"Everyone interested in the classical period should read this exemplary biography, which eschews psychological speculation and instead builds its case inventively from primary accounts and the iconographic record in statuary, architecture, and coinage."---Library Journal (starred review)<BR><BR>"Stephenson's knowledgeable account pursues a wide variety of historical branches of Constantine's story. The author provides valuable insight into Constantine's era."---Kirkus Reviews<BR><BR>"Stephenson, a historian at the University of Durham, successfully combines historical documents, examples of Roman art, sculpture, and coinage with the lessons of geopolitics to produce a complex biography of the Emperor Constantine."---Publishers Weekly<BR><BR>"[A] full, detailed, thoroughly documented and very readable account of Constatine's life and times."---BBC History Magazine<BR><BR>In 312 A.D., Constantine, one of four Roman emperors ruling a divided empire, marched on Rome to establish his sole control of its western half. According to Constantine's first biographer, Eusebius, the bishop of Caesarea, on the eve of the decisive battle at Rome's Milvian Bridge, Constantine had a vision. "A cross-shaped trophy of light" appeared to him in the sky with an exhortation, generally translated as "By this sign conquer." Inscribing the sign on the shields of his soldiers, Constantine drove the followers of his rival, Maxentius, into the Tiber River and claimed the imperial capital for himself. He converted to Christianity and ended the persecution of Christians with the defeat of his last rival, Licinius, in 324.<BR><BR>Under Constantine, Christianity emerged from the shadows. Constantine united the western and eastern halves of the Roman Empire, and presided over the first ecumenical council of the Christian Church, at Nicaea in 325. He founded, a new capital city nearby on the Bosphorus, where Europe meets Asia. This site, the ancient trading colony of Byzantium, became the city of Constantine, Constantinople, a new Christian capital set apart from Rome's pagan past. Thereafter the Christian Roman Empire endured in the East as Byzantium, while Rome itself fell to the barbarian hordes in AD 476.<BR><BR>Paul Stephenson offers a nuanced and deeply satisfying account of a man whose cultural and spiritual renewal of the Roman Empire gave birth to the historically crucial idea of a unified Christian Europe underpinned by a commitment to religious tolerance. In Constantine: Roman Emperor, Christian Victor, a seminal figure in the political and cultural history of the West has at last found the biographer he deserves.