Read The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 for Free Online Page A

again; but they did not remain so for long. Indeed, the story of the next decade is one of a steady deterioration in the relations between them. In 317 Constantine named his two young sons - Crispus, the fourteen-year-old child of his marriage to his first wife Minervina, and another Constantine, the infant son of the Empress Fausta, who was hardly out of his cradle - as joint Caesars of the West; simultaneously, Licinius at Nicomedia conferred the same rank on his own natural son, Licinianus; but these moves were doubtless concerted in advance and do not necessarily reflect any particular rivalry. By the following year, however, Constantine had moved his court from Sirmium to Serdica, the modern Sofia - a curious choice of capital for a ruler whose domains extended to the Straits of Gibraltar and beyond, and one which was logically justifiable only on the assumption that it was from the Eastern Empire, rather than from the Gauls or the Franks or the Donatists in North Africa, that trouble was to be expected.
    In fact, that trouble was to be largely of Constantine's making. His apologists do their best to lay the blame on Licinius for his duplicity and faithlessness as well as for his undeniably growing hostility to the Christian religion: from 320 or thereabouts he imposed a ban on all episcopal synods, expelled a large number of bishops and priests (though by no means all of them) and dismissed from his household staff all who would not sacrifice to the pagan gods. By now, however, it was becoming clear that Constantine was determined to put an end to Diocletian's disastrous division of the Empire and to rule it alone. From 320, in defiance of recent tradition, he did not even include an easterner as one of the two annually elected Consuls, naming instead himself and his younger son; in 321 both his sons were named. 1 That same year he began to gather together a huge war fleet, and to enlarge and deepen the harbour at Thessalonica in readiness for its reception.
    Licinius also began to prepare for war, and for some time the two Augusti watched each other, waiting. In the autumn of 322, however, while repelling an attack by the Sarmatians - a nomadic barbarian tribe normally inhabiting the regions north of the lower Danube - Constantine, inadvertently or otherwise, led his army into Thrace. Licinius made a violent protest, claiming that this was a deliberate infringement of his territory for purposes of reconnaissance, and an obvious prelude to a full-scale invasion; he then advanced, with a force estimated at some 170,000, up to Adrianople - the modern Edirne. When Constantine marched, he would be ready to receive him.
    It was in the last week of June 323 that the army of the West crossed the Thracian border; and on 3 July, on a broad, sloping plain just outside Adrianople, it found itself confronted by that of the East. Constantine's force was slightly the smaller of the two; but it was largely composed of hardened veterans, who had little difficulty in wearing down their comparatively inexperienced opponents. Once again Licinius fought with conspicuous courage, ordering a retreat only when some 34,000 of his men lay dead on the field. Then he withdrew to Byzantium, just as he had done nine years before. This time, however, he sought no terms; instead, he declared Constantine deposed, named his chief minister, one Marcus Martianus, as Augustus in his place, and settled down to withstand a siege.
    Constantine fox his part dug himself in - reflecting yet again, one is tempted to think, on the strategic position and superb natural defences of the little town - and waited patiently for his fleet. He had entrusted its command to his son Crispus, now a man of twenty, married and a father, with five years' campaigning experience already behind him; it consisted of some 200 thirty-oared war galleys backed up, we are told, by 2,000 transports. To defend the Hellespont, Licinius could boast a yet more
    1 This dual consulate was one