of the empire. Here, the young man campaigned so successfully on the Rhine front that the army became his enthusiastic supporter; when he reduced taxation in the west, the people loved him too.
    While Julian’s popularity grew, Constantius’s waned. Like his father, Constantius was a Christian; unlike his father, he was supportive of Arianism, now officially a heresy. In the same year that he appointed Julian as his Caesar, Constantius wielded his imperial authority to get rid of the bishop of Rome, an anti-Arian churchman named Liberius who disapproved of Constantius’s beliefs. In Liberius’s place, he appointed a bishop of his own choosing.
    This was a serious matter, as the bishop of Rome was probably the most influential priest in the entire Christian church. The bishops of Rome considered themselves the spiritual heirs of the apostle Peter, and they considered Peter to be the founder of the Christian church. For some decades already, the bishop of Rome had claimed the right to make decisions that were binding on the bishops of other cities. *
    This privilege was far from unchallenged; the bishops of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, all cities that could boast a Christian community as old as the Christian community in Rome, resented the assumption that Rome was the center of the Christian world. Nevertheless, all of the bishops could agree that Constantius ought not to appoint and remove any bishop at will. Constantius, paying no attention to their objections, called a church council of his own in 359 and announced at it that Arian Christology was now orthodox. Neither Roman bishop—either the deposed one or the newly appointed one—was invited.
    None of the churchmen were pleased with this high-handedness, which seems to have stemmed from real theological conviction (certainly Constantius reaped no political benefits by meddling in church affairs in this way). Constantius fell into disfavor, particularly with churchmen in the western half of the empire, where anti-Arian sentiment was strongest. So when Constantius, alarmed by Julian’s swelling popularity, demanded that Julian in the west reduce his armed force by sending some of his troops eastward, Julian banked on his cousin’s growing unpopularity in the west and his own stellar reputation and refused. The army on the Rhine, backing him up, elevated him to the post of co-emperor.
    This put the empire back under two emperors, a situation that neither man found bearable. But Julian was not anxious to launch an