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Emperor Constantine noticed the internal discipline of the Christian Church and hoped that by encouraging Christianity he could encourage unity in the empire. Michael Grant (The Emperor Constantine) says that at the very outset, the Donatists and the Arians demolished Constantine's idea that the empire, with Christians in charge, could become a single harmonious unit.

In 313, Constantine and Licinius jointly issued the Edict of Milan, building on Galerius' Edict of Toleration but going a good deal further by granting positive advantages and privileges to the Christian community. These benefits were not intended to accrue to Gnostic Christianity, which was treated as an illegal heresy. At the behest of the Bishop of Rome, Constantine soon declared the Donatists illegal, but eventually gave them the right to exist.

As sole emperor, Constantine funded the construction of magnificent churches and paid the stipends and expenses of the Christian clergy out of imperial funds, although Christians were only a very small minority of the population. People of ambition soon realised that opportunities for advancement in imperial service were offered to those who became Christians. Emperor Constantine began the long persecution of the pagan temples, which would result in the public worship of the old gods being declared a capital crime by Emperor Theodosius in 391 CE.


Edward Gibbon (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) suggested that Constantine’s conversion of himself and his subjects to Christianity was one of the principal causes of the fall of the western Roman Empire, which ceased to exist 139 years after his death. Grant says that the most that can be legitimately said for Gibbon's thesis is that Christianisation may have accelerated the process.

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