Constantine

Eusebius

Eusebius (c 263 - c 339), the bishop of Caesarea, the father of church history, is a case in point. We can rely on him for significant information about the history of the early church but always cautiously. Modern objective interpretation reveals that his Life of Constantine was exaggerated and seemingly motivated by agenda. His greatest work, Church History (Historia Ecclesiae), shows clear evidence of bias as when he attributed divine vengeance as the cause of some events. But it is a gem nonetheless. Its value when it comes to understanding early church history is spectacular.

Justinian II and His Troubles

The image on the coin caused a great deal of trouble for Justinian. It may have contributed to his downfall. Noted art historian John Beckwith tells us:

At the same time, even after the first two centuries of the Christian era there had always been the seeds of opposition to images. When the Empress Constantia, stepsister of Constantine I and wife of the Emperor Licinius, asked Eusebius of Caesarea for an image of Christ, she was sharply snubbed. From the 4^th century onwards there had always been a minority among the intellectuals and the upper classes who disapproved of the cult of icons and the superstitious practices so often attached to them. Moreover in the Byzantine Empire near the eastern frontiers strong iconoclastic tendencies had been fairly constant. There is no period between the fourth and the eighth centuries in which there is not some evidence of opposition to images within the Church. (21)  

Justinian’s Ecumenical Council

During Justinian’s first reign he had called an ecumenical council together to promote certain religious policies that were not popular with the papacy. Justinian did not like restriction on the saying "Alleluia" in Lent, depicting Christ as a lamb, and a growing trend towards celibacy for priests. When Pope Sergius I refused to consent to the council’s findings, Justinian ordered him arrested. But the militia, mostly from Rome, Ravenna and elsewhere on the Italian peninsula sided with the pope.  Now, the Rhinotmetus was back in power and he demanded that the new pope, John VII, consent. He refused. This time Justinian sent his own troops to Italy to squash the militia loyal to the pope. A new pope , Constantine (not to be confused with all the emperors who had that name) travelled to Constantinople and consented to some of the emperor's demands in order to improve relations between the church and the state.

Philippicus led a popular revolt against the tyrannical unpopular Justinian and seized the city. Justinian fled but was captured and beheaded. Fearing for his son’s life, being that he was the rightful heir, Justinian’s mother sought sanctuary for him in the church of St. Mary's of Blachernae. Nonetheless the boy was dragged from the church and also beheaded. Thus ended a dynasty.

Small Greek City on the Bosporus

It was Caesar Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus Augustus, better known simply as Constantine the Great or just Constantine, who moved the capital of Rome to Byzantion, a relatively small Greek city on the Bosporus, a strait of water that connects the Black Sea with the Sea of Marmara, a strait with vital strategic and commercial shipping importance.

Byzantion was renamed Nova Roma Constantinopolitana. Even after the city fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the name stuck. It was called Konstantiniye. It wasn’t until after the demise of the Ottoman Empire that the name changed. In 1930, Turkey asked the rest of the world to call it Istanbul (which means essentially “the city.” In one form or another throughout its history, in one language or another, it was often simply called “the city.”  Even today, newspaper editors and authors of books will sometimes inserted Constantinople in parenthesis after the name Istanbul. The change of name was memorialized in a 1953 song performed by the Four Lads. Here is one verse of Istanbul (Not Constaniople):

Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That's nobody's business but the Turks

Constantine the Great

Much of what we know about Constantine, or think we know about him, comes from Eusebius of Caesarea who reported the legend of Abgar. And historians recognize that much of what Eusebius wrote about Constantine as legend, as well.

Constantine did issue an edict of tolerance for Christianity. He was not the first of the Roman emperors to do so. Galerius had done so two years earlier. But the difference was that Constantine restored confiscated property to the church. He adopted Christianity, his mother’s religion, as his own. When, exactly, and how sincerely, is something that historians debate unceasingly.

Nevertheless, he built churches. He began the process of bringing squabbling bishops together to hammer out their theological differences. In a sense he consolidated much of Christianity.  He made Christianity respectable among the ruling elite; indeed he began the process of fusing Christianity with the state, laying the seeds for Christendom.

The Macedonian Dynasty

We should not try to explore Byzantine history too much here. That is not what this book is about. But it does help to look at some individuals who are important to a study of the shroud. The year we are most interested at this point is A.D. 944, in the middle of the Macedonian Dynasty, so named because its first emperor Basil I (c. 811 – 886) was a Macedonian by birth. Basil, as the story is told by some historians, was the adopted son of Michael III (840 – 867) even though Basil was almost thirty years older than Michael who is more commonly known as Michael the Drunkard, the last emperor of Phrygian Dynasty.

According to one telling of history, Michael divorced his wife, Maria, to marry his mistress Eudokia, who would eventually marry Basil. Another version of the story is that Michael did not marry Eudokia but that he asked Basil to marry her so that he could keep Eudokia in court and maintain his affair with her. To compensate Basil, he gave him his sister Thekla as a mistress and named Basil co-emperor. A short while later Basil had Michael murdered and claimed the throne for himself. A new dynasty was born.

Leo the Wise (VI) followed Basil. He was most probably the son of Michael the Drunkard. Leo was followed by Basil’s son, Alexander and Alexander was followed by Constantine VII who was almost certainly the illegitimate son of Leo the Wise and thus possibly the grandson of Michael the Drunkard. To confuse matters more, Constantine would become the step-son of a dynastic interloper named Romanus.

