Constantine the great also known as “Constantine I” or “Saint Constantine” was a Roman Emperor or Illyrian-Greek Origin from 306 to 337 AD. He was the Son of Flavius Valerius Constantine, a Roman Emperor of his consort Helena. As emperor, Constantine enacted many administrative, financial, social, and military reforms to strengthen the empire. The government was restructured and the civil and military authorities were separated. A new gold coin was introduced to combat inflation known as the solidus. It became the standard for Byzantine and European currencies for more than a thousand years. Constantine was the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity and he played an influential role in the proclamation of the Edict of Nilan in 313, …show more content…
A product of this meeting has become known as the Edict of Nilan, which extended toleration to the Christians and restored any personal and corporate property that had been confiscated during the persecution. The Council of Nicaea coincided almost exactly with the celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the reign of Constantine, at which, returning the compliment paid by the emperor’s attendance at their council, the bishops were honored participants. But Constantine’s visit to the West in 326, to repeat the celebrations at Rome, brought the greatest political crisis of the reign. These events set the course of the last phase of the reign of Constantine. After his defeat of Licinius he had renamed Byzantium as Constantinople, and immediately upon his return from the West he began to rebuild the city on a greatly enlarged pattern as his permanent capital and the “second Rome.” The dedication of Constantinople (May 330) confirmed the divorce, which had been in the making for more than a century, between the emperors and Rome. Rome had long been unsuited to the strategic needs of the empire. It was now to be left in splendid isolation, as an enormously wealthy and prestigious city,still the emotional focus of the empire,but of limited political