name. The next day, after consulting a collection of oracles called the Sibylline Books, Maxentius chose instead to meet his rival in open battle.
With the bridge disabled, Maxentius’s men crossed the Tiber on a temporary platform made from wooden boats, meeting Constantine’s army a few kilometres north of its banks. The attacking forces, though much smaller in number, pushed Maxentius’s troops back. With no escape route, thousands of his soldiers were forced into the river and drowned, until, according to one account, the water could barely penetrate the piles of bodies. Maxentius perished too as he tried to flee, weighed down by his armour. Constantine fished his body out of the mud and paraded his severed head through the streets.
The victory gave Constantine undisputed control of Rome’s western territories. Fighting under the Chi-Rho symbol, he later gained its eastern lands too – from Macedonia as far as Syria and Egypt. After generations of instability and civil war, he finally united the Roman Empire. Although the west fell within a century or two as Rome’s political influence over its vast territory gradually disintegrated, the eastern empire, ruled from his new capital Constantinople, lasted for another thousand years.
The significance of Constantine’s victory goes far beyond geopolitics. Throughout his reign, the emperor broke with centuries of religious tradition, single-handedly transforming his chosen faith from a minor, persecuted sect into a hugely powerful church. His conversion paved the way for Christianity, rather than the old planet-based gods, to become the dominant religion not just for Rome but the entire western world. The Battle of the Milvian Bridge, then, marks a key moment in an even greater clash in human history: between the sky worship of early civilisations and the monotheistic religions that dominate today.
To commemorate his victory over Maxentius, Constantine built a huge stone arch near the Colosseum in Rome. It still stands, spanning the grand, ceremonial route taken by emperors as they entered the city in triumph, and it features a giant inscription, originally cast in bronze, that attributes his success to ‘divine inspiration’. Many historians have taken that phrase as referring to Constantine’s epic moment of conversion on witnessing the flaming cross in the sky. But over the last few years, scholars like the art historian Elizabeth Marlowe have pointed out that the marble sculptures and reliefs that cover the arch include no Christian symbols.
Instead, they show the Roman sun god, Sol. On the eastern side of the arch, Sol rises from the ocean in his four-horse chariot, balanced on the west side by the descent of Luna, goddess of the moon. Sol is identifiable elsewhere on the arch, too, from a band of light rays around his head – known as a radiate crown – and a raised right hand; in several places Constantine mirrors this pose. What’s more, Marlowe has shown that the arch was carefully offset from the road so that for approaching crowds, the view beyond it centred on a colossal bronze statue dedicated to the sun. Far from affirming Constantine’s Christianity, she says, ‘the favoured deity is unambiguously Sol’.
In other words, the emperor’s famous conversion isn’t everything it first appears. But then, neither is the victory of monotheism over the gods of the sky.
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Most early societies worshipped the sky in some form, or associated their gods with celestial bodies. There are earthly gods too, of course, representing everything from animals and ancestors to rivers and crops. But the vast majority of religions – from all periods of history, anywhere in the world – have a prominent role for celestial beings. The very word ‘deity’ derives from a root that means ‘shining in the sky’.1
According to the twentieth-century Romanian historian Mircea Eliade, who surveyed hundreds of religions around the world, the sheer size and power of the sky drives spiritual experiences. Simply by being there, the heavens reveal how tiny we are in the cosmos at the same time as putting us in touch with the vast, unimaginable whole. ‘The sky, of its very nature, as a starry vault and atmospheric region has a wealth of mythological and religious significance,’ he wrote. ‘Atmospheric and meteorological “life” appears to be an unending myth.’
Some sky gods are associated with specific celestial bodies, such as Babylonia’s Marduk and Ishtar, or the Egyptian sun god, Ra. Others are supreme creator beings that are embodied by or live in the heavens. The goddess Mawu, worshipped in Benin, West Africa, wears the blue sky as a veil and clouds for clothes. Debata, known in Sumatra, releases lightning when he opens his mouth to smile. Qat, supreme being of the Banks Islands in Melanesia, created the dawn when he cut into night’s darkness with a red obsidian knife. But with the rise of the three great monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – this wealth of celestial personalities was swept away. Their divine dramas were replaced, for much of humanity, by the concept of one, unchanging God.
It’s a revolution that started in Canaan, a region centred on Palestine, between the Jordan Valley and Mediterranean Sea. Ruled by the Egyptians for much of the Late Bronze Age, a people called the Israelites emerged here around 1250 BC. Texts and archaeological evidence suggest that early on the Israelites worshipped celestial bodies among a pantheon of gods, led by Yahweh (linked by some scholars to the sun) and his wife Asherah (associated with trees, and later Venus).
The region split into two kingdoms: Israel in the north and Judah in the south. The Assyrians destroyed Israel in 722 BC and exiled thousands of its people; in 586 BC, the Babylonians did the same to Judah. After Israel’s fall, a religious group emerged in Judah, centred in Jerusalem, which recognised Yahweh alone as the sole creator of the universe: a deity who couldn’t be depicted, and who forbade worship of all other gods. Surveys of religious texts from the period suggest this was initially a minority view, but that such ‘Yahweh-alone’ beliefs then strengthened among the exiles in Babylon.
In 538 BC, Babylon was in turn conquered by the Persians, who helped the exiles to return home and rebuild their Temple of Jerusalem. With Persian support, this monotheistic group came to control Judaean religious institutions, and they assembled and edited the documents that became the Hebrew Bible. It has been suggested that the Persians were sympathetic because they recognised in the exiles’ religion aspects of their own Zoroastrianism, with its supreme creator-god, Ahura Mazda, opposed by the hostile Angra Mainyu. Early Judaism was certainly influenced by Zoroastrianism, particularly its notion of the cosmos as an epic struggle between good and evil.
Although historians’ understanding of these events is murky, scholars generally agree that the rise of Yahweh among the Jews at this time was linked to their experiences of exile and loss. They also saw the powerful empires of Assyria and Babylonia destroyed within one lifetime, points out David Aberbach, a professor of Jewish Studies at McGill University. Perhaps that encouraged them to see material gods and territorial identity as weak and transient, and to choose instead ‘an abstract and indestructible God, rather than gods of wood and stone’.
All nations claimed that their own chief god was supreme, but this new deity was different. Unlike the Greek Zeus, say, who despite being the most powerful god in the universe still faced limits to his actions and could be thwarted by other gods, Yahweh was transcendent: not within the cosmos but above it, and no longer bound by its rules. According to Eliade, this ‘notion of God’s “power” as the only absolute reality’ was ‘the jumping-off point for all later mystical thought and speculation on the freedom of man’.
It was an idea so powerful, it would change the spiritual face of humanity: Judaism, Christianity and Islam are now followed by more than half the world’s population. Initially, Yahweh had little influence beyond Israel. Then, in the first century AD, a Jewish sect emerged led by a teacher from Nazareth called Jesus Christ, who claimed to be the son of God. Converts such as Paul the Apostle brought the story of his death and resurrection to Rome. The faith was slow to take hold; when Constantine, the son of a high-ranking Roman army officer, was born in Naissus, modern-day Serbia, in 272, the tide of change was still lapping at the shore.
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