INTRODUCTIONalready offered to Christians.^30 But Constantine had not waited until 324 to
introduce change; already in the winter of 312–13 he intervened in disputes
between Christians in North Africa, calling a meeting in Rome to settle them,
and then a council at Arles in 314. The issues were not new, especially in
North Africa: the question was how the church should treat the lapsi (com-
promisers) in the aftermath of persecution. It was thus a very modern prob-
lem, with church property and careers at stake, and North Africa was not the
only part of the empire where these divisions showed themselves. However,
this early effort on Constantine’s part at solving inter-Christian disagreements
was unsuccessful, and in 315 we find him threatening the persistent hardline
‘Donatists’. By 321, under pressure of other concerns and apparently realis-
ing the limits of practicality, he advised the mainstream catholic Christians
in North Africa to be patient and wait for God to bring justice. But the great
Council of 411, at which St Augustine was prominent, shows that the Dona-
tist and catholic division in North Africa remained a major problem through-
out the fourth century, and even the strong measures taken at that time failed
to eliminate Donatism completely. By 324, Constantine had learned from his
earlier mistakes. He now called a much bigger council of bishops, to meet at
Nicaea and settle a further dispute identified with the views of an Alexandrian
priest called Arius about the relation of the Son to the Father in Christian the-
ology. This time the meeting resulted in a statement of faith, to which all had
to subscribe, and which was eventually to become enshrined as the Nicene
Creed; public resources were deployed, and the few who refused to sign the
Council’s statement were exiled. The Council of Nicaea took on an iconic
status: the number of those attending was soon claimed to have reached 318,
an improbably high figure, but the same as that of the servants of Abraham,
and Theodoret of Cyrrhus, writing in the fifth century, told an affecting story
of how some of those present had been mutilated in the persecutions. When
Constantine invited the assembled bishops to dinner, it was claimed that he
even kissed the eye sockets of some who had been blinded.^31
These were powerful precedents for the subsequent position of the church,
its bishops and Christians generally in the empire, but they did not make the
empire officially Christian, as many still imagine. However, Constantine also
set about building churches, at first on the sites of Roman martyr shrines and,
in the case of the Lateran basilica, on the site of the demolished barracks of
the imperial guard of his defeated enemy Maxentius. This huge basilica was
to be the seat of the bishop, and was sited away from the main existing Chris-
tian areas but near an imperial palace. We know about Constantine’s Roman
churches and the donations he made to them mainly from a sixth-century
history of the bishops of Rome, and some, including St Peter’s on the Vatican
hill, may have been built by his successors rather than Constantine himself.
Yet while even in the time of persecution there were certainly some substan-
tial church buildings, Constantine’s imperially sponsored churches in Rome,
Antioch, Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Holy Land instituted a new devel-
opment in architecture and in Christian visibility. It is interesting therefore,