The emperor Constantine has been called the most important
emperor of Late Antiquity. His powerful personality laid the
foundations not only of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome and of
Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but of post-classical
European civilization; his reign was eventful and highly dramatic.
His victory at the Milvian Bridge counts among the most decisive
moments in world history.
But Constantine was also controversial, and the controversy
begins in antiquity itself. The Christian writers Lactantius and
Eusebius saw in Constantine a divinely appointed benefactor of
mankind. Julian the Apostate, on the other hand, accused him of
greed and waste, and the pagan historian Zosimus held him
responsible for the collapse of the (Western) empire.