The Purple Room

Born out of wedlock made Constantine’s dynastic ascension questionable. Otherwise, he was, by way of the convoluted rules then in place, the legitimate heir to his uncle Alexander. But Zoe, his mother, who would eventually become Leo’s fourth wife, anticipated the problem and devised an ingenious plan. There was a peculiar rule of succession at the time that stipulated that while the eldest legitimate heir was normally first in line to become emperor, if a younger heir was born in a certain purple room of the royal palace and the older heir was not, the younger heir had precedence. Zoe reasoned, before her son was born, before she even knew that the child she carried would be a boy, that if her son was born in the purple room this would confer an important measure of legitimacy. She conspired to arrange it and it worked beautifully. At the age of two Constantine was symbolically crowned emperor. When Alexander died Constantine was elevated to the throne. But he too young to be regent. The Patriarch of Constantinople, Archbishop Nicholas I Mysticus, assumed that role.

The Fall and Rise of Zoe

One of his first acts was to ban Zoe from court. She was sent away to a convent to spend the rest of her life. However, the archbishop arranged an unpopular peace treaty with Bulgaria. It was so unpopular at court that it allowed Zoe to muster enough support to return from the convent and take the reins of government. She revoked the treaty, which proved disastrous when the Bulgarians defeated her forces. It was then that Romanus, an admiral in the Byzantine navy, led a coup d'état to overthrow Constantine’s mother but not Constantine.

Romanus declared himself regent and named himself co-emperor along with Constantine. Because he controlled the military, he was, for all practical purposes, the sole emperor, purple room or not. Eventually, Romanus’ own sons, fearing that their father favored Constantine over them to become the eventual sole emperor, managed to have him arrested and exiled to a monastery to spend the rest of his life as a monk. However, during a popular revolt, fomented it seems by Zoe, Romanus’ sons were also arrested and sent to join their father. Constantine the Purple Born was sole emperor once again, and regent.

Constantine VII, the Untypical Emperor

Constantine VII was somewhat untypical as an emperor. Having been sidelined for so much of his earlier life, he developed an interest in matters that had little to do with running an empire. He enjoyed painting and writing. He wrote several books about the history of the empire and the ceremonial life of court. He was a patron of the arts and educational institutions. He was instigated some land reforms to return lands to peasants who had been reduced to serfdom by debt. Historians tend to look on him kindly.

In 1994, just four months before Romanus was deposed by his sons, the Image of Edessa arrived in Constantinople. Romanus, because he was the regent emperor, is given the credit for bringing it to the Byzantine capital. The real credit should probably go to a general of the army named John Curcuas. Following successful campaigns against Arab forces operating in northern Syria, Curcuas, moved his army into northern Mesopotamia in 943 and began to plunder the cities and towns throughout the region. He successfully captured Amida, Dari and Nisibis, taking whole populations away and collecting vast amounts of booty. By the summer of 944 he reached Edessa and laid siege to the heavily fortified city. Edessa, once part of the empire, had fallen to the Persian Sassanians in 609. It had been briefly retaken by Byzantine forces, but fell to the Muslims in 638.

That the Image of Edessa was in a city that was in Muslim hands during the iconoclasm that was started by Leo III around 726 and ran its course until 787 when the Second Council at Nicaea put an end to the movement with the support of the pope and the emperor Constantine VI and his mother, the empress Irene.

The Image of Edessa in Constantinople

On August 15, 944, the prized relic arrived in Constantinople where it was received with great fanfare. A lengthy document, the Narratio de imagine Edessena, tells us that Constantine VII described the image as “extremely faint, more like a moist secre­tion without pigment or the painter’s art.” That is a poignant clue for us that the Image of Edessa was in this way like the Shroud of Turin. Another document, Symeon Magister’s Chronographia tells us that Constantine could see some image features but his two brothers-in-law, Romanus’ two sons, could barely see anything. Thus we have more evidence that the cloth with its image might be the Shroud of Turin. But there was more to come. On the very next day, Gregory Referendarius, the archdeacon of Constantinople’s great cathedral, Hagia Sophia, gave a sermon in which he described the cloth as having an image formed through sweat and blood. This was the first indication, from known records, that the cloth contained blood. He also mentioned the likeness of a man and a side wound, which implies that the image was a full body image.

Recalling Constantine VII

Recall the Constantine VII saw an image on the Edessa Image when it was brought from Edessa to Constantinople and that his step brothers could not see anything. Well the Shroud of Turin has just that sort of image, one in which there are no discernable images when you are too close because the transition between lighter and darker tones is too smooth.

John Beckwith

At the same time, even after the first two centuries of the Christian era there had always been the seeds of opposition to images. When the Empress Constantia, stepsister of Constantine I and wife of the Emperor Li-cinius, asked Eusebius of Caesarea for an image of Christ, she was sharply snubbed. From the 4th century onwards there had always been a minority among the intellectuals and the upper classes who disapproved of the cult of icons and the superstitious practices so often attached to them. Moreover in the Byzantine Empire near the eastern frontiers strong iconoclastic tendencies had been fairly constant. There is no period between the fourth and the eighth centuries in which there is not some evidence of opposition to images within the Church.