So if we can, before we go to Emperor Constantine the First and the founding of Constantinople, can we look at some maybe seminal events that led up to some of the topics we'll be talking about? So one of them, maybe tell me if this is not as interesting as I think it is, but the Edict of Caracalla in 212 AD. So this is where you described that starting with Augustus in the early imperial period, government saw itself as a protector of the Roman citizens, which is a minority of the people living in the Roman Empire. It doesn't consider the provincials. And then you described that the Edict of Caracalla that extended full Roman citizenships to basically all free inhabitants of the Roman Empire. So what is it? Why was it done? Why is it important? And how did it change the Roman Empire?
Right. I agree with you that this is in fact a very important, it's a real turning point in a sense, but it also is part of a process.
So for various reasons, the Roman polity tended to bestow its metropolitan citizenship, that is Roman citizenship, on its allies, and eventually in time on many people that it had conquered. And it had various mechanisms for doing so. It could bestow block grants. Sometimes it allowed its generals to bestow citizenship on people they thought would be necessary players for controlling local societies. Sometimes they even allowed foreign cities, like non-Roman cities, to decide who would get Roman citizenship by basically electing them to certain kinds of offices. Like they outsourced a lot of this. And so you have over time the steady growth of a Roman community of citizens who are not all in Rome, and who are not all of Roman origin, whatever that means, but they were not descended from people who were from Rome. And this proceeds, you know, it expands, it expands, it expands. By Caracalla's time, so early 3rd century AD, we can estimate that maybe at most a third of the free citizens of the empire are Roman citizens. Everyone else has local citizenship, like you're Alexandrian or Athenian or whatever, and you're subject to those laws. This emperor Caracalla, now that's his nickname. His reigning name is Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. So, just like Marcus Aurelius, it's the same name two generations later.
Some badass names for emperors, by the way. I don't know if it's chicken or the egg, but just some epic names.
They've been remembered that way, and so we read that back into the name and yeah, absolutely, yes.
Yeah, so he issues this edict in 212, called the Constitutio Antoniniana, named after him. Some people at the time called it the divine decree, which basically extended citizenship to everybody. Now, we don't know exactly why he did so. We can guess the reasons that he said he did so, and this was for religious reasons. In other words, he wanted people to go to the temples and pray and give thanks to the gods for him, for his survival out of a coup, which is whatever. And it's possible that there was some kind of religious motivation here, and he wanted everybody to do so as Roman citizens to honor the Roman gods and something like that. Other historians at the time said he did it for tax reasons. We don't know exactly. There might even have been a kind of ideology of a unified community across the empire playing, if not in his mind, in that of the jurists, that is the legal advisers that he had. So that's possible. But less interesting than his motivations, more interesting are the consequences of this and what it tells us about the Roman community. So imagine a situation where, like, no modern empire has ever done this really, right? What's significant about the Roman case is that not only did they extend citizenship to everybody, but they meant it. This is something that had teeth. In other words, it meant that the rights and opportunities that were available to Roman citizens, say in the Roman Senate at Rome, are now available to everybody. And within a generation you have a situation where, like, all of the emperors are provincials. Right? All the most powerful people in the empire from the provinces.
This is like mind-breaking, mind-blowing. This is incredible.
The fact that the Roman Empire was able to do this and it stuck.
They did it and they meant it.
And they meant it, they implemented it, it was real. That tells you, that's an important thing, that tells you a lot of information about the populace of the Roman Empire. The fact that it stuck, that the government meant it, that the system encouraged, incentivized the government to mean it.
Yeah. And there's a law of citizenship and it basically says something like anyone born within the Roman Empire is a Roman citizen.
And the Roman jurists and policymakers who were behind this had some very interesting ideas about, you know, creating this kind of community. Look, imagine if, I mean it's almost impossible to imagine, but the British at the time of the peak of the empire bestowed British citizenship on everyone including in India and like suddenly made positions of power in London available to people from India, like including the throne. Like it's just unthinkable. And that has to do, you know, with race and colonialism and all kinds of things, right? But not in the Roman Empire. So we have a situation where the emperors are all from the provinces, the most powerful officials are all from the provinces. And so a century later when Constantinople is created, it's created right, like in the Bosphorus, so like where modern Istanbul is, in the Eastern Roman Empire, it's created within a pre-existing Roman context, right? It doesn't bring Romanness to the East. It's already there. And so it's not such a leap to create a center of Roman power in the East because of that.
And you've helped put together a book on the history of intellectual thought in the Roman Empire, but is the interesting thing here, and I get asked that many times, but let me ask it here also. Is the great man, the great woman view of history, were there like Thomas Jefferson or those types of characters in the meetings as they're executing on the edict or developing the edict? Is that important or is it more about the system and the culture and just... Is it, how important was it? Because this seems like a revolutionary idea and when we think about the American Revolution and the founding documents, it seems like a few individuals were really critical about the wording of things and then words matter because those words create the reality and then it propagates over time.
For the edict I suspect that yes, there were a few people who were behind it and quite possibly jurists, that is Roman legal scholars, and 212 is in an age of very important Roman legal scholars, Ulpian, for example, and others. But we just don't have those. We have minutes of the meetings for the American Revolution. Not only do we not know who was in the room, we don't actually even have the whole edict. We have a papyrus fragment. This is a piece of ancient paper that's mostly torn and mutilated, and we have like a bit of a paragraph from it, in Greek, not even the Latin original. And it's kind of torn, but it actually preserves the key clause. Right? And that's all we have of the original. We have contemporary sources that mention it. We have legal documents, but nothing like a... we can talk about the people involved in it. Or even how it was immediately implemented. Like suddenly we know everyone in the provinces, like there's this explosion in the number of people called Aurelius, because that was his Roman family name. And so when you acquired citizenship from that edict, you became an Aurelius. Right? And there are lots of Aurelii suddenly all over the place. Like we can see it immediately.
But we can't actually see the implementation.
But your instinct says that individuals were very important in the development of that idea and execution of it.
